Pero a tu lado

About the song

Los Secretos were born in Madrid in 1978, when a group of teenagers who had been playing together under the name Tos decided to turn their weekend hobby into a band. At the centre were the three Urquijo brothers — Álvaro, Enrique and Javier — and their friend José Enrique Cano, known to everybody as Canito. On New Year’s Eve of 1979 Canito died in a traffic accident, and the survivors carried on under a new name. What followed placed them among the defining groups of the movida madrileña, the cultural explosion that swept Spanish cities in the early eighties, although Los Secretos never fitted the movement’s louder, more ironic side: their trademark was melancholy sung plainly, over clean guitars and unhurried melodies.

«Pero a tu lado» belongs to «Dos caras distintas», the band’s ninth studio album, released in 1995 on the Madrid label DRO. For that record the group left their usual surroundings and travelled to the United Kingdom, where the album was produced by the veteran Mike Vernon, a man whose name is attached to a long list of British blues recordings. Two session musicians joined them in the studio, the bassist Gordon Edwards and the drummer Kevin Wilkinson, and the result is a warm, organic album of thirteen songs lasting a little under forty-seven minutes. Three tracks were lifted from it as singles: the title track, «Menos decir adiós», and this one. «Dos caras distintas» turned out to be the last album Enrique Urquijo would record with the band.

The song itself was written by Enrique Urquijo and lasts about three minutes and seventeen seconds. Its origin is unusually specific for a love song: he wrote it for his daughter María, who had just been born, and the band has always presented it as a song of hope — the promise of a new life beside her, and the intention of leaving behind the addictions that had been shadowing him for years. That intention did not hold. Enrique Urquijo died on 17 November 1999, at the age of thirty-nine, of a heroin overdose, and from that day the song has been heard in Spain as something closer to a farewell than to a lullaby. His brother Álvaro took over as frontman and the band has continued ever since.

What the lyric describes is a resurrection. The singer speaks of having died and come back, of ashes out of which a tree has grown and already given fruit, of having destroyed every poem he had written about sorrow and grief. He says he no longer runs after dreams that are broken; instead he has stitched them back together, and the thread he used he took from the other person’s eyes. He sings to that person with chords nobody has invented yet. The refrain is a small exchange of favours that folds time on itself: he asks for help now and answers, in advance, that by then he will already have helped in return. The wish is for another life and another world — but always beside the same person, which is where the title comes from.