Gerard Quintana: "A summer night in my adolescence changed my life and career forever"

In Gerard Quintana's life there have been many special nights, but none like the one in the summer of 1977 which, he assures, "changed his life and career forever".

He was twelve years old, about to turn thirteen, and his parents had rented an apartment for the first time in the Mas Olives urbanization in Roses, where Quintana was starting his first job: a shelf stacker in a supermarket. "It was the summer I discovered almost everything, that life wasn't shit, that rock'n'roll existedand that not all girls would say no to me," he recalls. That summer, he says, he "stopped being the shy, introverted boy with a stutter" to become "the seed" of the person he would become.

It was the first summer, explains the musician, that he was free "from his mother's control", who worried about him all day and didn't let him do "almost anything". It was the summer of hearing the first notes of I wish you were here" by Pink Floyd "and following them down the street like someone following a scent" until he found the sound system that some Dutch people had set up next to the pool. It was the summer of falling in love with Elisabet, a Dutch girl from another world, of being reciprocated, and "of feeling that everything was magical and possible".

Among all those nights, there was one that marked him forever. Quintana had started hanging out with a group of older boys, "some anarchists who had been to Pau Riba's Canet Rock festival and had returned with all the girls changed". "They told me everything they had experienced and I was intoxicated by the feeling that nothing was as I had been told it should be," he remembers. And, suddenly, one of those nights, a character from the Gironan symphonic rock band Atila appeared, and who changed him forever. "Tintin appeared with a plastic bag and took out a long-haired wig from it. He started singing and I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life: to be possessed by music," says Quintana. Enjoying the pleasure of extending the night with all those people, says Quintana, he decided that he too "wanted and could" dedicate himself to music. "It was a night when the potential of all that was to come was revealed to me. Without that summer night, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now," he assures.

It was also the summer, he says, that he understood that everything in life is fleeting and that trying to capture a person, a place, a moment, is a futile effort. “It seemed like that would be forever, but no, it was only fifteen days on the coast,” reflects the musician, who concludes: “We must be able to love what we do not possess”.