Photos: Francisco Parrilla
A 1988 ticket recalls Joaquín Sabina's concert at the Ciudad Deportiva de Lanzarote. Years later, the singer would reveal that one of his most popular songs was written on the island with Pancho Varona. The story of “Y nos dieron las diez” takes in tours, waitresses, a bar in Arrecife and a handful of lines that would also end up in the hands of Enrique Urquijo.
On Tuesday 11 October 1988, at half past nine in the evening, Joaquín Sabina had a date at the Ciudad Deportiva de Lanzarote. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the Cabildo, and among the traces left by that performance is a ticket that has survived the passage of time: a photograph of a 39-year-old Sabina, still a long way from the bowler-hatted, bearded figure of his later decades, printed alongside the venue, the date and the time. It would be almost four years before he released Física y química, and before a song about a musician, a waitress and a night after a concert became one of the biggest hits of his career.
That performance is especially intriguing because Lanzarote holds a confirmed place in the story of Y nos dieron las diez. For years, various places across Spain tried to recognise themselves in the unnamed “pueblo con mar”, the town by the sea where Sabina set the action. Gijón was one of the most frequently cited candidates, and it was there, in an interview published by El Comercio in 2015, that the singer answered those who took the song's Asturian origin for granted. “The good thing about songs is that, in this case, it works for every place that has a sea; that's what you write them for. But it was Lanzarote!” he said at the time, remarks that were picked up by the island's media.
The connection, however, is somewhat more complex than the tempting story in which Sabina finished the 1988 concert, found a Lanzarote bar still open and lived exactly what he would tell in a song four years later. The musician himself offered a much more precise explanation in 2014, when he went over the story of Y nos dieron las diez for El País. Sabina explained that the waitress in the song did not come from a single episode. On those tours, after the concerts, he and his musicians would go out for a drink, and on several occasions they found bars closed that some waitress ended up opening for them. “It wasn't once, it was several times,” he recalled. The real experience was gradually transformed into a fictional story, but he pointed without ambiguity to the place where he finally managed to give it shape: “Actually, it was written in Lanzarote.”
At the time, Sabina travelled to the islands with Pancho Varona in search of something that was becoming hard to find for an increasingly well-known musician: peace and quiet. “Sometimes Panchito and I would go off to an island where few people knew us, or where it was quiet enough to write,” he explained in that same conversation with El País. Y nos dieron las diez, which had been refusing to come together for some time, finally came out “in one go” during one of those Lanzarote nights. The revelation resurfaced publicly in 2023, when Sabina launched the Spanish leg of his Contra todo pronóstico tour in Las Palmas. RTVE reported at the time that the singer had told the audience the song had not been written in Mexico, as some assumed from its unmistakable ranchera structure, but in Lanzarote.
Pancho Varona's recollection brings the picture into even sharper focus. According to his account, gathered by Julio Valdeón in the biography Sabina. Sol y sombra and later revisited by Cadena SER, the story of the two songs that would eventually grow out of those lines began in a bar in Arrecife. Sabina and Varona had travelled to Lanzarote to concentrate on writing the next album when, sitting in that bar, Sabina asked for a pen and began writing on a couple of napkins. The lyrics were still unfinished, but the opening of a story that would end up belonging to two different songwriters was already there.
Sabina during his visit to Lanzarote in 1988
From napkins in Arrecife to Enrique Urquijo
The genealogy of Y nos dieron las diez contains one of the best-known forks in Spanish popular music. Back in Madrid, those first lines reached Enrique Urquijo. Sabina recounted in the aforementioned interview with El País that the Los Secretos frontman had come to his house and asked whether he had any lyrics going spare. He handed over the one he was writing, still without a chorus or an ending. Urquijo carried on the story in his own way, and Sabina later did the same. There was no dispute over the coincidence. “He went on telling a beautiful story that wasn't mine; and I carried on with it too,” Sabina would recall many years later.
From that common trunk came Ojos de gata and Y nos dieron las diez. The first appeared on Adiós tristeza, the album Los Secretos released in 1991; the second opened Física y química in 1992. Both start from the same encounter between a musician who has just played a show and a woman behind a bar, but they soon go their separate ways. Diego A. Manrique would explain years later in El País, writing about Enrique Urquijo, that few songs better captured the different personalities of the two songwriters: Sabina steered his story towards romantic conquest and then towards an almost cinematic return to the scene; Urquijo led the same character towards insecurity, melancholy and defeat.
The coincidence drew attention from the moment the songs came out. In May 1992, with Física y química just released, Sabina complained in an interview with El País that some radio stations would not play his new single while they did play Ojos de gata, which he himself described as “practically the same song”. The newspaper had to explain the shared origin of the two to its readers: Sabina had written the opening lines and each of the two musicians had then continued the story in his own way.
The commercial outcome was not what Sabina expected either. He has admitted that at first he had little faith in the song, and nor did some of his musicians or Joan Manuel Serrat. Yet Y nos dieron las diez became the biggest hit he had had up to that point, sent sales of Física y química soaring and made a particularly strong impact in Latin America. Sabina, who had built the song in the tradition of José Alfredo Jiménez's rancheras, would end up hearing it performed by mariachis who even disputed its authorship and credited it to Mexican composers, as the musician himself recalled when reconstructing the song's history. For someone who hoped his songs would become part of the popular repertoire, that was probably the best victory possible.
The night history cannot confirm
That leaves the ticket from 11 October 1988, and a question for which there is no documentary answer. We know that Sabina performed in Lanzarote that night, and we know, because he and Pancho Varona have said so, that the island was one of the places they went to write and that Y nos dieron las diez was eventually born here. We also know that Varona places the moment Sabina began writing those lines on some napkins in a bar in Arrecife. What we do not know is whether the two episodes belong to the same trip, much less whether the concert announced on that old ticket was the one that preceded the night that ended up turned into a song.
Trying to make them coincide would mean turning a good story into a legend and presenting it as fact. Not even Sabina claims that Y nos dieron las diez reproduces a single real night. Quite the opposite: when he had the chance to explain its origin, he spoke of experiences accumulated over years on the road and of a fiction built from them. Even the sources that have tried to track down the mysterious waitress or identify the specific town have run into the contradictions inherent in a song written precisely so that anyone could imagine their own place by the sea. RTVE, for example, reconstructed the song's origin to mark the 30th anniversary of Física y química and included another version that places part of the inspiration in the Madrid nights of Malasaña, while keeping the sentimental connection with Lanzarote.
None of this takes anything away from the island; on the contrary, it allows its role to be placed where the sources are most solid. Lanzarote is part of the story of how one of Sabina's essential songs was written. It was here that he and Varona found the seclusion needed to finish it and, according to Varona's recollection, it was in a bar in Arrecife that some lines appeared on a few napkins, lines that later travelled to Madrid and fell into the hands of Enrique Urquijo. From that writing came Ojos de gata and Y nos dieron las diez, two different songs born from the same story and turned, just months apart, into classics of the Los Secretos and Joaquín Sabina repertoires.
Thirty-eight years later, the old ticket from the Ciudad Deportiva cannot solve the mystery, but it does take the story back to a very specific moment. In October 1988, Sabina had not yet written Y nos dieron las diez, Física y química did not exist and Enrique Urquijo had not yet turned those shared lines into Ojos de gata. Joaquín Sabina was simply a musician arriving in Lanzarote to give a concert. At some point in those years he would return to the island with Pancho Varona, sit down in a bar in Arrecife, ask for a pen and keep writing. What came out of those nights would go on to be heard for decades, far beyond the place where it had been written.