JOAQUIN SABINA
Joaquin Sabina plays with an Alhambra guitar with steel strings and narrow body, built especially for him by our luthier Javier Mengual in January 2025.
Joaquín Sabina is that singer and poet whose figure has transcended to the category of popular myth thanks to an artistic work that has universalised the irreverent and passionately beautiful vision of life from the frivolous nocturnality, the feverish love and the unmitigated lack of love. Verses and stanzas that err on the side of sincerity and scratch at utopias and freedoms, and which have made him an indispensable figure in contemporary music and street poetry in Spanish.
Master of the sung short story, incorrigible vividor, rocker at heart, singer-songwriter on duty, Joaquín Ramón Martínez Sabina was born in Úbeda (Jaén, Spain) in 1949; he was a voracious reader from his adolescence, when he wrote his first poems and participated in an incipient rock group. During his time at university he took part in the student movement against the regime, events that ended with his self-exile in London, where he wrote his first songs, until his return to Spain in 1977.
Settled in Madrid as an unredeemed urbanite, he alternated the release of his first solo albums with performances at La Mandragora (with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez) and the composition of songs for other artists. Since then, he has released seventeen studio albums, several of them essential chapters in the history of popular music in Spanish, such as Juez y parte (85), Física y química (92), 19 días y 500 noches (99) or Vinagre y rosas (09), and among which also stand out his works made jointly with Fito Páez and Joan Manuel Serrat. In addition to this capital discography, there are seven live albums and an audiobook of recited poems which, together with different compilations, have accumulated more than ten million physical records sold throughout his career and more than two billion audio streams.
Since the mid-eighties, having become a highly popular and popular artist, he has made countless tours that have taken him to almost every American country, including the most prestigious stages and festivals such as the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico, the Luna Park in Buenos Aires, or the Chilean Viña del Mar, among many others, and he has also performed in legendary European venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Olympia in Paris.
At the same time, Joaquín Sabina has developed a literary career which he inaugurated with the songbook Memoria del exilio (76), which he paid for out of his own pocket, followed a decade later by De lo cantado y sus márgenes, in a facet which concludes with the compilation of his songs Con buena letra (original from 2002 and expanded on two occasions). On a purely poetic level, it is worth mentioning the book of sonnets Ciento volando de catorce (01), published in the Visor de Poesía collection, which was a milestone in the publication of poetry in Spanish due to its wide readership, as well as the three collections of verse published in publications where he has collaborated: Interviú, Público and more recently Tinta Libre, which resulted in Esta boca es mía (05), El grito en el suelo (12) and En román paladino (18), respectively. His bibliography is completed with the collection of letters A vuelta de correo (07), which includes missives with personalities such as the insurgent Subcomandante Marcos and the poet José Hierro, and two miscellanies containing drawings and unfinished fragments of poems and songs: Muy personal (13) and Garagatos (16), a collector's book published by Artika in a limited edition. In addition, dozens of biographies of his life have been published, as well as numerous studies on his poetic and musical work.
At the end of 2017 he released his latest studio album Lo niego todo and in 2020 he offered his tour No hay dos sin tres, together with Serrat, which was cut short after Joaquín fell from the stage of the Wizink Center in Madrid. That same year the audiovisual series Pongamos que hablo de Joaquín Sabina was broadcast.
He is currently preparing his farewell album and tour and is releasing Sintiéndolo mucho, a documentary film shot over 13 years and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa in what is a ‘portrait without a bowler hat, made just a few centimetres from his skin, which tells without extenuation the intimacy of the artist, his backstage, when he steps off the stage’.
The recognition of his professional career has been backed by a multitude of awards and distinctions, including the Silver Medal of Andalusia, the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts, the Gold Medal of the City of Madrid, the Guest of Honour of the City of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the three Ondas awards and the Latin Grammy Award for Musical Excellence. He, however, with his unique humour, claims to prefer the many bars named after some of his songs in Spain and Latin America.
Cured by old age and by the devil, his two recognised passions are the Spanish language and the rich and varied ways of speaking it in Latin America.
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In Alhambra Guitarras we have collaborated over the last few years with other guitars for Joaquín Sabina.
In 2024 we also built a guitar especially for Joaquín with all the details to make it authentic like him. If you want to read more about this guitar, here is the link to the blog
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