Ghosts of Spain (26 page)

Flamenco has dozens of styles or types of song, known as
palos
. They have all been carefully categorised and placed on a ‘family tree’. These are sometimes reproduced in flamenco books as just
that, though no two trees seem to fully coincide. The tree’s roots are buried somewhere in the eighteenth century or earlier. The
palo
families appear along its branches. Here are the
rumbas
,
tanguillos
and
alegrías
, the songs of partying and dancing, or the complex
siguiriyas
and
soleas
. There is even a branch known as the ‘
palos de ida y vuelta’,
the ‘round-trip
palos
’, brought back from the Americas by musicians who travelled west to the
long-disappeared
Spanish empire. These last ones bear the names of Latin American musical styles such as
milongas, tangos,
and
guajiras
– though they often bear little relationship to the Cuban,
Argentine
or Mexican music of the same names.

The origins of flamenco are lost in history. That does not stop the cognoscenti, a passionate, opinionated and nit-picking bunch, from spending much time disagreeing on them. The Romans were said to be fascinated by the dancing girls of Cádiz, though they predate flamenco and Spanish gypsies – by centuries. Records show gypsy dancers from Triana being hired for parties in the 1740s, though they were also generally deemed to be pre-flamenco. Early nineteenth-century travellers would watch
fandangos
being danced. My preferred version of the story is of a series of musical forms brought by the gypsies in their exodus from India and their slow crossing, over several centuries, of the Middle East and Europe. They crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in the fifteenth
century
. They were noted musicians whose services could be bought for weddings and celebrations. Spanish culture was itself a melting pot at the time, with Arab and Jewish music adding to a stock of
romances
, traditional poetry, occasionally set to music. Flamenco, it seems, emerged from this stew over the centuries – appearing in a recognisable form in the early nineteenth century. The rhythms inherited from all sides, be they the metre of medieval poetry or the beat of Indian music, created what is, at times, an
extraordinarily
difficult structure. It is not, and never has been, a purely gypsy music. Some of the best exponents have no gypsy blood at all in them. Gypsies, however, have always been at its centre.

Difficult, or not, the best-known
palos
came naturally to the crowd of
gitano
prisoners I found gathered for a flamenco
workshop after the gates had clanked shut behind me in Seville’s jail.

Spanish jails are remarkably modern, well equipped and
tolerant
places. Some boast glass-backed squash courts, swimming pools and theatres. Most of the British prisoners in them do not apply to serve their time back home in Britain’s run-down, aggressive, Victorian-built prisons. ‘I’ve seen the inside of Brixton, the Scrubs and a couple of others,’ a prison-hardened East End drug trafficker in Salamanca’s Topas jail told me once. ‘This is a million times better. I miss my mum, but I’m not going back.’

‘A country’s health can be measured by how it looks after its weakest members,’ a Spanish prison governor explained to me. If that is so, Spain is in fine fettle. Amongst other things, prisoners get private conjugal visits from their wives or girlfriends in rooms equipped with double beds. This jail, and others, are mixed, though the different sexes live in separate wings. Some couples even meet and get married in Spanish prisons.

I had come to Seville’s jail to meet competitors in what must be one of the most specialised, but also one of the most passionate, musical competitions of all times – ‘
El Concurso de Cante Flamenco
del Sistema Penitenciario
’, ‘The Flamenco Song Contest of the Penitentiary System’. It is against prison etiquette to ask why
people
are inside the
talego
, as Spanish jail argot calls a prison. So I had no idea why Rafael, a fifty-three-year old with flowing grey locks, shiny leather shoes, a choker of wooden beads and a massive gold ring on one finger was here. He was, respectfully, referred to as ‘
tío
’, ‘uncle’ by the younger Silva and twenty other men, almost exclusively gypsy, in the prison’s flamenco workshop. Murderers? Thieves? Drug dealers? Petty crooks? It did not matter. Prison is a leveller. Everybody here was sharing the same fate.

Silva was a Tres Mil boy, and the most thoughtful and serious singer. He was the jail’s chosen representative for the sing-off at Granada prison a few weeks later. He belonged to the same clan, or extended family group, in the barrio as my musician friend Rafael. ‘When I am singing I stop feeling the pain. Only song, and tears, can get rid of it,’ he explained.

Pain and joy,
pena
and
alegría
, are the two emotional motors of flamenco, but here, they explained, only one was available to them.

Flamenco had been with them since the day they were born. It had been there at parties, baptisms, weddings and, often, in their parents’ voices around the house for as long as they could
remember
. ‘Sometimes I sit in a corner of the exercise yard and start singing. When I look up there are half a dozen gypsies there with me,
tocando palmas
,’ one explained.

They were pleased with their workshop. Many had only known the three or four
palos
that were sung at home. Here, in a jail that houses gypsies from across Andalucía, they had extended their range. Most of all, however, this was an opportunity to unburden themselves through song and dance.

Rafael had brought with him the songs of Algeciras and La Línea, the area of Cádiz around Gibraltar. ‘When I listen to Uncle Rafael, it breaks my heart,’ said Silva. Uncle Rafael was, indeed, extraordinary. His voice was all mud and gravel, so deep, thick, rough and heartfelt that Alfonso declared the style to be
rancio
– literally rancid, but somehow appropriate for a voice as thick as churned butter.

They took turns to sing, twenty of them standing on the prison’s rudimentary theatre stage, beating out rhythms on their hands. Suddenly, there was something very feminine about this bunch of crooks. ‘Your voice sounds like peaches in nectar,’
shouted
one in a fit of enthusiasm for a fellow inmate’s singing. ‘
¡
Hermoso
mi primo
! Beautiful, my cousin!,’ shouted another. Occasionally one stepped forward, arms elegantly raised, wrists cocked, delicately pacing out the first few steps of a dance before launching into a joyful, if somewhat out of control, moment of heel-drumming, hopping and spinning. A handful of the
glassier-eyed
prisoners looked as though they had no trouble finding drugs in jail, but there was no alcohol here to drive the
juerga
. It was not needed. The music itself was enough to carry them off.

There was no sheet music. ‘No one would be able to read it,’ explained Alfonso, a professional flamenco singer and volunteer
worker at the jail. Some had nevertheless mastered, without studying, the complex structures of
soleás
and
siguiriyas
.

A few weeks after visiting Seville jail, I found myself in the visitors’ bar at Granada jail – a shiny, modern building sticking up, incongruously, out of fields of olive trees twenty miles from the city. I was here waiting to see the prison flamenco song final. A British photographer had asked to come along. ‘Wherever I go they have a bar,’ he said. And he was right. That morning we had had breakfast – freshly squeezed orange juice and thick, toasted rolls drowned in a garlic-flavoured olive oil and tomato pulp – at the bar in the Renault dealership in Seville. There are said to be more than 138,000 bars in Spain. This is as many as the rest of western Europe put together. The prison was doing its bit to keep the numbers up. The visitors downing
café
con leche
and
pastries
, while waiting their turn to see inmates, were mostly gypsy families.

‘My husband is going to sing,’ one hefty matron – black dress, large bosom and a single gold tooth punctuating her smile – informed me. ‘Why can’t I watch?’

They had brought the competitors in from a dozen jails – from as far away as Valencia and Extremadura, as well as from each of the eight Andalusian provinces. The presidents of all the
Andalusian
provincial associations of flamenco
peñas
– the flamenco clubs which were funding the prizes – were here to act as judges. These were mainly round-bellied, self-important men in jackets and ties. They were also sticklers for the proper observance of flamenco tradition or, at least, for their version of it. There was no gypsy amongst them, as far as I could tell. Nor were there any women. Ten out of the twelve finalists, however, were gypsies.

I found Silva backstage, looking serious and feeling out of his depth. ‘I caught a cold in the police wagon on the way here,’ he complained, pointing to a throat that, he said, was now too sore to win prizes.

The performers had rustled up their best clothing. There were, amongst the jeans and T-shirts of regular prison wear, a smattering of shiny, Cuban-heeled ankle boots, spotted cravats,
waistcoats, black shirts and clanking medallions. In one case, a cream suit had even appeared. Despite the banter and desperate dragging on the flamenco voice’s greatest enemy – the Winston cigarette – most looked tense. It was hardly surprising. This was a serious event. Many had no real experience of singing in public.

‘This is not charity. We will judge them the way we would any other competition,’ the jury’s chairman told me. ‘We are looking for someone who might become one of the great voices. There are no concessions just because they are prisoners.’ He knew, however, that Spanish prisons were a secret repository of
flamenco
talent. Gypsies who would never enter a competition outside the prison walls would, in this unique competition, suddenly find their voices exposed to, and appreciated by, more than just friends or family. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, a secret jewel could turn up.

The nervousness of the competitors, then, was hardly
surprising
. When this competition was first launched, the prize included not just a small amount of money but a recording contract, a
concert
tour and, it turned out, early exit from jail. This time only the money and contract were on offer.

The singer in the cream suit was a wiry, angular man. He could have stepped out of an El Greco painting. His hooked nose, beard and attitude of artistic superiority also gave him the air of a tenth-century Moorish Caliph.

‘I am a nightingale, kept behind bars,’ he said, in a
conspiratorial
tone. ‘This is a competition to the death. There are people here, inside prison, who sing much better than those outside.’ The Caliph later raised some of the loudest applause of the day from the audience of fellow inmates by singing: ‘They put me in jail just because I tried to defend myself.’

Flamenco, one contestant explained, was pain and
quejío
, a flamenco word to describe the outpouring of that same pain. ‘When you sing in jail, blood comes out of your mouth,’ he said.

Most of the contestants had similar stories. Their music came from their families. Drugs or violent feuds between gypsy clans had brought them to jail. The prison walls pushed them deeper
into themselves and deeper into their song. I was struck by the similarities to that other jailhouse music par excellence, the blues. Men with recording machines made the pilgrimage to the state penitentiaries of Mississippi as long ago as the 1930s in order to capture the music being made there. It is not surprising that, at the hands of that Tres Mil Viviendas family, the Amadors, blues and flamenco had finally met. ‘They are both about suffering and sentiment. Our peoples, gypsies and
negros
, have suffered a lot, or our ancestors have. We both, also, manage to wring a lot out of just a few notes,’ Raimundo Amador explained to me once. ‘Gypsies and
negros
both like gold, and giving away money to children, because we both believe in luck.’

A jolly, round-bellied priest introduced the singers one by one, throwing the audience prison jokes and reading out the little
biographical
notes the prisoners had given him. ‘Manuel loves women and bulls,’ he declared, bringing cackling and catcalling from the ranks of the women prisoners in this mixed-sex jail. A burly female guard dived in amongst the rows of red plastic
bucket
seats and ordered the loudest offenders out of the theatre.

For years I had had a love–hate relationship with flamenco, turned on by its recorded, studio-mixed output and especially by its more popular, but impure, versions. Camarón de la Isla,
especially
, had captured me with his pure
cante jondo
, the so-called ‘deep song’, and the records he made with guitarist Paco de Lucía. I had, however, almost always been disappointed by public performances. Only rarely did I find anyone who seemed to have been gripped by
duende
. Early trips to watch imitators of the great Camarón had a purely soporific effect on me. Yet I knew that, at its most passionate and profound, flamenco was meant to
provoke
extraordinary emotions. For some fans it is virtually a
religion
. There are tales of people ripping their shirts to shreds in excitement or being moved to tears. Camarón de la Isla even gained the nickname of
acabareuniones
after apparently
provoking
some visiting Galicians – hardly the most ‘flamencos’ of Spaniards – to start tearing up their own shirts. Good flamenco, I was constantly told, would make the hairs on my arm stand on
end. And that, I discovered, was finally happening to me in Granada jail’s concert hall. It started with el Chanquete, a big, bearded
payo
from Marbella with a gentle, sweet voice. ‘I have a past in drugs that I now regret. Really, they ought to be letting me go home,’ he told me.