The singer opens his soul to Fernando León in ‘Sintarlo mucho’, a documentary filmed over 13 years and presented at the San Sebastian Festival
‘Feeling it a lot’ begins with tobacco smoke and the silhouette of a bowler hat, that hat that made Joaquín Sabina a sign of identity and which, as he reveals in the documentary, pays a double tribute: to Charlot’s silent films and to the seven years spent in London. There he worked in a nursing home, did the dishes in restaurants and sang on Portobello Road.
Fernando León’s film does not reveal whether the famous anecdote is true that George Harrison tipped young Sabina five pounds when he sang “Que te va bonito” to the beat of the guitar in a Mexican. In any case, the bowler hat, which the singer admired on the heads of the English deputies, serves to distinguish the performer Sabina on stage from the citizen Sabina.
The director of ‘Mondays in the Sun’ knows the songs by heart of an idol who has opened the doors of his house in Madrid’s Plaza de Tirso de Molina and hotel rooms all over the world for 13 years. The result is two hours of Sabine Memory and Psychotherapy, which his fans will hastily buy when the DVD comes out.
The film was screened at the Velodrome this Saturday and still doesn’t have a theater release date. Sabina golfo appears, the one who, after the stroke he suffered in 2001, continues to drink and smoke as a charioteer, sharing dinners and verses in Rota with friends like Benjamín Prado, “a poet who wants to be a rock star”, burning the night in the Tenampa from Plaza Garibaldi, the cradle of the mariachi.
But also twilight comes Sabina, who at age 73 knows that drunkenness has numbered her days and that, just as her favorite Dylan albums are the first, she assumes that she will not compose the songs her followers sing. . the concerts. “I don’t think it will improve songs like ‘Contigo’, ‘Y sin embargo’ or ‘Yo me bajo en Atocha’. I don’t think so,” he confesses.
Sabina crápula is still there, pointing out that the dish with a white powder seen in his dressing room is not what we think, but salty so that the mouth does not dry out. “The sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll thing lasted until I was 50,” he swears. “Not bad, huh?” Without cocaine, he admits, he would not have been able to compose one of his most popular albums in 1999, ’19 days and 500 nights’. It was recorded in three-day sessions without sleeping. Twenty years ago, he gave up coke without going through rehab. “For me they were happy experiences. And when they stopped, I just stopped. What if I miss them? Yes, what if I fall again? No”.
Articulated on the basis of jumps in time, with the discreet presence of Fernando León asking very occasionally, ‘Sintilo mucho’ jumps from the singer’s tour with Serrat in 2020 to the time of Joaquín Sabina y Viceversa, with whose members he returns to touch. The author of ‘The good boss’ is fascinated by the moments before a concert, when the main character, despite his experience, becomes so nervous that he has to throw up. Especially if that night is the performance in Las Ventas. Sabina’s return to her native Úbeda is priceless, from where she fled, disgusted by the bleakness of life under Franco. Today a tourist tour pays tribute to his prodigal son, the son of a police inspector. Unlike his brother, Joaquín Sabina did not marry the mayor’s daughter. Over time, the singer has come to love his father, a “bell tower poet,” and in one touching scene, his voice crackles as he reads his amateur verses.
“I feel like I went from adolescence to old age without touching maturity,” says Sabina ironically in San Sebastián along with Fernando León and Leiva, who are signing the music for the film and with whom she will record her first song in three years. . An admirer of the director’s work – “I celebrated his last Goyas as if my brother had won them” – the author of ‘Who stole the month of April from me?’ He let the cameras capture his intimacy, despite confessing to killing the inventor of cellphones that take selfies. «I am much more humble than my caricature suggests. After seeing the documentary, my wife told me that Fernando had stolen my soul. And I thought, How rude, if I’m ashamed to show my ass.
His wife Jimena Coronado, his Jime, who has been by his side for twenty-five years, always appears in anticipation of the musician, who when he first married did so to sleep in the barracks while he was in the army. “I love domestic life, but I can’t think of anything to write,” laughs Sabina, who flees the ceremony like the plague. «The artist must take seriously what he paints, shoots, writes or sings, but he must never take himself seriously. The end of every artistic adventure is solemnity».
There are two moments in Sentilo mucho where tragedy creeps in. José Tomás’ fuck in Aguascalientes (Mexico) in 2010 with his friend on a leash and the fall at the Wizink Center a few years ago. On his 71st birthday, he was in the ICU for four days and had to undergo surgery for an intracranial hematoma. And there, as he was put in the ambulance, Fernando León’s camera was respectful and scared. “Fernandito, aren’t you going to start the documentary with the hell I gave myself?” asks the singer in a film that always has an eye for detail, such as when Serrat lets him out of the dressing room “don’t drink too much, huh ?».
Joaquín Sabina played the night José Tomás was torn between life and death. And that’s what happened when his father and mother died. That child who felt cramps in Úbeda that secretly stroked the bullfighter’s suit, the lover of the songs of José Alfredo Jiménez, the one who sang “May she give you what I could not give you, even though I have given you everything” , opens the soul between drinks, cigarettes and laughter: “One of the clouds that I almost never tell and that I carry in my soul is that, when I started playing in big places, my father had Alzheimer’s and my mother very sick was,” he discovered. “They died instantly. They didn’t enjoy the kid’s success, they would have loved it like crazy.
The voice that Joaquín Sabina shows in San Sebastián is even more hoarse than that in the documentary. The singer congratulated himself that Fernando León’s film has served him “to get out of the sorrow of this three-year pandemic”. When they went to a hotel, the filmmaker had a copy of their room key. “Even if he catches me pooping.” The end result reflects “the joy of being with loved ones.”
It is those moments of reunion and revelry when Sabina is more relaxed and happy. Or when he’s on top of a stage, because strangely enough, his fear disappears as soon as he steps on it. Singer Leiva is largely responsible for Sabina’s return to the studio after the fall in 2020, which resulted in a new collarbone and a timely collected thrombus. On the Zinemaldia, he announced that a record is coming for Christmas and that he will start a tour of America and Spain at the end of February.
Only the one from Úbeda is able to hold their breath and not leave the site until the 15,000 souls who saw him at the Wizink Center, until they heard news of his health condition. A journalist confessed to him in San Sebastian that she still had the tickets from that evening, because no one thought of asking for her money back. «Joaquín never tells you what you want to hear,» praises Fernando León. “There is not an ounce of deceit. And that’s a gift.”
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
