Joaquín Sabina, the Spanish songwriter who swapped the stage for sonnets

Joaquín Sabina

Photo: Mr. Tickle / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 12, 1949 Úbeda
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts · Medal of Andalusia · Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

A few days before his last concert, Joaquín Sabina told an interviewer that he would not miss the stage. He knew colleagues who could not live without it, he said, and he was not one of them: “I know how to live perfectly well without getting on a stage.” It is a strange confession from a singer whose bowler hat, sandpaper voice and three-hour shows shaped Spanish-language song for two generations. It also sounds true. Sabina has always presented himself as a man who writes first and sings second, and his plan for retirement is the oldest one he ever had: a notebook.

The son of a police inspector and a housewife, he was born and raised in Úbeda, a Renaissance town among the olive groves of Jaén, in Andalusia. As a teenager he wrote poems and played Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry covers with friends in a band called Merry Youngs. When his father offered him a wristwatch as a reward for passing his exams, he asked for a guitar instead. His older brother took the watch and, like their father, became a policeman. Sabina has said the distance between the two brothers started there.

He moved to Granada in 1968 to study Romance philology, and his politics soon caught up with him. In 1970 he threw a Molotov cocktail at a bank branch in protest at the Burgos trial, the military trial of Basque separatists under Franco, and left the country on a borrowed passport. After a few months in Paris he settled in London, where he lived as a squatter, sang in Underground stations and restaurants and self-published a booklet of songs, Memoria del exilio, which he sold copy by copy around Portobello Road. The most repeated story from those years, a five-pound tip from George Harrison, is one Sabina has told in contradictory versions, including one in which he drank the money that night.

He returned to Spain in 1977 and released his first album, Inventario, in 1978. The second, Malas compañías (1980), included “Pongamos que hablo de Madrid”, first recorded by Antonio Flores and later adopted as the city’s unofficial anthem. At La Mandrágora, a small Madrid club, he shared the stage with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez, and the live album of those nights, La Mandrágora (1981), caught the mix of cabaret, irony and street poetry that became his signature. The jump to a mass audience came after he signed with Ariola in 1985 and toured with the rock band Viceversa. Hotel, dulce hotel sold more than 400,000 copies in 1987.

The 1990s turned him into a figure on both sides of the Atlantic. Física y química (1992), with Andrés Calamaro on “Pastillas para no soñar”, sold more than a million copies and launched a 188-date Latin American tour. Yo, mi, me, contigo (1996) contained “Y sin embargo”, which he has called his favourite love song, and 19 días y 500 noches (1999) sold half a million copies and carried “Noches de boda”, sung with Chavela Vargas. The academic Juan Pablo Neyret reads those two records as the peak of a baroque style indebted to Quevedo, with its puns, antitheses and piled-up lists.

The legend of the poet with a guitar hides a more practical arrangement. After his debut, Sabina’s records were built on his words, while the music was largely set, from the mid-1980s on, by his guitarist Pancho Varona and by Antonio García de Diego. With Varona he founded Ripio, the publishing company that registered his songs. So the end of the partnership hit fans hard: in November 2022 Varona announced that Sabina would not take him on the next tour, closing more than four decades of work together, and Sabina gave no public explanation. It was not his first rupture. In 1998 a joint album with Fito Páez, Enemigos íntimos, ended with more than seventy concerts cancelled and a rhymed letter from Sabina listing his complaints.

His body has interrupted the story more than once. In August 2001 he suffered a mild stroke; he recovered physically within weeks but sank into a depression that lasted years. He stopped using cocaine, cancelled the tour for Dímelo en la calle (2002) and wrote mostly poetry, including the sonnets of Ciento volando de catorce. He came back with Alivio de luto in 2005, toured Spain and the Americas with Joan Manuel Serrat on Dos pájaros de un tiro in 2007, and in 2009 released Vinagre y rosas, made with the band Pereza, which became the best-selling album in Spain that year.

His last studio album to date, Lo niego todo (2017), was produced by Leiva, with lyrics written alongside the poet Benjamín Prado. A year later his voice failed during a show at Madrid’s WiZink Center and the tour was cancelled. In February 2020, on another night at the same arena with Serrat, he fell from the stage into the security pit and needed surgery for an intracranial haematoma. Fernando León de Aranoa’s documentary Sintiéndolo mucho, which premiered at San Sebastián in 2022, followed him at home and on the road, and its title song, written with Leiva, won the Goya for best original song in 2023. The Latin Recording Academy had announced its Lifetime Achievement Award for him in 2021.

He announced the end of touring with a song, “Un último vals”, whose video gathered Serrat, Ricardo Darín, Calamaro and Jorge Drexler. The Hola y adiós tour sold out from Chicago to Buenos Aires, then across Spain, with stops in Paris and London, and closed at Madrid’s Movistar Arena on 30 November 2025. RTVE broadcast that final night in January, and on 1 May 2026 Sony Music released it as the double live album Hola y Adiós (En Directo), eighteen songs that include “Contigo”, “Princesa” and “Y sin embargo”.

Away from the stage, he married Jimena Coronado, a Peruvian photographer and his partner of more than two decades, in a civil ceremony in Madrid in June 2020. He has two daughters, Carmela and Rocío, from his relationship with Isabel Oliart. He also wrote the centenary anthem of Atlético de Madrid, the club he has followed all his life.

What comes next is a desk, not a stage. Before the farewell concert he said he had four or five songs for a new album he intends to record and more than sixty sonnets for a book, and that he wanted to fill his days writing, painting and reading. No title or date has been announced for either. He left one door open: a single show or a tribute, if friends insist. Not, in his words, a tour.

Selected Discography

• Inventario (1978)
• Malas compañías (1980)
• Ruleta rusa (1984)
• Juez y parte (1985)
• Hotel, dulce hotel (1987)
• El hombre del traje gris (1988)
• Mentiras piadosas (1990)
• Física y química (1992)
• Esta boca es mía (1994)
• Yo, mí, me, contigo (1996)
• 19 días y 500 noches (1999)
• Lo niego todo (2017)

Tags: singers, singer-songwriters, Joan Manuel Serrat, Joaquín Sabina, 19 días y 500 noches, Física y química

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