Repression was followed almost inevitably by excess and nowhere more so than in Madrid. Solo se vive una vez ran its unofficial motto – a slogan that eventually became song, one whose chorus is still belted out at discos with a collective defiance that’s almost evangelical. You only live once. Spain’s equivalent of the Swinging Sixties, an outpouring of creativity and imagination, arrived in Madrid in the 1980s. It was an explosion in music, in literature, in film, in art.
