Camilo Sesto

Camilo Sesto is easy to file away as the soppy balladeer, the one with the dramatic songs your grandmother used to play.

That misses a much bigger and much braver artist than his reputation as a romantic heart-throb lets you see. Behind that prodigious voice there was a songwriter, a producer, and a man who put his own money on the line for art when almost nobody dared.

The sixth in the house

He was born in 1946 in Alcoy, a town in Alicante, into a working-class family: his father was an electrician.

He started out singing in the school choir and later in pop-rock bands. When he launched himself as a solo artist he took "Sesto" as a stage name—the sixth—because there were another five Camilos in his family.

In the early seventies he exploded with "Algo de mí", and from there it was a chain that never stopped: "Vivir así es morir de amor", "Perdóname", "Jamás", "El amor de mi vida", "Melina".

That high, powerful, overflowing voice was recognisable from the first note. He is estimated to have sold more than a hundred million records, and he racked up fifty-two weeks at number one on the Spanish Los 40 chart, a record nobody has taken off him yet. The Spanish press also points to him as the first artist in the country to get a platinum record, in the late seventies.

In Latin America he was a total idol: he filled stadiums in Mexico, in Argentina, in Chile.

The risk nobody remembers

But here is the part almost nobody tells, and the part that rescues him from the easy label.

In 1975, in a Spain that was only just coming out of Franco's dictatorship, Camilo Sesto took on the riskiest project of his career: he produced, financed with his own money and starred in—playing Jesus—the Spanish-language adaptation of the rock opera "Jesucristo Superstar".

He put up the money, fought against censorship and against the scepticism of a grey era, and won. It opened in November of that year and changed Spanish musical theatre for ever.

Along the way, in that production he introduced an unknown, Ángela Carrasco, and around those years he wrote and produced the debut of a Miguel Bosé who was only just starting out.

In other words: he was not just a lovely voice performing what other people handed him. He was an author, a producer, a man with vision and with guts.

What he kept to himself

His private life, on the other hand, he guarded jealously, and it had its share of pain.

He had one son, Camilo, born in 1983. He faced serious health problems—a liver transplant in 2001, kidney trouble—and in his last years he drew away from the world.

Cosmetic surgery changed the boyish face that had made him famous, in what many read as one man's difficulty in accepting the passing of time.

He was, deep down, someone who sang about love all his life and who lived his own quietly and not always happily. He died in Madrid on 8 September 2019, at seventy-two.

The language of the heart

And there is something that puts him in a category of his own, alongside Juan Gabriel: Camilo Sesto stopped being a singer and became part of Latin American popular culture.

His greatness is not in the complexity of his verses. That was not what he was after. It is in how his storytelling reaches emotion through the cliché.

He sang about the forbidden, the farewell, the love that hurts in secret: precisely those clichés where, worn out as they may seem, we all recognise ourselves, because they happen to everyone.

The cliché is the shared language of the heart, and Camilo sang it head-on, without embarrassment, taking it to the dramatic extreme until it became grand.

The anthem of those who loved in secret

And there is a secret in his songbook, one the title of this piece says better than anything.

Many of his songs are about clandestine love, the kind you cannot say out loud. "¿Quieres ser mi amante?"—which he recorded in late 1974 and which blew up the following year—asks it with no detours.

That is why, for so many people who loved in secret, for whatever reason, because of circumstances, because of what their world would not allow them, Camilo was the one who played at full volume what they had to keep quiet.

He was, without ever proclaiming it, the anthem of forbidden lovers. In 2011, when he was honoured at the Madrid Pride festivities, he sang "Vivir así es morir de amor" there in front of a packed square.

And there is something moving in the fact that a man so protective of his own privacy lent his voice, of all things, to the loves that are lived in silence.

What remains

If you put on "Vivir así es morir de amor", or "Perdóname", or "El amor de mi vida", you are going to hear a man who turned heartbreak into something grand, almost operatic, and who gave a soundtrack to the broken hearts of several generations.

A working-class boy from Alcoy who conquered Latin America by singing about the most universal feeling of all, and who, in the meantime, was living his own in a low voice.

He was no ordinary balladeer. He was a pioneer with a voice that cannot be repeated, and his songbook is part of the sentimental memory of the Spanish-speaking world.

There he still is, every time someone with a tight chest puts him on and sings along.

Sources

Camilo Sesto (Camilo Blanes Cortés; Alcoy, Alicante, 16 September 1946—Madrid, 8 September 2019), Spanish singer, songwriter and producer of romantic ballads, pop and rock. From a working-class family, he began in bands such as Los Dayson and Los Botines; he took "Sesto" because he was one of several Camilos in his family. He found fame with "Algo de mí" (1971) and strung together hits such as "Vivir así es morir de amor", "Perdóname", "Jamás" and "El amor de mi vida". He is estimated to have sold more than 100 million records and holds the record of 52 weeks at number one on the Los 40 chart; the Spanish press points to him as the first artist in the country to obtain a platinum record, in 1979 with "Horas de amor", although there was no official certifying body at the time. In 1975 he produced, financed and starred as Jesus in the Spanish-language adaptation of "Jesucristo Superstar", which opened on 6 November of that year at the Teatro Alcalá-Palace, where he introduced Ángela Carrasco; he also wrote for Miguel Bosé and produced his debut album (1976). "¿Quieres ser mi amante?" was released in late 1974, on the album "Camilo", and was a massive hit the following year. He was very private about his personal life; he had one son, Camilo Blanes Ornelas (1983). He faced health problems (a liver transplant in 2001, kidney trouble) and in his last years he withdrew from public life. On 1 July 2011 he received an award at the Madrid Pride festivities, in the plaza de Chueca, where he sang "Vivir así es morir de amor". He died at 72 of kidney failure; his last album was "Camilo Sinfónico" (2018). Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Readings of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's interpretation. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, LOS40, La Nación, El Español and other press coverage.