Mercedes Valimaña, the 'Macaria' of the La La La trio who won Eurovision and was a dubbing actress for Disney

The natural grace of Mercedes Valimaña (El Puerto, 1936) can be seen in the distance. The Porto native who was part of the legendary trio La La La in that Eurovision Song Contest of 1968, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, she exudes art in every word that comes out of her mouth. The now singing and piano teacher who loves the beach of La Puntilla in El Puerto, and "a little chuflona", she has spent her whole life singing on stage with the most famous musicians of the Spanish song of the 70 and 80.

Known as the Macaria —later she herself will explain why—, the voice of the first choir that stepped on the Eurovision stages together with Massiel, "one had never been there", has come to dub numerous animated characters from very popular Disney movies such as Lady and the Tramp (1987) or Cinderella, until she sang together with Phil Collins himself the theme In my heart you will be from Tarzan (1999).

On an afternoon when a “crazy” easterly wind is blowing, Mercedes reviews her life exploits sitting in a bar in Plaza de la Herrería. The artist who has sung at “weddings, baptisms and banquets without charging a penny, the girl was called to go to a party so she could sing Granada and the girl sang as if they had thrown her a coin”, exudes spontaneity. Much loved by the people of Porto, “how great you have been Merche, daughter, how simple and what a beautiful voice”, a neighbor tells her as she passes by, Mercedes delves into her memories.

When she went to the Gente Joven program on TVE in the seventies, “we put it on television on Sundays and my son, who was very small, told me: Mom and mom? As if to say, this is what it is, it's here on the screen, and here too, the boy went crazy”. Now, the City Council of her native land has proposed awarding her the city's gold medal, "to return, even symbolically, the feeling of pride and gratitude that we Porto residents feel for having her".

Were you a singing girl?

She was a girl who from what I see now, after so many years, I say that she would be an artist. My mother loved the piano and she said that the first daughter was going to learn to play it, and I was the first. When I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother took me to Bellas Artes Santa Cecilia, at the labor institute, and that's where I started my career. And Mrs. Carmen Utrera, my first teacher, told my mother: Don't leave the girl, the girl is worth a lot and the girl didn't want to go to Fine Arts when she was eight years old, I wanted to keep my dolls (laughs).

Until I was ten or twelve years old I didn't like music, because then I didn't even want to be crazy. When I was already in the fifth year of piano in Fine Arts, I accompanied myself to zarzuela and sang it with maestro Dueñas, who introduced me to cante, and I had some honors degrees, the girl promised. With Dueñas we sang in the choir and we didn't shut up or crazy.

Her nickname La Macaria, alludes to the emblematic Macario cinema to which Javier Ruibal dedicates a song: "From Monday to Friday it was worth living an ordeal, if on Saturday they gave a good movie at the Macario cinema." Was it your second home?

Man, it was my house, the cinema was in front of my house, my father and my uncle were the partners. When it was a summer cinema, my uncle, who was more serious than my father, would throw all of us out on the street because the six brothers would go with their friends and we would make some scandals... There he had the piano where he studied and when I started recording there were physical shows, Manolo Caracol, Manolo Escobar and Juanito Valderrama came to sing here. From time to time a company came by bus and sang live and the cinema was filled, it was a scandal. At the Macario cinema I met the Dynamic Duo because they came to sing; I did the first choirs with them, there weren't any before. That was my second home and I am Macaria because my grandfather's name was Macario, a horrible name, but that was his name. All of us who went out after my grandfather are all macarios and macarias. Many of these artists who no longer live knew me by Macaria and called me that on the recordings.

They say that you were a novice before going to Madrid to study at the conservatory. Did you feel the call of music?

That is a lie, I was a postulant in Córdoba for three months and I was not a novice at all. When I got here, people say that I was a nun, but I don't care. I have been a person all my life who has passed through my pocket everything they have said, I was not a novice, nor did I take any habit or anything. But at that time, as El Puerto was smaller, they began to say that I had become a nun, I don't care, I wish they had said I was going to be an escort. (laughs)

Merche, known as la Macaria, during the interview. PHOTO: MANU GARCIA

At that time, was it difficult for you to go to the capital to study?

Let's see, no one left, at that time no one studied abroad. It wasn't difficult for me. My father told me you're not going to Madrid until you finish your higher piano degree and then I said, oh yes, I got my act together and since the girl was smart and pointed out ways in no time I did tiquitiquiti, honors, the piano career: take the title. But my father did not want me to go to Madrid. He told me: Well, we'll talk, and I told him: I'm going to Madrid, I'm not here to ask your permission and that's how I arrived at the conservatory in 1962. We were in the second year one day and a classmate came saying that they were asking the conservatory for female students to show up to record the liter Coca-Cola ad and I went and they caught me. And from there I started recording.

Could you imagine participating in the Eurovision Song Contest?

No, I didn't know what that was, let's go to London, well let's go to London. Long before lalala I had recorded with Serrat, with the Dynamic Duo, with Marisol, with a lot of people from Zafiro and Fonograx and they called us because they already knew us. Listen, one thing, I made the suits that we took out because they told us at the record store to go as we pleased, and I said, man, let's buy a fabric that I sew, my mother taught me to sew, thing that girls don't learn now. I cut the suits, they lined our shoes with the same fabric and it was a success. Let it be clear that I was the seamstress apart from the choir (laughs)

Manel Navarro, Alfred García, Miki Núñez... lately the Catalans represent Spain at the festival. Do you think that there would be such a stir today if one of them had expressed the decision that Serrat made?

What do you want me to tell you? I don't know any of them, no idea. In the Eurovision festival, there were once great composers who presented great songs and now I don't know the one who sings or the one who does the couplet, neither Manel nor those who have made the songs. What a sea chestnut. Ramón from the Dúo Dinámico presents songs and they knock her down because there is cronyism. I stayed with Julio Iglesias, Juan Bau, Nino Bravo, Perales, Formula V, and what there is now doesn't interest me. But now there are already many girls who sing, in my time it was, the score and they sing, now anyone sings by ear and there are girls who do it very well. Before you had to read music, now you don't, now they do it very well with a computer, phenomenal, but back then, that won't come back. At that time it wasn't worth so much money to record an album, because back then there were many recording studios and it cost you nothing, the record company did it for you, and boom you hit a ball, like many did back then. And not now, there are almost no record houses because everyone does it at home on a computer. The ones from before were first-rate musicians and a lot of them have already died.

@TheSiddiqua They are those people who's parents never really thought them the importance of religion and religious… https://t.co/dtg0p303Ne

— MUHAMMAD Tue Jul 13 11:45:59 +0000 2021

He barely had time to rehearse, about ten days. How was the preparation of the song?

First we recorded it with Serrat in a recording studio to promote the album, and as Serrat said he wanted to sing in Catalan and they told him no, they called Massiel who was in Mexico and he came to record it. We had to record it again because it was a different tone. And then there, in London, there were rehearsals with the orchestra every day at 5 because they had to test lights and sound. We rehearsed it many times.

What did it mean for you to win Eurovision in 1968?

Very well. At that time she had long hair like Massiel and when we went out they took me on the shoulders instead of her. We left the Dynamic Duo and the three of the choir, and a little girl on her knees told me: Please, Massiel, and I told her: That I'm not. Massiel stayed very sprawled in the dressing room to wait for the final apotheosis and the one they took on the shoulders was me. They confused us there, one day at a rehearsal a Portuguese man came and asked me if he could do an interview for me, I said: Yes, okay, I'll talk to my classmates and you do it for us, and he says: No, not your classmates, just you , I say well okay, he says goodbye and tells me: Thank you very much Massiel, and I say: Che, wait a minute, I'm not Massiel. She got confused, since we both had long hair (Laughs)

Massiel's victory at the Festival was the subject of accusations about a possible purchase of votes by the Franco regime. Was this true?

I have no idea, we were walking around London, but we were going at that time as a Francoist or anything because the director of TVE at that time was Adolfo Suárez, who later became President of the Government. I didn't even see movement, we weren't in the big sphere let's say. But come on, that's a rotten lie. Fraga Iribarne, who was the tourist at the time, gave us a dinner after returning from London, but nobody there said anything about Franco. They made it up, or at least I didn't see anything.

Mercedes posing in her hometown. PHOTO: MANU GARCIA

He spent half the 1970s on the Eurovision stage, with Julio Iglesias in 1970, with Karina in 1971, with Sergio and Estíbaliz in 1975, and with José Vélez in 1978. What was it like dealing with the best-known stars of the time? ?

I've sung with everyone, we recorded with everyone, I remember all the singers with great affection. We spent three years traveling with Julio Iglesias, we had a very good feeling, the boy was a chestnut when he started and I told him: Julito, how heavy you are. I'm very funny and I told her: If you behave badly, I'll put you out of tune in the choir, wing. We were friends, we were together all day, it seems that he banged everyone he met along the way, but I didn't see him. The last thing I sang with him live was at the Seville Expo with Plácido Domingo. That was when the ETA kidnapped his father and in his dressing room there were policemen guarding him in case something happened to him. I went with my son and they wouldn't let me pass, so he went by there and put us in, and he told my son: I'm not your father because your mother didn't want to. Lifelong friends. When Nino Bravo was killed we were going to travel with him that summer, I have recorded all his albums, he was a singer who was a pleasure to listen to. I remember that time that he will not return with great affection. I had the great fortune of dedicating myself to what I liked the most, and also earning money.

In 1973 he ventured to record a single with Waldo de los Ríos that could be seen in the window of Disco Film on Vicario Street. After years in the trio, did you get the bug to become a soloist?

It was Waldo de los Ríos, he was the one who called me and told me I have here some songs by an Argentine lyricist that I'm going to make some arrangements for and I want you to sing them. And I told him, okay, and he was the one who made the record for me, but I didn't ask to make the record or anything. Waldo had a lot of admiration for me, he told his wife that I was one of the most privileged voices he had ever heard, mind you. He told me: Girl, don't they give you a nickname in your town? and I say man of course, Macaria, and she loved it and on the album she put me Merche Macaria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=J4g5QYJOFzQ&feature=emb_logo

The tunes of 'Maya the Bee' or 'Sesame Street' are still kept in the imagination. Why almost no one knows that you were the voice of these songs?

You put the voice, but someone else put the face, because generally the models do not sing. One day, José Luis Navarro, who is the one who recorded Life is the same with Julio Iglesias in Columbia, tells me: They have asked me for the singer who sings Heno de Pravia and you will have to meet her, right?, and I said: Yes and you too, it's me. People have not finished knowing the things that I have done in particular. If I tell you the things I've recorded, you won't believe them, the advertisement for Famosa's dolls, Fraggle Rock's garbage queen, I've made a chicken, a donkey, I've even recorded flamenco, and for the movie La Colmena , lily and green eyes. We've done everything, even sing in a French brothel.

Her face appeared in advertisements for Coca-Cola, Heno de Pravia soap or Soberano brandy, which "was a thing for men." Did he suffer from the machismo typical of that time, have we evolved as a society, although sometimes it may not seem so?

Come on, man, then we were normal, there was no machismo, nor was there goodness, nor was there anything. I sang that about the Sovereign at that time and there would also be someone who would drink it. But that is from now. I was always a feminine lady, not feminazi or anything like that, at that time nobody was as dislocated as now. The things that are happening now have never happened before.

Every year in the acts of the Patron of Los Milagros, the patron saint of El Puerto, sings the Ave Maria during the Offertory. Is it the only time that she sings publicly?

I have been singing the Ave Maria for at least 60 years. Every year he came to sing, wherever he was. I remember one year he took me in Huelva and at seven in the morning one of the musicians brought me by car, I came, I sang the Ave Maria to the Virgin, and I left again. Also once I was in Melilla and I came by plane. Today I haven't sung because this bug has me excited, it makes me weird and I've been here six months. I haven't sung it for three years