Joan Molas, the manager of Nova Cançó, dies

BarcelonaJoan Molas, one of the key managers in the development of Nova Cançó, passed away this Thursday, according to sources close to the family confirmed to ARA. Born in Reus in 1943, Molas formed a tandem with Núria Batalla, and together they built a professional structure to represent artists such as Lluís Llach, María del Mar Bonet, Raimon, Ovidio Montllor, Quico Pi de la Sierra, Joan Isaac, Marina Rossell, and the Dharma Electric Company. "At that time, artists performed occasionally. What was needed was a company dedicated to organizing concerts, and we took over," Joan Molas explained in the ARA in 2016 a few days before receiving the ARC Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognized the work he and Batalla had done since 1967.

From the late 1960s until 1990, they participated in the organization of more than 6,000 concerts, some of them legendary, such as the multi-song concerts. "We had to invent everything. In this country, there was an unused infrastructure of municipal theaters, casinos, and athenaeums, but there was no circuit or concert organizers. We would go to the venues and ask if we could organize a concert," recalled Molas, a key person in the normalization of the song. Both he and Batalla were young people eager to do things, and they maintained their attitude until they decided to fold in 1990. A year later, their friendship with Eliseu Climent led them to take charge of the commercial side ofThe Weather, for six years. "And then we retired," Molas explained.

Joan Molas was only 22 when he started working at Ermengol Passola's Concentric record label, handling "administration and commercial matters." He met Batalla, and in 1967 they decided to go it alone to organize a concert at the Palau de la Música with Rafael Subirachs, Maria del Mar Bonet, and Lluís Llach. "I thought Concentric was wrong. They just made records and let the artists develop. We, on the other hand, thought that concerts should be organized and that records weren't that important and that any multinational record label could be good," Molas said. The distribution of profits with those represented, after taxes and expenses, was as follows: 75% for the artists and 25% for the managers.

The relationship with Lluís Llach was especially close, both at home and in Europe, and the Batalla & Molas duo operated at full capacity in years marked by the pendulum of dictatorial repression and the push for cultural activism. But after 1977, things changed. As Molas recalled, "political parties gained a lot of importance, and many of those who had organized concerts with us were suddenly Culture Councilors." Furthermore, the craze for free concerts began, and with the 1980s came fixed fees. The model was changing, and the Nova Cançó ran into another political dispute. "Jordi Pujol's governments were quite disastrous, because what he didn't control didn't interest him, and in the song, everyone was leftist. And for the Socialists, everything that sounded Catalan was a slouch, it was Pujol," Molas explained about "the sociovergent pincer." And the press, which "in 1977-78 had been very open, pro-democracy, and anti-Franco, became very partisan in the 1980s." However, Batalla & Molas continued to do excellent work and organize memorable concerts like those of Maria del Mar Bonet in Barcelona's Plaça del Rei.