Bailar pegados

About the song

«Bailar pegados» is the song that made Sergio Dalma a household name across the Spanish-speaking world, and it is still the first title anyone mentions when his name comes up. Sergio Dalma is the stage name of Josep Sergi Capdevila Querol, born in Sabadell, in Catalonia, on 28 September 1964. He had sung in local groups and choirs, won a talent competition on the Catalan service of Spanish public television, and spent a stretch as the resident singer of a Barcelona nightclub before his first album arrived in 1989 and turned him into a promising newcomer. The song that lifted him out of that first bracket was written for his second record.

The music is by Julio Seijas and the words are by Luis Gómez-Escolar, two of the most prolific names in Spanish pop songwriting of the period; the pair also produced the album. The track was recorded during the winter of 1990 and 1991 at the Sonoland studios in Madrid and released by the Horus label. In its album form it runs to about four and a half minutes. It belongs to a very identifiable family of early-nineties Spanish pop: a slow, warm Latin ballad with a broad chorus, strings and a saxophone-coloured arrangement, built so that the refrain can be sung back by a whole room.

Spanish public television picked the song internally, without a national final, to represent Spain at the Eurovision Song Contest, and it was introduced to the country on the television programme «¡Viva el espectáculo!» on 5 April 1991. A month later, on Saturday 4 May 1991, Dalma sang it at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, in a contest staged by the Italian broadcaster RAI. He performed nineteenth of the twenty-two entries, between Belgium and the United Kingdom, with Eduardo Leiva conducting the orchestra. To fit the three-minute rule the song had to be cut down, losing a verse and a chorus. It finished fourth with 119 points, one of Spain's strongest results of that era, in the year Sweden and France tied on 146 points and the tie-break rule was used for the first time in the history of the contest.

The subject of the song is as simple as its melody: an argument in favour of dancing in a close embrace. The singer starts by pointing out that dancing at a distance is barely dancing at all — two people moving in the same room but effectively alone, one of them somewhere hot and the other somewhere frozen, a couple of metres apart. He then proposes trying it the other way, just once, holding on to each other and following the beat without letting go. The chorus piles up images of togetherness: the sea moving with dolphins, two dancers alone in a whole ballroom, one heart against another. The second verse turns to the music itself, which no longer has to be argued for because it asks for a kiss on its own and climbs up through your feet like something you cannot see and nobody has ever managed to write down.