It was not drugs or depression that caused the death of Carles Sabater on February 13, 1999, at the end of the first concert of the XII tour, which should have served to recover Sau’s pulse. What ended the life of this former swimmer with blue eyes and curly hair was the desire to please everyone, the desire to maintain a career with two sides, musical and theatrical, both equally demanding, and satisfy fans and friends, colleagues and family. He pushed his body to the limit until he said enough at dawn while he was being taken by ambulance to the hospital from the Casal de Vilafranca dressing room with Pep Sala, his traveling companion, holding his hand.
A quarter of a century after that fateful date Pep Blay, a music journalist fought in multiple battles, friend of many of Sabater’s friends as well as the singer himself, has covered the life of one of the best-known faces who became known to late nineties within the explosion of rock in Catalan. He does it in Cor trencat (Folch
“For many people Carles was the singer of Boig per tú, the handsome one who sings, but that was a smokescreen,” says Pep Blay at the Ona bookstore during the presentation of the book. Behind this image was hidden a “sensitive, multifaceted, not a rocker” artist, someone who liked to listen to Jacques Brel or Serrat, whose rocker tastes were Prince or Stevie Wonder, which did not prevent him from succeeding with rock and music. balads. “He came from the theater, he liked beauty, design, spectacle.” Blay, author of the biographies of Sopa de Cabra, Els Pets and Albert Pla, defines Sabater as the first frontman of Catalan rock. “Lluís Gavaldà or Gerard Quintana won over the public through complicity,” while the Sau singer behaved like a rock star, worrying about the aesthetics, the lights or the costumes, both his own and that of the rest of the band. . “He moved around the stage as if it were his home,” a reflection of an acting experience that he developed in parallel with the musical one, and that began under the orders of Josep Maria Flotats in the performances of A particular day and Cyrano de Bergerac before giving life to the project that would become Sau.
Together with Pep Sala, Sabater created one of the leading bands of Catalan rock, the first to sign a contract with a multinational, author of hits such as El tren de mitjanit, No he nascut per militar or És useless continue, which they released in legendary concerts such as the one at the Palau Sant Jordi on June 14, 1991 with Sangtraït, Els Pets and Sopa de Cabra, or the one at the Monumental bullring, where they brought together 10,000 people on July 9, 1992. At the same time, Sabater developed an acting career that had its zenith in the performances of Pirates, by the Dagoll Dagom company, after earning hits such as Company, directed by Calixto Bieito, or Tots dos alongside Àngels Gonyalons, in addition to participating in films and television series like Sitges, broadcast on TV3.
Although he initially gave up participating in the musical Mar i cel to focus on his musical career, Carles finally decided to go all out in both fields. “He was a person who needed to be liked in an almost addictive way. He wanted to fulfill others, not to look bad to anyone, whether it was because of self-esteem or because of how he understood the world. This obsession allowed him to be liked by many people, but it turned him into a slave. The Sabater described in the book did not know how to say no to the theater, to television roles or to what Pep Sala proposed to him for Sau, just as he was incapable of leaving his partner, Laura, although he maintained relationships with other women and dedicated time to his many fans, “you won’t find a single fan he didn’t pay attention to.”
In his way of living there was no room for economic calculations, which led him to live without a penny in his pocket permanently, “he had come to life to sing, dance and fall in love”, he spent everything he earned, also when they worked for the band, prioritizing quality over profitability, which led him to go into debt like his colleagues. “In the first era of Sau they had to ask for credits to record the albums, the famous subsidies from the Generalitat only allowed them to go to a studio next to their house for five days, and they wanted to record in London.” A way of life that turned Sabater into a kind of “bohemian life nomad”, from stage to stage, from party to party.
Caught between two lives that were difficult to combine, Sabater considered on more than one occasion the possibility of leaving Sau, something that seemed decided when he began his last tour with the aim of searching for new, more mature sounds, like the project he started with Eduard Iniesta. These disagreements were part of the relationship with Pep Sala, which cooled as the years went by. “Carles was the singer, many people went to concerts just to see him. That must have been difficult for Pep, he was the soul of Sau, he was in charge of the musical direction, the rehearsals, the composition of songs, and he also had at his side a person who wanted to be the rock star, who sings, performs and ends up be the face of their songs.”
The accumulation of commitments and the physical overexertion that it entailed was a constant that, together with unhealthy habits such as smoking or the consumption of stimulants, slowly ate away at his health until it was too late. “In recent years he was distressed by the amount of work he had,” which caused arrhythmias that no one was able to detect even though he fainted more than once at the end of the concerts. “At 36 years old you don’t check if you have a bad heart or do an electrocardiogram, but if I had explained the whole picture to a doctor I would have undoubtedly told him that he should leave the stage.” Stopping suddenly and changing his life is the only way out that, in Blay’s opinion, Sabater had left to avoid dying before his time, following in the wake of his admired James Dean. “He could have died of old age, but he didn’t like the idea of ??seeing an old rock star, he wanted to be handsome.”