Joaquín Sabina

He threw a Molotov cocktail at a Banco de Bilbao branch in Granada and had to flee Spain in a hurry. He was 1970 years old, his father was a police commissioner in Úbeda, and the fake passport he was lent carried the name Mariano Zugasti. In London he slept in squats, sang at a Mexican restaurant where George Harrison left him a five-pound tip, and learned to measure verses with an acoustic guitar.

He returned to Madrid in 1977 with a cardboard suitcase and the certainty that protest songs bored the stones.

Nobody gave him a chance.

The Malasaña basement and the rogue rhyme

At La Mandrágora, a basement dive in La Latina, he began trading sonnets and satires with Javier Krahe. His first record, Inventario, released in 1978, sold next to nothing and drew scathing reviews. CBS signed him almost by default and imposed orchestral arrangements he detested, but that stumble taught him never to hand over control of his lyrics again. Because the musician no longer wanted to be anyone's spokesman except his own.

Two years later he released Malas compañías and discovered that the audiences of the Transition preferred nocturnal tales of hangovers to political pamphlets. He passed the million-copy sales mark with Física y Química in 1992, backed by Pancho Varona's guitar and the group Viceversa.

And the formula worked for an entire decade, fueled by electric rumbas and grueling tours through stadiums across Latin America.

The Night the Bill Came Due

The sound changed when producer Alejo Stivel locked him in the studio to record 19 days and 500 nights in 1999. He recorded the vocal takes before dawn, smoking Ducados and straining a cracked voice that sounded like sawdust and black tobacco. That album sold more than 500,000 copies in just eight weeks.

The body said enough in August 2001.

He suffered a cerebral ischemia that sidelined him from the stage and sent him into a severe depression. He gave up chemical excess, cut back on nights out, and took refuge in writing sonnets for cultural magazines. But director Fernando León de Aranoa had already begun setting up his cameras in the apartment on Plaza de Tirso de Molina to document the singer's physical decline.

Fernando León de Aranoa spent thirteen years filming intermittently to finish the documentary Sintiéndolo mucho, released in 2022. The film shows the musician's vulnerability without artifice, from the panic in the dressing room at Las Ventas to the chronic pain of hip surgeries.

The curtain rises on the big venues

In February 2020, he fell nearly two meters into the pit at the WiZink Center in Madrid during a joint performance with Joan Manuel Serrat. The impact fractured his left shoulder and forced the tour to be suspended. During his recovery, he decided to part ways with Pancho Varona after forty years of working together, a departure settled with a brief email that shocked his longtime band.

So he turned to Leiva to put together a new band with a leaner, more austere sound.

In 2023 he completed the Against All Odds tour, with 700,000 tickets sold across sixty international concerts. For 2025, he set his final retirement from major stages with the Hello and Goodbye tour.

For that final run of concerts, the promoter booked 30 dates in Spanish arenas with an average attendance of 14,000 seats per night and a medical cancellation policy tied to the sound check.