Yahoo News Julio Iglesias: how we made Begin the Beguine
Julio Iglesias, singer
I wasn’t a very good goalkeeper but I played for the reserves of a great team – the 1960-61 Real Madrid “Galácticos” that included Alfredo Di Stéfano and Ferenc Puskás.
However, when I was 19, I was in a car accident, almost died and was left completely paralysed. It took me two years to learn to walk again. My hands didn’t have much strength so I was given a guitar to help me regain movement in them. I started making little simple harmonies, then simple songs. I learned to play and became a singer: a bad singer! Now? I’m not so bad. It became my passion, and I became the biggest selling artist ever in Spain.
Begin the Beguine is a Cole Porter standard, one of the most beautiful songs from the 1940s and 50s. I’d heard it on the radio many times and one day suggested covering it. My producer did an incredible new arrangement and I changed the lyrics completely. I think the song was originally about a dance, but I wrote about a lost love, someone you want to go back to. Everything in life is about personal experiences – your feelings, your brain and your chromosomes. So as an artist you express that. I’m Spanish, but these things are universal. The song was a hit with women. I adore, learn from and respect women. I like to flirt. What can I say?
Begin the Beguine was my first hit in the UK. Piccadilly Radio in Manchester played it, then the other stations followed. It went to No 1 in the UK and changed my life completely. It felt like a miracle. When I was a child and singing in the house, my father had once said to me: “Do you want to be like Frank Sinatra?” So after Begin the Beguine was an international smash and Sinatra invited me to sing at his all-star party, I thought about my father. None of this would have happened if that radio programmer hadn’t picked the song for Piccadilly. I’m a great believer in good luck.
Ramón Arcusa, producer
I met Julio when my songwriting partner Manuel de la Calva and I wrote the song that won the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest – La, La, La by Massiel. The day before the ceremony in London, this guy came up to me and said, “I’ll tell you two things: you are going to win Eurovision and you are going to hear about me.” That was Julio Iglesias.
Years later, I’d started producing artists when Julio’s manager came up to me at a festival in Chile and suggested we meet. I told him I wasn’t interested. But then a few months later, when I wrote a song called Sono un Pirata, Sono un Signore (“I am a pirate, I am a good man”), I wanted Julio to sing it. It was the start of a long working relationship, and we sold millions of records.
We kept having to add treble. I later found out the studio speakers had just arrived and were full of packaging paper
Begin the Beguine was on a list of potential songs for the fourth album we did together. We recorded in Madrid – the rhythm section first, then the brass, the violins, guitars and so on. I changed a couple of the lyrics. We used the rhythm from the Johnny Mathis disco version but made a very different arrangement.
I remember the session because we kept having to add more treble to the recording. It just didn’t sound right. I later found out that the big studio speakers had just arrived – and they were still full of all the paper and packaging they’d been shipped in, so that’s why we kept having to add all that treble.
You have a feeling in the studio when something comes right, and we definitely had that with Begin the Beguine. Julio’s voice floats over the music, like Sinatra’s or Nat King Cole’s. It was very unusual for a song sung in Spanish to be a British hit. I suppose everyone knows the word “begin”. My wife’s mother – who is English – says: “I don’t understand a word of what Julio is singing, but I believe him.”
He is a perfectionist in the studio. Every word has to be just right, so he’ll do take after take after take. I’ve spent more time with Julio than most of his girlfriends.
• Julio Iglesias plays the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 28 October.
