"It makes me feel posthumous"

Joaquín Sabina greets EL PAÍS in espadrilles inside his beautiful home in the heart of Madrid, surrounded by seven cats who ignore him, unsettling paintings on the walls and platinum records hanging in the bathroom.

The 62-year-old singer and songwriter, who has often been referred to as the Spanish Bob Dylan, is about to embark on an unfamiliar journey. October 5 marks the premiere of Más de 100 mentiras (or, More than 100 lies), a new musical based on his songs that will be performed on Gran Vía, Madrid's answer to Broadway.

The show will then travel to Mexico and Buenos Aires, and rumor has it that maybe New York as well. Two years from now, there are even plans for a movie.

Nine arrangers and seven choreographers worked on the musical for four years, at a total cost of 3 million euros. It's the sort of thing that only happens to very well-established artists.

Question. Does this upcoming event not make you feel a bit like a holy cow?

Answer. No. What I feel, though, is posthumous. This is the kind of thing they do to corpses. I hope to be an exquisite corpse. For 10 years, every year, José María Cámara [executive producer of the musical] would offer me the chance to put together the musical, and every year I politely declined. [...] But in time I saw that Gran Vía is creating a Broadway of sorts, and that movement made me change my mind.

Q. But do you ever go see musicals?

A. Never in my life. Not here nor in the West End, or Broadway, or anywhere. I may be posthumous but I'm a virgin.

Q. When you were a child in your home town of Úbeda, you did go see zarzuela [Spanish popular opera], which is a precedent of musical theater as we know it today.

A. That's true, and it's why what I really wanted to do was to write a zarzuela, not so much for others to take my songs, but I didn't dare.

Q. What led you to finally say 'I do'?

A. I could no longer find reasons to say no, and besides, I really like to slip into places where my presence is not expected, or where I was not invited.

Q. Besides, your songs are micro-stories, many of them with a theatrical structure of exposition, climax and dénouement.

A. That's because I come from the line of Quintero, León and Quiroga and that's what their own verses were like. I never thought that a few dozen songs of mine would provide enough juice for a musical.

Q. You still haven't seen a thing about this musical?

A. I've met with the scriptwriters, David Serrano, Fernando Castets and Diego San José, I know what it's about, I know there's a bar where the clients are a corrupt councilor, some good whores, some good thieves and a punch drunk boxer, and I liked it.

Besides, the project also includes my alter ego, Pancho Varona.

Q. Has it been a long time since you broke with the theater scene?

A. I started off doing independent theater and while in London I had a small traveling theater company, all very Brecht-like and educational, but then Spain was going through the Grotowski era, during which you had to drag yourself across the stage covered in ash, and I said, enough is enough!

Q. But what you did during the democratic transition at that legendary establishment called La mandrágora, with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez, was a kind of vaudeville, almost reminiscent of Berlin's cabarets in the 1920s.

A. Yes, we talked to the audience, but back then, in an era full of modern folks, we looked like dinosaurs on the brink of extinction with our Nazarene beards.

Q. Do you feel that you belong to a kind of caste that has disappeared?

A. Yes, but mine predates the Movida \[Madrid's countercultural movement\]: we're talking about the old, decadent, cheesy bohemia.