Ghosts of Spain (28 page)

Separation, however, does not always work. The flamenco workshop group in Seville jail, for example, had recently seen its numbers reduced by one. A participant, serving time for a
stabbing
, had returned home on his first weekend out of jail. He had immediately been stabbed to death in a bar. Everybody was
convinced
it had been a revenge killing. ‘It should not have gone that far,’ commented Silva, shaking his head. ‘More violence is not a solution.’

I should admit here to a long-standing penchant for some of the stranger bastard offspring of flamenco. It is the sort of stuff
that sends serious-minded purists reaching for their guns. I learned to love groups such as Los Chichos, Las Grecas and Los Chunguitos when, on long journeys, I stocked up on cheap tapes and CDs at roadside bars.

These groups can only be described as the Status Quos of the flamenco world. The Chunguitos had the bad hairstyles, gold chains, medallions and 1970s dress sense of the worst of northern Soul. On older record covers they boast a passing resemblance to the Bay City Rollers. They took the simpler flamenco rhythms, especially
rumbas
, and turned them into electronic, urban pop. Their lyrics do not pass even the most basic mores of political correctness. ‘You were so beautiful that I felt a desire to kill you, because I realised you were no longer mine,’ they sing, or, quite simply: ‘Pass me the joint, I want to get stoned …’

The women in these songs are mothers, virgins, whores, junkies, whipping posts and, especially, traitors to their men. ‘
Papá
, don’t beat up
mamá
… because
mamá
is a good person.’ The men, in turn, are poor, violent, bitter, drugged and, often, in jail. ‘I would never have imagined/ that you might cheat on me/ my love was so blind/ that, for you, I killed,’ Los Chichos sing in ‘
Mujer Cruel
’, ‘Cruel Woman’.

Liking these groups is roughly equivalent to being hung up on 1970s British pop-rock, with the added disgrace of lyrics that would put the most violent rappers to shame. It is not a
recognised
sign of high cultural standards. They do represent, however, a moment when flamenco began to mix with the world of rock and pop – as it continues to do. Unfortunately, this new wave of flamenco
rockeros
were also amongst the first wave of victims of the heroin explosion. The Grecas fought so badly that one of them, Tina, eventually stabbed the other, Carmela. An emaciated, peseta-less Tina could be seen wandering the Madrid barrio of Lavapiés in the early 1990s. She went on to spend time in jails and psychiatric units before the drugs finally killed her in 1995. One of the Los Chichos, in a deranged moment, managed to kill himself by throwing himself from a first-floor window.

What these groups did was a travesty to flamenco purists. But,
just as the nineteenth-century
café cantantes
, the
coplas
aflamen-cadas
of the mid-twentieth century and the Catalan
rumbas
of the 1960s had done, they opened flamenco back out to the world. A deluge of flamenco rock and pop has followed since then. The latest generation, brought up on hip-hop, acid house or rap, is producing its own potent, rhythmic mixtures. From the
flamenco-blues
guitar of Raimundo Amador to the Moroccan or Berber fusions of El Lebrijano and Radio Tarifa to the eclectic rap,
hip-hop
and everything else mix of Ojos de Brujo, the fusion
continues
. Spain is virtually unique, in western Europe, in having such a strong motor of autochthonous music. For flamenco is the bright, burning force behind a flow of popular music that is recognisably Spanish.

One man has done more to popularise flamenco in the past twenty years than anybody else. He was, of course, a gypsy. His name was José Monge Cruz, better known as Camarón de la Isla, the Shrimp of the Island. The Shrimp was a man with Mick
Jagger
lips and one of the worst, most bouffant, hairstyles since James Brown. He also possessed the best, most tragic, flamenco voice of the past quarter of a century.

Camarón was an intense introvert – a man of profound,
hermetic
silences. He lived in a period when young singers, thanks to the influence of pop and rock, could become living legends. It was also a time when flamenco itself opened up, incorporating new instruments and allowing itself to be influenced by the turbulent popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Camarón himself would lose from this meeting, dying a rock star’s early death. Along the way, however, he ensured himself the same kind of mythical
status
of fellow tortured, ‘live fast, die young’ stars like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. He died in 1992. Some say that flamenco has yet to recover.

The Iglesia Mayor, the main church, stands on the Calle Real, the Royal Street, of the southern town of San Fernando. Perched on a flat ‘island’ called La Isla de León it overlooks the salt flats, muddy wetlands and still waters of the Bay of Cádiz. A plaque on the church reminds those present that this is where, in 1812, one of the
key events in Spanish history took place. For it was here that a rebel parliament, fighting the French rule imposed by Napoleon, wrote the first Spanish constitution to enshrine popular sovereignty (male suffrage excluded monks, criminals, servants and those with no income). It was a time when Spain was adding new words to the international lexicon of war and politics. A new species of fighters, dubbed ‘
guerrillas
’, harried the French. A new political label,
meanwhile
, was invented for those behind the constitution. They were the world’s first ‘
liberales
’. Their battles with Catholic
traditionalists
, and the continued coup attempts, or
pronunciamientos
, of both sides, would dominate a politically chaotic nineteenth century but, also, bring universal male suffrage in 1891 (though elections were still manipulated by the interior ministry).

The liberal ethos of the constitution would later be betrayed by the man its authors had wanted to come back and run the country, Fernando VII ‘
el Deseado
’, ‘The desired one’. After
winning
, with the help of Wellington, their battle against Napoleon, the liberals saw their constitution declared null and void by
Fernando
.

In the Calle Carmen, one of the narrow streets leading down to the bay from the Calle Real, a second, more recent, important event in Spanish history took place. Here, in the shabby end of the shabbiest part of town, in a two-room house that shared a small patio with several neighbours, José Monge Cruz was born in December 1950. These were still the grey years in Spain, the years of hunger that followed the Civil War. José Monge was born at the bottom of the social and economic ladder – an Andalusian gypsy. But San Fernando, with its shipping and salt industries and its naval barracks, was relatively prosperous. And José’s father, like many gypsies, had a forge which his elder brother Manuel, eighteen years his senior, took over when the father died in 1966.

The Monges did not starve. A blacksmith was near the top of the gypsy social order. One of José’s brothers still lives in the handful of rooms where the eight Monge brothers and sisters grew up. When I visited it, the paint was peeling off the walls and
the tiny, shared patio was run down and shambolic. A plaque on the outside wall reminded visitors that this was where José Monge Cruz was born and that his uncle had, because of his relatively pallid skin and his
rubio
, light-coloured, hair nicknamed him ‘Camarón de la Isla’, the ‘Shrimp of the Island’. Camarón de la Isla, the plaque insisted had been ‘a gypsy through and through’. He was ‘so slim that he was almost translucent … and, instead of walking, he seemed to spring from one side to the other.’

José’s mother, Juana, was a
canastera
, a basket-maker. After her husband’s death, however, she kept the family afloat by cleaning bars and cafés. Few of those who met Juana remember her for how she earned her money. What they remember, instead, is how she sang. Camarón’s father sang too. That early flamenco
palo
, the
martinete
, is a forge tune, traditionally accompanied only by the clink of a blacksmith’s hammer. But it was Juana who the great names of flamenco – Manolo Caracol, La Niña de los Peines or La Perla de Cádiz – would come and listen to when they passed through town. Juana’s children would all inherit some of her
talent
. Manuel, the eldest brother, began earning extra money by singing to the
señoritos
– rich men out on the town – at the Venta de Vargas, a local restaurant. But it was Camarón who, by the time he was twelve, was already the star.

I met Manuel in San Fernando’s cemetery, where he goes daily to tend Camarón’s huge marble tomb. I handed him a thick bunch of red and white carnations, a gift from two ardent Camarón admirers in Madrid. Manuel spends his time here arranging the fresh flowers that arrive continually and sometimes shooing off the fans who want to clamber up beside the seated statue of Camarón. ‘Someone turns up virtually every day. From Seville, from Barcelona, from France or Germany,’ said Manuel, still amazed at just how far his brother’s name has travelled. The Shrimp sits atop his tomb with his trademark long, curling locks – responsible for an entire generation’s worth of bad gypsy hairstyles – brushed up from his forehead and dripping down onto his shoulders. A dandy’s handkerchief sits in his top pocket. The tomb is a piece of drab kitsch. Covered with slabs of black
shiny marble, mottled with brown, it looks out of place in a cemetery where virtually everything else – except for the fresh carnations and roses, the paper flowers and a handful of mangy cats – is a brilliant white.

The greatest fanatics are the gypsies themselves, for whom Camarón is, quite simply,
El Príncipe
, The Prince. When he was alive, gypsy women would bring their children up to him and beg him just to touch them. He knew the myth was going too far when that happened. ‘I don’t like it,’ he told his friend, later
biographer
, Enrique Montiel.

Manuel sticks my carnations in a pot, busily fluffing them up, fussing around with others that are already there. ‘The other day I found some gypsy children here. They could only be about ten years old. They must have been here selling flowers at the
feria
, (the local fiestas). One of them said: “I am going to curl up here tonight beside my cousin Camarón and sleep next to him.” “You can’t do that,” I said. “Nobody is allowed in here after the gates have been shut and, anyway, you’ll get scared amongst all the dead.” “I’ll be all right. My cousin will look after me,” the kid said.’

Camarón provoked a rare phenomenon in Spanish culture – public displays of gypsy pride. Entire families of gypsies would appear at his concerts and, while the
payos
looked on in
amazement
, let rip the full passion of flamenco. Fat matrons danced with beautiful, bejewelled and untouchable granddaughters. Tears were shed. The gypsy
juerga
was there for all to see.

Camarón’s funeral in San Fernando saw coach-loads of gypsies bussed in from around the country and scenes of mass hysteria. Fifty thousand people arrived in a town of eighty thousand. Spain had rarely seen such a concentration of its gypsies. This was not just the death of a star, but the funeral of a prince, a demi-god, a man whose voice and hands were thought to contain magic forces that came from beyond the normal world of human experience.

Enrique Montiel, a writer who came from the posher end of town, had played with Camarón and his friends in the streets of San Fernando or jumping off the town’s bridge into the river below. Enrique remembers, as a boy, drifting towards a noisy
crowd gathered in a makeshift bar in the city’s old, semi-ruined Moorish castle. ‘It was where the town’s cockfights were held,’ he told me as we picked at
tortillitas
de camarón
, fried shrimp
pancakes
, in the Venta de Vargas. Stars of bullfighting, flamenco and
farándula
, Spanish ‘showbiz’, stared down at us from
photographs
. A stunningly beautiful, bare-shouldered starlet with cleanly chiselled features and wide eyes turned out, to my amazement, to be Carmen Sevilla. I only knew her as the ageing television star who presented the lottery results.

Enrique continued his story. ‘But when I got there, it was not cockfighting that people were fussing about. A ten-year-old blond gypsy boy was standing on a table singing. People were going crazy. It was Camarón,’ he said.

His brother recalls how, when Camarón was still just a child, the
señoritos
who gathered at the Venta de Vargas would insist that he came to sing. ‘After a while they always asked for Camarón, and we all knew we would earn more money that way. I would have to crawl on to the bed above all the other sleeping bodies and prod him awake. Often he would tell me that he didn’t want to come.’

It was the start of a story of genius and tragedy, of the first flamenco star of the media age. Just as Camarón was often
unwilling
to sing for the
señoritos
, so he was an unwilling star. Quiet, introverted, uninterested in the trappings of wealth and stardom, he was a mystery to most people – even to the legion who claimed to be his friends. Rafael, my friend from Las Tres Mil, recalls meeting one of the shyest, quietest men he had ever seen: ‘He would wrap his arms around his body and sink into himself when he was in company,’ he said. ‘You had to pull the words from his mouth. But he was a beautiful person.’

Camarón de la Isla died in 1992, aged just forty-two. A cancer caused by four packets of Winstons a day finished him off. Years of drug abuse, of heroin and cocaine, had already drained the resistance out of a body that produced a sound which
revolutionised
flamenco. With his death, Camarón’s mythical status was ensured for ever. It continues to grow.

I asked Enrique about the drug abuse. ‘I am not going to talk
about that,’ he said. Nor would most other people. Drugs were an intruder, something none of his friends or family will ever
discuss
. To some, especially the gypsies, mentioning the smack habit, the cocaine – snorted and smoked – the experiments with LSD, the days on end when he just disappeared with junkies, sleeping out in the rough if necessary as he consumed and consumed – even his wife,
la Chispa
, ‘the Spark’, could not persuade him home – is to show a lack of respect. The
payos
who inhabit the flamenco universe are just as careful, wary that the gypsies who hold the key to flamenco’s magic garden may shut them out. Those prepared to talk about it ask not to be quoted by name. ‘He was a multiple drug user. His consumption was extraordinary,’ said one friend who should know. ‘In the same time that you would do a single line of coke, he could shove grams of it up his nose.’