Juan Antonio Muriel has been able to offer concerts for six years, an eternity for a musician who has not stopped acting since the mid -1970s. His last recital was in December 2018 in Freedom 8, singerutory temple in Madrid. Since then, nothing. It is prevented from esophagitis, which forces you to talk to this newspaper, in telephone conversation, in a short tone. Despite the setback, the sense of humor of the Malaga grimaces regularly: “I am going to send to Joaquín some vitamin pills, so that he will end up and continue singing Princesa, that it is good for me economically. ”The Joaquín to which he refers is Sabina, and the matter of the monies has to do with that every time Jienense interprets that Spanish pop classic, Muriel invoices by copyright.
Sabina (Úbeda, Jaén, 76 years) is the author of the letter and Muriel (Málaga, 75 years) is the composer of the music of Princesa, Sabinero repertoire banner, the song that has touched the most times in concert and with which he closes the concerts, in a rocker version, of his current tour, which has promised that it will be his withdrawal of the great stages. Hello and goodbye, That’s the name of the tour, it arrives on May 11 to Malaga, on Madrid 19 and on the 22nd of the same month he jumps to London, nothing less than Royal Albert Hall. Except surprises, in all of them will close with Princesa.
The story of this song began years before Sabina included her on her fifth album, Judge and part (1985), of which 40 years of publication are completed. But the first to record it was Juan Antonio Muriel, in 1982. “I met Joaquin in Song Parnass, a garito in the best sense of the term. He was in Lavapiés (Madrid). You got off a staircase and gave a basement. There was a round platform, I was lighting a white focus and there was no microphone. We acted there and there I met Joaquin,” says Muriel. The Malagueño was part of a batch of singer-songwriters (late seventies and early folk-pop fur to which Sabina climbed. Muriel’s first album, Andalusian power, With the imprint of his land, dates from 1977, a year before Sabina’s debut, Inventory (1978). One night in 1980, Sabina debuted at Song Parnass. Muriel, who acted in that place for a long time, asked Daniel, the owner: “Who is that?” “A new one,” he replied. “When the performance ended, Joaquín came to congratulate me for my music,” says the Malaga, who has five recorded albums, has composed 140 songs and has always lived from music, especially of the performances.
From that moment on they saw a lot through the bars of the capital, where the two resided. Friendship was narrow. In 1981 Muriel offered to inaugurate a place in Malaga and invited Sabina to accompany him. On the way back, in the Madrid house of the Jienense, the adventure of Princesa. “He told me: ‘Juan, we should compose something together.’ “I immediately saw that it was a cannon, that people stayed with her.” When the multinational Columbia offered to record an album in 1982, Muriel decided to start it with Princesa. “By the way, at first Joaquín titled her Doll, But I suggested that it was better Princesa”, Muriel points out.
Many more surprises were waiting for this classic. For example: that he was presented to the Benidorm Festival, in 1982; Yes, that since 2022 is called Benidorm Fest and serves to designate the representative of Spain in Eurovision. Muriel: “When the company told me I took a good rebound. I didn’t want to go. Princesa I didn’t need any festival, it worked without that springboard. But they told me that I had to do it by contract. ” I think of you, of the Chilean Fernando Ubiergo, who reached the golden mermaid. Curious how such a truculent story, with a Yonqui protagonist who is “wrapped in a death with assault on pharmacy”, was able to achieve such a high classification at such a well -well -well -known festival. Muriel took 250,000 pesetas, 1982, and gave half to Joaquín. “Legally I didn’t have to do it, but I think half was for him,” says the Malaga. Sabina did not want to answer the questions of El País.
After three years, Sabina decided to record Princesa, But changing four parts of his own letter. The chorus of which Sabina registered, the one that most knows, says: “Now it is too late, princess. / Look for another dog that bricks you, princess.” And the one that Muriel recorded, the original that Sabina wrote, says: “You arrive too late, princess. / And there is no more firewood than the one burning, princess.” Another change. In this stanza: “Damn is the guru that raised between you and me a dark silence. / Of which you just leave to tell me: ‘Ok, leave me twenty hard.” The first, and the one that is heard on Muriel’s album, says: “Damn is the guru that raised between you and me a dark silence. / Of which you just leave, lady of my ills, if you are in a hurry.” And the third: “How many times would I have given your whole life, because you asked me to take your luggage,” in Muriel’s version it is “how many times I would have stopped waiting for you to ask me to take your luggage.” And the fourth: the 85 says “how you were not going to see yourself wrapped in a death with assault on pharmacy” and that of 82 “how you were going to miss the adventure of a death with assault on pharmacy”
Maybe Sabina will not trust at the beginning on the impact of Princesa, because he buried her in Judge and part In position nine, 10 songs contained in the album.
Muriel and Sabina were losing contact over the years. The Malaga says that Sabina gave him another lyrics, in the Madrid place Elígeme, so that Musicara, but Muriel did not seduce him. “I talked about some flowers, a pot and a balcony. Something like that, I don’t remember well. I was putting a little hand, but in the end I told him that it didn’t work and returned it. I think it was from there when our relationship cooled.” The last time they were seen was in 2007, at the Madrid Book Fair. “An Argentine journalist told me to greet him to a booth where he signed books. It was a cordial and brief encounter.”
About the importance of Princesa In the Song of Sabina, Julio Valdeón, author of the book Sabina. Sun and shadow (Ed. EFE EME), Biography of the singer, tells this newspaper: “With Princesaand with the rest of the songs of Judge and part, Sabina size your first masterpiece from beginning to end. A song and an album that pusches a lyricism without concessions. With rounding melodies, which drink both Bob Dylan and Jean-Patrick Capdevielle, we are facing a geography of defeat. A sentimental, pious and raw Bestary, which collects both the chiaroscuros learned in the texts of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler and the spark of a Jules Dassin or a John Huston. ”And, in passing, the singer photographs the sordid side of a time. Princesa y Zero citizen It demonstrates its skills as a portraitist. An author capable of building characters with three wise details. Princesa Not only portrays a specific girl, but the rare miracle operates that her adventures is as personal as it is interchangeable, reflecting the falls of a generation razed at night and her catalog of poisons. It is a song of love and heartbreak, a gloomy ode, an epitaph and, in addition, a portrait without sweetening of that Spain of the eighties, ”assumes Valdeón.
But, a moment, then princesa Is it a real person? It was the book of Valdeón (published in 2017) the first who revealed his identity. Arianne Sved, born in 1963, and who was part of the Circle of Friends of Sabina Musicians. Pancho Varona, who recorded Princesa in Judge and part And he was 40 years with Sabina until he fired him in 2022, he gave more clues in his Youtube videos series What nobody knows about the songs we all know: “She is a friend who, despite what the letter says has an excellent state of health and whenever she comes to the concerts, she says: ‘Joe, I don’t know why Joaquín exaggerated so much. If I am perfectly, it was not so much.”
Princesa It is also the favorite composition of Sabina, who just granted the Medal of Honor of the SGAE, to share on stage with friends: he has played it with Leiva, Alejandro Sanz, Andrés Calamaro or Dani Martín. The Rodríguez made a very very Dead Flowers (Rolling Stones classic) on the album Tribute to Sabina.
The co -author of Princesa, Juan Antonio Muriel, wants to record a new album, the last. “I have the songs, but this esophagitis prevents me from getting into him …” And he confesses: “I am withdrawn, because of the age and life that we have passed, that nobody takes it away. So much Joaquín and I have lived very well, we have had a great time … and now that we have taken off from whiskey and everything, we are spending worse. The last doctor said: ‘Look, I am taking away everything and I am having a worse. And laughs.
Return to London, where everything started
Joaquín Sabina has been faced since January 2025 which has announced as “her farewell tour.” This Hello and goodbye It ends on November 30 at Movistar Arena from Madrid, a pavilion where it will play during the year up to eight times, the first one on May 19. On May 22 the tour for in London, at the Royal Albert Hall. The recital will be tremendously symbolic because it was in the English capital where the jienense began. In 1970 and with 21 years, Sabina landed in England. Because? For three reasons. First, because he was involved in the launch of a Molotov cocktail to a bank branch of Granada as a protest to the Burgos process against Etarras. As the author himself told, “they were looking for him” after that. Another reason: that in 10 days he had to leave for mili. And the third: that an English girlfriend, Leslie, who met in Granada when she did a thesis had thrown out. Franco still lived and it was not easy for someone in the police orbit to leave the country. The singer got it thanks to a PCE militant, who gave him his passport. Sabina requested political asylum, granted it and spent seven years (he returned in the summer of 1976). In London he made a living with sporadic works and playing in pubs, especially with Spanish left -hand clientele, who appreciated his versions of Víctor Jara or Paco Ibáñez. He almost always moved with other exiled Spaniards. He edited his first book of poems, Memory of exile, And the cold London was a good breeding ground for the songs that in 1978 would compose their first album, Inventory. The English capital also served to meet Argentina Lucía Correa, with whom he married in 1977 and separated in 1985.