He should have been in Madrid. The city that welcomed Joaquin Sabina As a young man he traveled “on dirty trains heading north” and slept “with girls who were sleeping with men for the first time.” In Madrid, where he was shipwrecked several nights on Melancholia Street, where he fathered his daughters and where he now resides with his wife. Madrid had to be his final place, no matter how much he resisted the dream of saying goodbye by walking.
he Movistar Arena – formerly the WiZink Center, and always the Palacio de los Deportes – in recent years an alternative to his beloved Plaza de las Ventas, where many nights have come On the shoulders. It’s the same thing: they want it here as much as they want it there. In 2020, he suffered a stunning fall, falling more than two meters into the hole, during a show with… Joan Manuel Serrat. In the preamble to the epidemic. The day he turned 71 years old.
In 2018, at the same location, Sabina left after just over ninety minutes of the concert because she had lost her voice. In 2014, it was a bout of stage fright that forced him to leave Wizink’s stages half an hour before the end. “Pastora Soler gave it to me.”he joked to get the issue out of the way.
But since his return, more than two years ago, the Madrid stadium is no longer a cursed place for the man from Obita. Last night, he bid farewell to his faithful flock, who were ecstatic, cried emotionally, and screamed at some of them. The best songs in our language.
There are those who assert that his farewell should have happened much earlier. Maybe, but what does it matter? How noble there is in a gesture of retirement when one has nothing left… Sabina, who for years had joked about the idea of growing old without dignity, walks out the front door, to great acclaim. He may be riddled with diseases, but with decency like his impeccable flag and suit.
Barely ten minutes had passed after the announced time, and the stadium was in a cauldron. Bowler hat in hand, bullfighting salute, blue jacket with crimson trim, matching shoes: Joaquin Sabina’s last night on stage. How do I explain here what that means to some… To start, I stayed in Atocha. If not, when will waiver day be?
Hello, goodbyethe long tour that took her through Latin America and Spain, ended in Madrid, and Sabina wanted to make it clear from the beginning that this time it was the final tour. “Tonight is just called goodbye.”He confirmed to the resigned audience. Of course, “Goodbye is very grateful” for the public reception of his songs throughout his half-century career. “They have grown and traveled, and in some mysterious way have infiltrated the emotional memory of several generations. Thank you.”
One of them, no doubt, Marble tears (located on disk Deny everything). At least for the little ones. It is worth claiming now: no one but Sabina is composing hymns at the age of seventy. Nobody…except Sabina.
This song is. A late hymn, if you will, a sad one, because it was written at the last stage of a life well lived – “The death of a friend hurts me more than the one that haunts me” – but a hymn, after all, that echoed angrily in a stadium of more than 15,000 souls: “Survivor, yeah, damn it!”. By the way, Leyva and Benjamin Prado played their part.
“It is the last and most important concert of my life, and the one that I will remember with the greatest emotion,” Sabina said. That’s why songs like Deny everything, now and White liesWhich the band excelled at. The chorus is cannon and the guitarists know it Jaime Asiapure, eternal rock Antonio Garcia de Diego and Borja MontenegroGuitarist Laura Gomez Palma, Josemé Sagasti -Clarinet, saxophone, accordion…- and Pedro Barceloevery taste of drumsticks.
There was also the half-time space, an identity marker in the repertoire of the Úbeda player, who dusted off an ancient jewel box to rescue the formidable player. Sadness StreetThe second song!? Which he wrote in his life, and it was the first time that the author dedicated the chorus to the respected person, who was happy to move to the neighborhood of joy and continue whistling the beautiful melody of this beautiful song.