Pancho Varona, the guitarist Sabina fired by email, admires singer Serrat’s farewell

Pancho Varona has a clear idea of how a great career should end. Asked by Heraldo about Joan Manuel Serrat, the guitarist who spent four decades at Joaquín Sabina’s side called Serrat’s retirement “a very sensible decision” and said there is “no career in the world better used.” He has an equally clear memory of how his own run ended: with a short email from Sabina, which he still calls baffling.

Those two exits sit side by side in the same interview, and together they answer the question Varona keeps asking. He says he was never given a weighty reason. The record shows that reasons were given, second-hand, and that Varona himself has described the friction behind them. What he never got is the thing Serrat gave his audience and Sabina later gave his own: a goodbye said to his face. That, more than any missing explanation, is the wound.

For anyone who grew up with “Y sin embargo” or “Ruido”, this is more than gossip about a band roster. Sabina has left the stage. The man who wrote the music for a large share of that songbook is still carrying it from town to town, in rooms that hold a hundred people, and the way he tells the story of the split now colours how those songs are heard.

How Pancho Varona left Joaquín Sabina’s band

The basic facts are not in dispute. In November 2022, Varona announced on social media that Sabina had decided, “against all odds”, not to take him on his next tour, a pun on the tour’s own title, Contra todo pronóstico. In the same post, quoted by Vozpópuli and ¡Hola!, he thanked Sabina for “the 100 songs we composed together, the 40 tours on which I accompanied him and the 15 records on which I was his producer.”

The news had reached him by email. Varona told Diari de Tarragona the message was “short, eight or ten lines,” saying only that Sabina no longer counted on him. “Breaking up by email seems very cold to me, very cold,” he said, adding that he had tried several times to visit Sabina at home and had not been received. Four years later, speaking to Heraldo, the complaint is the same and sharper: there are phones to call, he says, and he had gone to Joaquín’s house to see him.

The partnership he lost was real. Varona joined Sabina in 1982, in the Viceversa years, and his name sits on “Y sin embargo”, “Ruido” and “Yo me bajo en Atocha”, as Vozpópuli noted. Sabina wrote and sang; Varona set the lyrics to music and produced the records. In an interview with Alicante Plaza given while the partnership still stood, he described his place in it with a surveyor’s precision: “two metres behind and to the left of Joaquín.”

Pancho Varona’s Serrat confession, read closely

That is the context for the line that made the Heraldo headline. “On the tours I did with Joaquín, I used to boast that I was the person on that stage who most admired Joan Manuel Serrat,” Varona told the paper. Serrat came into his life when he was eight or nine, he said, through his mother singing “Cantares” with him as a boy, and has stayed there “almost since I was born.”

The tours he means are the joint Sabina and Serrat shows, which put two bands on one stage. Here the confession meets an awkward detail. When the split broke, Vozpópuli’s Víctor Lenore wrote that merging with Serrat’s band for those tours had been one more source of distance, because Serrat, demanding about the playing, preferred his regular musicians to Varona. Varona did not play on La orquesta del Titanic, the pair’s joint album, and Sabina’s dedication on it read: “For Panchito, who shone by his absence.” Varona himself joked about that line on Twitter years before the split.

Read with that in mind, the Serrat praise is generous and pointed at once. Varona is not settling scores with Serrat; he admires him without reservation. But when he calls Serrat’s retirement “very sensible”, he is praising a man who chose his ending, announced it, toured it and closed it at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona in December 2022. Sabina did the same in Madrid on 30 November 2025, telling 12,000 people at the Movistar Arena, as EFE reported, that it was “the last concert of my life and therefore the most important.” Varona’s ending was chosen for him, in ten lines.

Sabina’s side of the Pancho Varona split

Here is the strongest case for Sabina, as his camp has made it. In April 2023, when EFE asked, Sabina’s team endorsed an account by the music writer Juan Puchades in the magazine Efe Eme, The Objective reported. In that version the break had been coming for years: the relationship had worn down and was limited “strictly to the tours.” The trigger was a conflict between Varona and the rest of Sabina’s band. Vozpópuli had already reported tensions with Antonio García de Diego, the band’s other long-serving pillar, who stayed.

Those musicians had formed La Noche Sabinera, a show that played Sabina’s songs with his blessing while he rested from the road. According to Puchades, Varona replaced the previous manager with an inexperienced friend and kept parallel projects “that set the main band’s schedule.” In 2021 he left the group and launched a project billed as “the authentic Sabina tour.” The others carried on as Benditos Malditos, and in April 2022 Sabina joined them on stage by surprise, which EFE’s report read as a significant sign of where he stood.

On this reading, the email was not a bolt from the blue. It was the paperwork for a split that had already happened inside the band. A bandleader is entitled to choose his musicians, and Varona has said so himself: Sabina “can fire whoever he wants,” he told Cadena SER’s Hora 25, according to Cronista. A written message, for all its coldness, is at least unambiguous.

Why Pancho Varona’s question still stands

The striking thing is how much of that version Varona has confirmed. Speaking to El Mundo, as Cronista reported, he described the same scheduling friction: he worked half the month on his own projects and half with the band, the band asked him to give them more of his time, and he refused, telling them they could work without him on those days. The reason he says he never received is, in outline, one he has told himself.

So the bewilderment he describes to Heraldo is not about facts. “I cannot understand why I was not given a weighty reason for ending both the professional and the personal,” he says. “It is more bewilderment than pain.” The key words are “the personal.” A band dispute can explain a tour without Varona. It does not explain why a friendship of forty years had to end with the tour, or why the end arrived in writing after he had knocked on the door.

This is where Sabina’s case is thinnest. Everything in the Efe Eme account concerns the band: managers, calendars, a rival show. None of it addresses the partner who wrote the music for some of Sabina’s best-known songs. In the coverage we reviewed, Sabina has not spoken about Varona in his own voice; the endorsement came through his team. The personal half of the story is a silence, and a silence, unlike an email, can be read any way the reader likes.

Pancho Varona keeps the Sabina songbook on the road

Meanwhile, the songs have quietly changed hands. On the Friday night that opened the All Saints’ long weekend, Varona filled the Yoanna Irish Pub in Ciudad Rodrigo, in the province of Salamanca, for the third time, according to Salamanca RTV al Día: more than a hundred people, tickets at 18 euros, a room singing along to “Ruido”, “La del pirata cojo”, “Y sin embargo”, “Peor para el sol” and “Princesa”. He also played “Pongamos que hablo de Madrid” in the faster style of Antonio Flores, a first for that town.

He has been clear about his right to do it. “I don’t mind going back over the songs I made with him, because they are mine too,” he told La Capital in Mar del Plata, on a Latin American tour after the split. “I have every right to sing them.” In the same interview he said he planned to swap some of Joaquín’s songs for his own over time, “with all the pain in my heart.”

That swap is under way. Heraldo reports that Varona is preparing a solo record and has already released advances such as “Sospechas”, “Ni fu ni fa” and “Como Miguel Bosé”. His only previous solo album, self-titled, came out in 1995, Alicante Plaza noted. The guitarist who placed himself two metres behind the singer is now the one at the microphone.

The Varona and Sabina break: the record, and the two versions

On the record: the November 2022 announcement and its numbers; an email that Varona describes as eight to ten lines; Sabina’s Contra todo pronóstico tour without him; Sabina’s team endorsing the Efe Eme account of a band conflict; Sabina’s farewell concert in Madrid in November 2025; Varona’s full pub dates and new singles.

Still one side’s word: Varona’s account of visits and calls that went unanswered; Puchades’s account of the manager and the parallel projects, endorsed by Sabina’s team but not by Sabina in person; and Vozpópuli’s reading that the Serrat tours played a part. Varona says he remains open to a reconciliation, “with open arms, waiting for an explanation or a hug,” as he told Diari de Tarragona. Sabina has not answered in public.

Our reading is that the explanation already exists and the hug is what is missing. Serrat ended his career on his own terms, and Varona admires him for it. Sabina did the same in Madrid. The only exit in this story that nobody staged was Varona’s, and he is answering it the only way left to him: by singing the songs, his songs too, in rooms small enough to see every face. It is the opposite of an email. Every night, a hundred people tell him to his face.

Tags: singer-songwriters, Joan Manuel Serrat, Antonio García de Diego, Farewell tours, Joaquín Sabina, Pancho Varona