Joaquin Sabina
Joaquín Ramón Martínez Sabina (Úbeda, February 12, 1949), known as Joaquín Sabina, is a Spanish singer-songwriter, poet and painter.
He has released seventeen studio albums and seven live, and has collaborated with different artists singing duets and doing other collaborations. The live albums are recordings of performances in which he has taken part alone or together with other artists: La mandrágora (1981), together with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez; Joaquín Sabina y Viceversa live (1986), together with the band Viceversa; We have plenty of reasons (2000); and Two birds with one stone (2007) with Joan Manuel Serrat. It is estimated that he has sold more than ten million records and has also composed for other artists such as Ana Belén, Andrés Calamaro or Miguel Ríos, among others. On the literary side, he has published nine books with compilations of song lyrics or poems published in the weekly Interviú.
In 2001 he suffered a mild stroke that put his life in danger, recovering a few weeks later without suffering any physical sequelae, but becoming deeply depressed, which led him to leave the stage for a while. During his retirement, he published Tell me on the street (2002), which would be followed by his eighteenth album, Alivio de luto (2005), whose songs reflect how The incident influenced his way of thinking. He got three platinum records for Vinagre y rosas (2009) and one gold record for I deny everything (2017), his last albums to date.
Biography
Early Years
Joaquín Sabina was born on February 12, 1949 in the municipality of Úbeda (Jaén, Spain), the second son of Adela Sabina del Campo, a housewife, and Jerónimo Martínez Gallego, a police inspector. He completed his primary studies with the Carmelite nuns and at the age of fourteen he began to write poems and compose music in a band formed with his friends called the Merry Youngs, who were dedicated above all to covering rock singers such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Little Richard.
At that time, he had his first girlfriend, Virtudes Antero «Chispa», who inspired him to create some love poems. This relationship was somewhat bumpy since Chispa's father, a notary from Úbeda, opposed her from the beginning and a few years later, when Joaquín was a university student, he took his daughter with him to Granollers in order to permanently separate her from him. But Joaquín undertook, in the company of a friend, a journey in search of her and settled in a tent next to Chispa's family home. The two young men escaped together, finally ending up in Valle de Arán (Lleida) where they lived together for a few days.
Later, he attended high school at the Salesians. At that time he continued writing verses and read Fray Luis de León, Jorge Manrique and José Hierro but also Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Herbert Marcuse. The day he passed fourth and revalidated, his father wanted to reward Joaquín with a wristwatch, to which he refused, stating that he preferred a guitar; request that was satisfied. On the other hand, his older brother did accept the watch and, according to Joaquín, that small detail would be the one that would start to distance them: his brother would end up becoming, like their father, a policeman, and he, a police officer. singer.
Exile in London (1968-1976)
In 1968 he moved to Granada to enroll in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and begin his studies in Romance Philology at the city's university, where he discovered the poetry of César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Joaquín lived for the first time with a woman named Lesley, who was preparing her Spanish thesis in Granada.
His leftist ideology led him to associate with movements opposed to the Franco regime. That same year, after the declaration of the state of emergency, his father, who was a commissioner in Úbeda, received an order to arrest him for belonging to the Communist Party. In 1970 he began collaborating with the magazine Poesía 70, where he coincided with other authors such as Luis Eduardo Aute or Carlos Cano. In that same year, he launched a Molotov cocktail against a branch of the Banco de Bilbao in Granada in protest of the Burgos trial, for which he was forced into exile. Since he did not have a passport, he could not immediately leave the country, but he met a man, Mariano Zugasti, who, after a few hours of conversation, gave him his. Under a false name and accompanied by Lesley, Joaquín headed for Paris, where He spent a few months, and later to London, where he lived as a squatter —squatter— during his first year in the city.
Joaquín needed to sensitize public opinion in his favor, since otherwise he would be repatriated to Spain, and thanks to Lesley he managed to get an interview and present his case. The Daily Mirror published that the death penalty would await him upon his return to Spain, but he managed to get the British authorities to grant him political asylum for a year. He went to live in Edinburgh with Lesley. They stayed there for four months, after which he went to London and left Lesley.
During this time, his house in London served as a refuge for members of the terrorist group ETA. Years later he affirmed that «the left of this country, to which I have proudly belonged and believe I belong, should apologize for its complacency with ETA for many years. I had ETA members in my house in London and they were lovely people who shot themselves in the back of the head, something that seemed very funny to us at the time. And we did wrong. Because from those dusts came these muds. So I think that people like me are very forced to be very against it and to say it very loudly, no matter how cowardly they are. And I am like the one that more ».
In London, he carried out different cultural activities: he cooperated with the Antonio Machado Club, which was regularly attended by emigrants and exiles; he wrote his first songs and organized a film club where films by Luis Buñuel were shown, then banned in Franco's Spain, and he rebuilt the Juan Panadero theater group, which staged plays such as The exception to the rule, by Bertolt Brecht, and The Toothbrush, by Jorge Díaz. He earned his living singing in the subway, restaurants and cafes.In 1974, according to one of the most widely reported anecdotes about his life, George Harrison was at the Mexican-Taberna bar celebrating his birthday and Sabina performed for him. The ex-beatle gave him a five-pound tip. In some interviews, Sabina recounted that she kept the ticket she received as a treasure, in others that she lost it in a move and on other occasions she has denied her own legend - "Actually, I I drank them that very night. During that time, she was in a relationship with a woman named Sonia.
In 1976 he published the booklet of songs Memory of exile and began to organize concerts for the colony of Spanish exiles in the United Kingdom, in which Paco Ibáñez, Lluís Llach, Francesc Pi de la Serra and Elisa Serna. These verses would constitute the main bulk two years later of his first album, Inventario. The book was published by the Nueva Voz publishing house, with a circulation of 1,000 copies that Joaquín himself was in charge of distributing in the Portobello Road area; he sold every last one of them thanks to his people skills and the many friendships he has made in the more than half a decade he has spent in the British capital.Later he composed the soundtrack for the series The Last Crusade , from the BBC.
Return to Spain (1977-1986)
In 1977, two years after Franco's death, he returned to Spain thanks to a legal passport provided by Fernando Morán, the Spanish consul in London. In that same year he married Lucía Inés Correa Martínez, an Argentinean whom he had met in London during his exile. The ecclesiastical link ceremony took place on February 18, 1977. In reality, the link was held for the sole purpose of obtaining the "overnight pass" —permission given to soldiers so that they can go to sleep at their houses—in the barracks during the military service that he had been forced to do in Majorca after returning to Spain. This allowed him to work in the local newspaper Última Hora. Its owner, Pedro Serra, offered him to stay on the staff, but he refused and, when he finished his military service in 1978, he settled in Madrid with his wife.. Shortly after, he managed to release his first LP, Inventario. The director of the CBS record company, Tomás Muñoz, had offered him his first contract with the reference to his song "¡Qué demasiao!", which at that time, performed by the singer Pulgarcito, was played on Popgrama, Spanish Television space presented by Carlos Tena. He began to perform in bars and in the electoral acts of different left-wing parties and unions, such as PSP, UGT, PCE and PSOE, as well as in acts of the CNT. At that time he conducted interviews for Carta de España . The following year, he began to sing together with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez in the basement of the Madrid café La Mandrágora. One of the songs they performed was "El hombre put nombre a los animales (Con su bikini)", a parodic version of the song Bob Dylan's "Man Gave Names to All the Animals" which, it seems, the author himself forbade him to play. The journalist Fernando García Tola came to the place one day, who invited them to his television program Esta noche, presented by Carmen Maura.
After his first album, he abandoned the prototypical profile of the singer-songwriter, since, according to himself, the use of that term made him feel as if they put a brick on his head and "poet" seemed to him "a suit that it's too wide for him". but very especially «Pongamos que hablo de Madrid», which has become for many a kind of unofficial hymn of the city and which was first recorded by Antonio Flores, a version that reached number 1 on the radio program Los 40 Principales. In 1981 La mandrágora appeared, an album recorded live together with Krahe and Pérez in which they tried to capture the spirit of their performances at the venue. In addition to concerts in pubs, he translated famous songs into Italian for the CBS record company and composed for other artists such as Miguel Ríos and Ana Belén. He began performing with what would be his first band, Ramillete de Virtudes and added to his old repertoire new compositions increasingly oriented towards rock and with more rhythm such as "Pisa el accelerador" and "Juana la Loca", songs that, shortly after, would form part of what would be her third LP —not counting the album recorded in La Mandrágora—, Russian Roulette, published in 1984. In 1984 he wrote an article welcoming Bob Dylan for Diario 16 and that same year he recorded with Gloria van Aerssen, from Vainica Doble, "With your hands in the dough", the tune of the homonymous cooking program by Elena Santonja on Spanish Television. During the 1983-1984 season, he also appeared regularly on the TVE program Si yo fuera presidente , by Fernando García Tola.
Sabina and Krahe later parted ways artistically. In 1985 he switched to CBS for Ariola as a record company, in exchange for greater artistic freedom and to obtain a higher remuneration. That same year he began working with Viceversa, a band with which in 1985 he released the album Juez y parte and, a year later, the album Joaquín Sabina y Viceversa en directo, recorded at the Teatro Salamanca in Madrid, with the participation of Javier Gurruchaga and Ricardo Solfa as guests, who They performed songs by their host, and by Luis Eduardo Aute, who dedicated the song "Let's say I'm talking about Joaquín" to him. The album was a sales success and marked his leap to the general public. He participated in parties in favor of a referendum for the withdrawal of Spain from NATO. He also published "Si te he visto no me acuerdo", a song that recounted the three years of Felipe González at the head of the government of Spain. In the municipal elections, he supported his friend Juan Barranco, candidate for mayor of the capital. In addition, in March of that same year, he published De lo cantado y sus margens, a set of texts that brings together a large part of the writings that were part of Memory of Exile and the songs of Inventario.
Crowd success (1987-2000)
The successes began to follow one another with the publication of his following LPs. In 1987 she sold more than 400,000 copies of Hotel, Sweet Hotel, which helped cement her success. His former company, seeing the fame that the artist was gaining, published without his consent a collection called Joaquín Sabina and all his hits . He parted ways with Viceversa and teamed up with Víctor Claudín and Pedro Sauquillo to direct the Elígeme concert hall, in the Malasaña neighborhood of Madrid. In 1988 he published The man in the gray suit , which he premiered at the Las Ventas bullring in Madrid and later went on a massive tour of Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela. The album included the soundtrack, written with Pancho Varona, for the movie Sinatra. Paco Betriu was the director of the film, which featured Alfredo Landa and Maribel Verdú as protagonists and the singer himself played a secondary character. That same year, he produced a double live album by the Madrid trio Los Chichos, obtained a divorce from his wife, Lucía, and the Junta de Andalucía awarded him the Silver Medal.
In 1989, together with Pancho Varona, who had become his inseparable guitarist, he founded Ripio, a publishing company with which he recorded all his songs from that moment on. In that same year, on January 16, his first daughter, Carmela Juliana, was born from his relationship with Isabel Oliart, and to whom he dedicated the song "Ay, Carmela" from his album Vinagre y rosas in 2009. Again without the singer's approval, his old record company released another compilation: Mucho Sabina.
The records and tours followed one another in the early nineties, after the publication of White Lies (1990). Later, Física y química (1992) would appear, of which more than a million records were sold and in which he had the collaboration of Andrés Calamaro on the song "Pastillas para no soñar" and which he popularized in South America through a great international tour of 188 concerts. It was followed by Esta boca es mía (1994), an album that was the eighth best-selling album on the 1994 annual list in Spain.
On July 26, 1992, his second daughter with Isabel Oliart, Rocío, was born and he began a sentimental relationship with the Mallorcan model Cristina Zubillaga. Together with other artists, he took part in protest actions for the closure of the Teatro Alfil in 1994. In June, he gave his support to Izquierda Unida in the legislative elections. This same year he participated, along with other important artists, in the tour Much more than two by Ana Belén and Víctor Manuel. In 1995 she collaborated in the television program With Hermida and company , presented by Jesús Hermida.
In 1996, he published Yo, mi, me, contigo, an album that took him on tour with more than 30 concerts throughout Spain, which began on July 18 in Gijón (Asturias), in company of Los Rodríguez and that continued through several Latin American countries, such as Peru, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. The album was the best-selling album of the Spanish Phonographic and Videographic Association (AFYVE), with 80,000 copies sold in the week of its premiere and the seventh most purchased album on the annual list of that year in Spain. the song "Y sin embargo" of which Joaquín affirmed "It is my favorite love song".
In 1997, he was received by Fidel Castro, with whom he spoke for five hours and embarked on a project with the Argentine musician Fito Páez, who admired Sabina's poetic qualities. The result was the album Intimate Enemies, which went on sale in Spain in 1998, although the scheduled promotional tour was suspended due to disagreements between the two artists. On that occasion, more than 70 concerts that had been sold and promoted around the world were cancelled. The scandal was greater when a letter was revealed that Joaquín Sabina himself had written to Fito Páez in the form of poetry, where he summarized the reasons that determined the end of their employment relationship: «The role of the ugly duckling, I don't care for you I assure you, and even less that of a hard man, that it costs you so little» Joaquín recited in the aforementioned letter. Joaquín made a solo tour of theaters called Sabina, widow and children in underwear , of important success and that stood out for the great duration of the recitals, which reached three hours. On this tour he was accompanied by only three musicians: Pancho Varona —guitar—, Antonio García de Diego —guitar and keyboards— and Olga Román —vocals, percussion and guitar. After breaking up with Cristina Zubillaga, he began dating a Buenos Aires 23-year-old Paula Seminara, a relationship that lasted a year and a half.
During the same year, 1998, Sabina collaborated with Argentine singer-songwriter Charly García on his album El aguante and sang on the song "Tu arma en el sur". In 1999, she published 19 days and 500 nights, which was the sixth most sold album on the annual list that year in Spain and twenty-fifth on the annual list the following year, selling a total of 500,000 copies. He won four of the Music Awards of the General Society of Authors of Spain (SGAE) in 2000, in addition to the Ondas Award as the best Spanish artist in 1999 and the Ondas Award for the best song in 2000. Within this Two of his favorite songs are found on the album: "Una canción para la Magdalena" and "Noches de boda", the latter a duet with the singer Chavela Vargas, with whom years before he had established a close friendship. That same year, his record company honored him at the Hotel Palace in Madrid to celebrate the achievement of selling more than four million records from his first record on that label, Juez y parte, to 19 days and 500 nights. In December, he performed at the second Principales Solidarios concert, organized by Los 40 Principales, together with other artists such as La Oreja de Van Gogh, Hevia and Celtas Cortos, with the aim of raising funds for refugees from the Balkan war.
In 2000, he was awarded four of the five awards for which he was nominated at the Music Awards in the categories of best pop author, best pop artist, best album of the year and best song of the year for "19 days and 500 nights". That same year, he began the acoustic tour Nos sobrano los motivos, an improved revision of En paños menores and, in September, the electric tour of 19 days and 500 nights. On November 6, he received the Ondas Award for best song for "19 days and 500 nights."
Health problems (2001-2004)
In the early morning of August 24, 2001, after the publication that same year of the album We have plenty of motives, a double live album, a compilation of the tour of the same name, and which was the sixth best-selling album on the 2001 annual list in Spain, he suffered a mild stroke, which put his life in danger. Although a few weeks later he recovered without suffering physical sequelae, the incident influenced his thinking and he became deeply depressed. All this made the singer reconsider his way of life and his relationship with drugs, which is why he decided to stop using cocaine and stated that "I only feel nostalgic for drugs". However, in the interview during the documentary Joaquín Sabina - 19 days and 500 nights he himself indicated that he had stopped using cocaine four months before his stroke. During that time, he also managed to stop smoking for 8 months and even confessed that "they were the longest eight months of my life". Determined to relaunch his friend María Jiménez, he gave her his songs to release the album Donde más duele and sang with her the song "With two beds empty".
In 2002, the year in which he posed nude for El País Semanal, the book Con buena letra went on sale, which included illustrations and the lyrics of all his songs, and the album Dímelo en la calle, which critics considered one of the most important albums of that year, and which became known with the single "69.G". It also contained the song "Like a toothache", partially written by Pancho Varona and Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and leader of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (Mexico) on January 1, 1994. That album also included the song “Semos diferentes”, which was part of the soundtrack of the film Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella, and for which he obtained a Goya Award nomination in 2002 as « best original song". Said album was positioned as the sixteenth best-selling album in the annual list of 2002 in Spain. Sabina suspended the scheduled tour to promote the album and cited problems with her vocal cords, although she would later make public that the real reason it was the depression he suffered. However, in April 2003 he released a new double album, Diario de un peatón, which integrated Dímelo en la calle with a second CD where presents some of his recent songs and some old ones that were still unpublished.On the album she had the collaboration of Pablo Milanés in "The most beautiful song in the world", which she had previously covered with Pasión Vega.
At this time he was still under the effects of depression and reduced his musical activity, but greatly enhanced his literary side as a poet. As a show of support, the project emerged that would end with the album Among all the women, released in October 2003, where thirteen female artists, such as Rosario Flores, Ana Belén, Chavela Vargas or Julieta Venegas, covered several of his themes.
Despite his illness, in 2003 he composed and performed «Motivos de un sentimiento», the hymn for the Centenary of the football club of which he has always declared himself a faithful follower, Atlético de Madrid. He was in charge of shaping three different versions: one instrumental, another in the style of chirigotas from Cádiz and a last one with a rock sound, the latter sung by Rosendo Mercado, Germán «Mono» Burgos, Lichis —singer of La cabra mecánica—, Josele Santiago and himself. In 2004 he created the restaurant La Cantina de la Mordida, in Madrid with some partners. That same year, he composed the song "La rubia de la cuarta fila" for the soundtrack from the film Isi/Disi. Amor a lo bestia, with which he again obtained a nomination for the 2005 Goya Awards for best original song. He also participated in the collective project in tribute to the poet Pablo Neruda on his centenary, entitled Neruda in the heart.
Recovery and return to activity (2005-2010)
In 2005, the mayor of Madrid Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón offered her to be the town crier for the festivities of San Isidro, patron saint of the city, an honor that Sabina accepted by composing a proclamation in verse that was very popular. She published the album Alivio de luto and thanks to this and his dedication to literature he managed to get out of depression. It was the eighth best-selling album on the 2005 annual list in Spain and certified with two platinum records. He also published the second edition of Con buena letra, where he included lyrics for songs written on request or for friends, for film and television, and corresponding to his album Alivio de luto.
He returned to the stage with the Gira ultramarina, in acoustic format and in small stages or theaters, and marked the return of the artist after more than three years of inactivity, surrounded by his usual musicians, Pancho Varona, Olga Román, Antonio García de Diego and Pedro Barceló. One of the concerts of that tour, in the city of Gijón, was canceled due to acute laryngitis, which once again gave rise to comments in the press and among the public about his state of health.
In 2006, after concluding the Overseas Tour, another series of concerts began under the name Carretera y top manta. This reference to music piracy led him to a bitter confrontation with the singer Ramoncín, a member of the SGAE's board of directors. called "gatillazo"— and ended at the end of the year, after touring a large part of the Spanish geography, in South America.
That same year a new book of interviews with Sabina appeared under the title Sabina in the flesh. Its author was Javier Menéndez Flores, who already wrote a previous one, Perdonen la tristeza, in the year 2000. The new book was a bestseller, although it was temporarily removed from bookstores for reasons of editorial struggle. At the same time, he began to collaborate with the magazine Interviú, which gave him the third page to publish his sonnets. In October of that year, he received the Gold Medal from King Juan Carlos to merit in the Fine Arts. A month later, in November, the double anthology box set Punto... y seguido was published, which contained all his records, plus collaborations, live performances and rarities.
In 2007 he went on a tour with Joan Manuel Serrat called Two birds with one stone, which began on June 29 and took them to 30 Spanish cities and 20 American ones. In it, the Catalan interpreted the best songs by the Ubetense while he did the same with the repertoire of the noi del Poble-sec. Of the concerts held in Madrid, a live album was recorded and a DVD with more material that was put on sale in December 2007. The live album was the second best-selling album on the 2007 annual list in Spain and the fourth in the annual list of the following year, by selling a total of 320,000 copies and thus obtaining the certification of four platinum discs.
In that same year he composed the soundtrack for the film A world for Julius, based on the novel of the same name by Alfredo Bryce Echenique, starring Ana Belén and Luz Casal. This mouth is still mine, the second part of the sonnets published for Interviú, and A return mail, a collection of correspondence between the singer-songwriter and different personalities such as Subcomandante Marcos or Fito Páez, among others.
In 2008, the Dutch director Ramon Gieling directed a film about the life of Joaquín Sabina entitled "19 days and 500 nights" and whose main theme is the depression he suffered a few years ago. That same year the reconciliation and subsequent meeting between Sabina and Fito Páez. He invited him to his recital in Madrid and together they recorded a version of "Contigo", which was included in the latest CD by the Argentine artist entitled I don't know if it's Baires or Madrid . The meeting is also recorded on the DVD that accompanied the disc.
On March 5, 2009, it was announced that Joaquín Sabina, along with José Tomás, Raúl González Blanco and Paloma O'Shea, was awarded the Gold Medal of the City of Madrid, which is awarded annually by the City Council as recognition to public figures who have contributed with their work to promote the good image of the city. He received the award on May 15 of the same year. On November 17 of that year, he published his fifteenth studio album, entitled Vinagre y rosas and whose single, "Lemon Tiramisu", sang it together with the Pereza group, which was also in charge of putting music on it as well as the choirs and production. To present this new album, he began a tour in Salamanca, where he gave his first two concerts on the 20th and 21st of the same month. This tour, he stated, would be his last on large stages. The album was the best-selling on the 2009 annual list in Spain and seventh on the annual list the following year, certified with a total of five platinum records. On November 16, 2010, Rolling Stone magazine awarded him the award as Artist of the Year. year.
Her musical and US debut (2011-present)
In 2011, the singer began the tour El penúltimo tren in which he toured Latin America and in which he planned to sing for the first time in the United States. However, in May 2011, Sabina suspended concerts in Mexican and American cities due to "acute diverticulitis with risk of complications" and postponed them until October. Already recovered, he returned to the stage on July 2 at the Musicians in Nature festival, held in Hoyos del Espino (Ávila), in which he performed with Andrés Calamaro. Finally, he was able to perform at the Manhattan Center in New York on October 16, in what was his first concert in the United States. As part of his tour, he also performed at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on October 20 and ended on October 23 at the American Airlines Arena in Miami. On October 6 of that same year, the musical More one hundred lies, based on his songs and directed by David Serrano and with the singer himself as musical director, in the company of Pancho Varona and José María Cámara.
On February 6, 2012, together with Joan Manuel Serrat, he presented The Titanic Orchestra, his first studio album recorded with the Catalan singer-songwriter. In addition, they announced a tour to present the album that would take them to Argentina, Chile, Mexico, the United States, Costa Rica and Spain. In the electoral campaign of the 2012 Elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, he gave his permission for the Ciudadanos -Partido de la Ciudadanía will use the verses of "Preliminary projects for the lyrics of the national anthem (with forgiveness)" in said campaign.
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In 2013, he published the book Very Personal, which included drawings, begun poems, and unfinished song lyrics. It was the first time that he published his plastic works —called "doodles" by the artist— painted with felt-tip pens and extracted from fifteen illustrated notebooks. The drawings were included among fragments of poems, personal reflections, sketches of song lyrics, impressions of his concerts, comments from his travels, and frustrated diary entries. On October 16, 2015, he released the box set Pure Sabina, which contained studio and live works, both solo and in front of Viceversa, the band that accompanied him in the mid-eighties.
On February 3, 2016, he put up for sale Garagatos, an artist's notebook that included an art book, the book Garagatos and a fold-out of almost three meters long. The art book consisted of 66 facsimile drawings in the form of plates of different sizes. Each drawing was accompanied by fragments of songs, verses or "winks of humor" by Sabina himself. In the book Garagatos, different personalities spoke about the influences, archetypes and characters used by the artist in his work. Shortly before, he had successfully undergone a stomach operation for diverticulitis with the risk of end up in peritonitis. That same month, he was named Favorite Son of Andalusia, a title granted by the Junta de Andalucía.
On March 10, 2017, he released his album Lo nego todo, produced by Leiva and in which the poet Benjamín Prado collaborated. In addition, he was named Favorite Son in his hometown, Úbeda On June 18, 2018, Sabina was forced to cancel the tour of Lo nego todo due to health problems, when she remained "totally mute" during the concert held on June 16 in the WiZink Center in Madrid.
On February 12, 2020, he suffered a fall during a concert he was giving with Joan Manuel Serrat at the WiZink Center in Madrid as part of his No hay dos sin tres tour. The singer plunged from the stage until he fell into the security pit, from a height of at least five feet. he fell into the security pit between the stage and the first rows of the audience. As a consequence of the fall, he suffered an intracranial hematoma. After the incident, Sabina himself came out on stage in a wheelchair, accompanied by Serrat, to postpone the concert and announce to the public that he was going to the hospital because he had hurt his shoulder. He had to undergo surgery, successfully, and admitted to the UCI. That same year, Atresplayer premiered a documentary series about Sabina, called Let's say I'm talking about Joaquín Sabina. He was also awarded the Ondas Award for his career. In 2021, the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences announced that it would present him with the Latin Grammy Awards Musical Excellence Award, along with Martinho da Vila, Emmanuel, Sheila E. & Pete Escovedo, Fito Paez, Milly Quezada and Gilberto Santa Rosa. They stated that the singer "elevated the art of songwriting in Spanish to unexpected heights, creating a musical universe characterized by his eccentric but simple poetry and his acute sociopolitical observations that have influenced several generations".
Work
Influences
Sabina's literary work is not that of a poet, since a large part of her compositions are songs. For Juan Pablo Neyret, "his life is no less important than his work, beyond the self-referentiality that the lyrics of his songs present". On this subject, Marcela Romano points out in The enunciation in person?, that "the model of individual producer, discreetly implicit in the writing, is succeeded by another strongly explicit, present, who, simultaneously with the text, exhibits the voice, the body, the gestures, the clothing", which he calls " Spectacular subject." Although references to his work appear in the books published on Joaquín Sabina —apart from the books of poems—, most of them are biographies and compilations of anecdotes, which for Neyret denotes the "display of the person" of the artist and affirms that «the exposure of the postmodern artist goes much further and reaches television and radio programs, Internet sites, general interest magazines and the gossip press, that is, the production and consumption system of the so-called entertainment world ».
Neyret considers that just after the publication in 1978 of Inventario, his first album, Joaquín Sabina «emancipated himself from the setting of poetry to music and what precisely characterizes him is, except in very few cases of co-authorship or interpretation of songs by other authors, the preeminence of their lyrics, both in the sense that they are absolute dominant in their songbook and in that they have a limited intervention in their musicalization». This was carried out, fundamentally since the mid-1980s, by Pancho Varona and Antonio García de Diego. It should be noted that the only text of the poems that make up the songs of Inventario that Sabina set to music was a medieval text entitled the "Romance of the gentle lady and the rustic shepherd". Sabina, following the practice quite Widespread among Spanish and Latin American singer-songwriters from the 1960s, he chose a text from several centuries ago and that was sung and remusicalized it. Several themes appear in it that he would later use in his songs, such as love, sex, rejection of a formal partner, and the stereotype of the lonely male.
In his studies, Heinrich Wölfflin considered that art develops in successive periods of affirmation and crisis. Neyret values the Baroque as a period of crisis and links it to postmodernity due to its "essential pessimism and irony". Lola Pérez Costa links some of Sabina's songs, such as "Calle Melancolía", "Inventario" or "Siete crisantemos", with the Baroque. He relates that period, which "expresses the awareness of a crisis, visible in sharp social contrasts, hunger, war and misery", with Spain in the 1980s, the time when the song "Calle Melancolía" was published., and which was characterized as "a society marked by unemployment, hopelessness, atomic fear, work and academic frustration, absenteeism, terrorism... along with a desire to live in a hurry, a certain cultural euphoria, confidence in democratic institutions; and all this citing his hypothetical salvation in an overwhelming individualism». This situation was reflected in "Calle Melancolía", in which there are verses with bitter disappointments ("I only find doors that deny what they hide"); vital pain ("the juice spills from the ocher walls / of a blood fruit grown on the asphalt"), despair ("I get angry with the shadows that populate the corridors"), helplessness ("I climb up your memory like a vine / that does not find windows to hold onto"), and, possibly, the verses that define the Spain of the first years of post-Francoism: "a crazy boat / that comes from the night and goes nowhere".
Sabina's lyrics are influenced by a great variety of styles and artists, ranging from Anglo-Saxon rock —with authors such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or The Rolling Stones—, Latin American folklore — such as Atahualpa Yupanqui, Violeta Parra, Chavela Vargas or José Alfredo Jiménez-, the tango -Enrique Santos Discépolo, Homero Manzi or Celedonio Flores- or the French melodic song by Georges Brassens, even Spanish-American avant-garde poets such as César Vallejo, as well as Pablo Neruda, Raúl González Tuñón and Rafael Alberti or the authors who are part of his first readings in his youth, which include Fray Luis de León and Jorge Manrique, as well as the rest of the Spanish tradition.
Above all these authors, the influence of Francisco de Quevedo stands out, although Sabina insists that his greatest influence among contemporary Spanish poetry is that of Jaime Gil de Biedma. For Neyret, sarcasm, irony and Bitingness are decisive in the poetic work of Joaquín Sabina, as in that of Quevedo. In the same way, the basic formal characteristics of the Baroque are evident in his lyrics: «lexicon of common use intertwined with cultisms, misunderstandings, puns, contrasts and antithesis, as well as anaphoric constructions and asindetic enumerations, the latter, the two main tropes of Sabinian poetics".
For Juan Pablo Neyret, the most significant albums and those in which Sabina reaches the «summit of her baroque style», above the rest of the albums in her discography, are Yo, mí, me, contigo and 19 days and 500 nights. The first is "deliberately full of code readings" and in the second "he definitely shows himself master of her style resources." Comparisons can be made between the song "Contigo" by Sabina and Quevedo's sonnet "Amor constant más allá de la muerte".
Sabina has repeatedly expressed her admiration for her compatriot singer María Dolores Pradera, with whom she recorded the song «Jugar por jugar» in 2007 for the album In good company by the artist. This would lead them to strengthen an old friendship that Sabina transcribed in the Coplas a María Dolores Pradera that she dedicated to her in the presentation of Canciones del alma , which Pradera recorded in 2003.
Official discography
- Inventory (1978)
- Bad companies (1980)
- The mandragora (1981), with Alberto Pérez and Javier Krahe
- Russian Roulette (1984)
- Judge and part (1985), with Viceversa
- Joaquín Sabina and Viceversa live (1986), with Viceversa
- Hotel, sweet hotel (1987)
- The man in the grey suit (1988)
- Pious liars (1990)
- Physics and chemistry (1992)
- This mouth is mine. (1994)
- Me, me, me, with you (1996)
- Intimate enemies (1998), with Fito Páez
- 19 days and 500 nights (1999)
- We're spared the reasons. (2000)
- Tell me on the street. (2002)
- Luto relief (2005)
- Two birds with one shot (2007), with Joan Manuel Serrat
- Vinegar and roses (2009)
- The Titanic Orchestra (2012), with Joan Manuel Serrat
- On the Moon Park (2012), with Joan Manuel Serrat
- 500 nights for a crisis (2015)
- I deny everything. (2017)
- I deny everything live (2018)
Literary work
Songbooks
- Memory of exile (London: New Voice, 1976), songbook published during his exile
- From the singing and its margins (Granada: Diputación de Granada, 1986), letters from your album Inventory
- The man in the grey suit (Madrid: Ripio, 1989), scores
- With good lyrics (Barcelona: Temas de Hoy, 2002; expanded in 2005 and 2010), compilation of letters
Poems
- One hundred flying fourteen (Madrid: Visor, 2001), sonetos
- This mouth is mine. (Barcelona: Editions B, 2005), satirical verses published in the weekly Interviú
- This mouth is still mine. (Barcelona: Editions B, 2007), satirical verses published in the weekly Interviú
- The scream on the ground (Madrid: Visor, 2012), poems edited in the journal Public
- Very personal (Barcelona: Planet, 2013), drawings, poems started and lyrics of unfinished songs
- Garagatos (Barcelona: Artika, 2016), artist's notebook that includes an art book, the book Garagatos and a drop-down of almost three meters long
- In roman paladin (Ubeda: Juancaballos de Poesía, 2018), verses published in the monthly magazine ink Free
Correspondence
- Back in the mail (Madrid: Visor, 2007), epistolary with personalities such as Subcomandante Marcos or Fito Páez, among others
Awards and distinctions
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- Silver Medal of Andalusia (1988)
- Ondas Award for the Best Spanish Artist (1999)
- Ondas Award for Best Song for «19 Days and 500 Nights» (2000)
- Gold Medal to merit in Fine Arts (2000)
- Nomination of the Goya Award for the Best Original Song (2002)
- Nomination of the Goya Award for the Best Original Song (2005)
- Gold Medal of the City of Madrid (2009)
- Predilect Son of Andalusia (2016)
- Predilect Son and Golden Medal of Ubeda (2017)
- Ondas Award for Musical Path (2020)
- Latin Grammy Award for Musical Excellence (2021)
- Alcalá City Award for Arts and Letters (2022)