He never composed his own lyrics, but used famous poems, like those of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti or Miguel Hernández.

He spent his first years in Barcelona, only returning there in 1994 after a long exile; his family had had to flee to France after the Spanish Civil War due to his father's membership of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union.

They lived in Paris until the beginning of the German occupation of France, when his father was arrested and deported to an internment camp for Spanish Republican prisoners.

His mother took their four children back to San Sebastián to find work, and they lived together in her family's ancestral home in Aduna, Guipuzkoa, until he was 14.

[1] His Basque mother and the period of his childhood spent on his mother's birth farm influenced Ibáñez to have an intense relationship with Basque artists and intellectuals such as Imanol Larzabal, Xabier Lete, Jorge Oteiza and Bernardo Atxaga, and to participate as well in the movement Ez Dok Amairu.