“The vice of singing,” the name used by Joan Manuel Serrat for his tour in which he will definitively retire from the stages, has a new stop. It will be on July 23 at the Starlite festival in Marbella, Spain. With the new announcement, the legendary songwriter adds another show to his last goodbye tour, after announcing several sold out shows in a matter of hours in various Spanish cities.

For the only date announced in Barcelona, ​​Dec. 23, the ticket sales page collapsed due to the high traffic from his fans.

Tickets for the Starlite festival went on sale from Feb. 1. The Andalusian festival also features other renowned artists such as Pablo Alborán, God Save the Queen, Camilo, Sebastián Yatra, Sara Barasa, C. Tangana, Vanesa Martin and Il Divo.

 

“Before the virus, health or the public fires me, I prefer to say goodbye. When I started I did not have an expiration date, I have never considered it. What has made me consider all this (retirement) have been these last two years,” Serrat recently explained on the El Hormiguero television program.

His last live performance was in February 2020, where he performed alongside Joaquín Sabina. Due to a fall sustained by his good friend and stage partner, they were forced to cancel all the scheduled shows.

The last tour of one of the most important songwriters and composers in Spain and Latin America will start in April at the Beacon Theater in New York, and will go through South America. In Argentina it has already sold out tickets for three events.

He will open the Summer season in Murcia on June 8, which will be the starting point of his tour in Spain, which will end in Barcelona, where he was born in 1943.

“I will play and compose at home, it is possible that I will record an album. But I will not return to the stage,” Serrat promised in a recent interview with El País.

In the statement announcing the tour, the singer explained that after the "forced inactivity" caused by the pandemic, he wants to say goodbye "personally to the public with whom I shared life and songs for more than half a century."

More specifically, it will be 57 years, in which the author of the "Mediterraneo" anthem became a musical and intellectual icon. He was a combative singer, a voice in the fight against fascism in Spain and a sympathizer for the struggles against dictatorships in Latin America.

Now, however, he recognizes that he has the “need to recover family life, fulfill intimate and necessary matters. There is a time for everything." However, he is grateful for the commitment he made to music: “I had a job that has allowed me to see the world and meet magnificent people, and it has made me a person loved by many people.”