Ghosts of Spain Page 24

  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.’

  Camarón’s first dozen records were made with the guitarist Paco de Lucía, under the benevolent dictatorship of the latter’s father. They are serious, straight flamenco albums – part of a total output of some twenty records which, in life, only sold around 360,000 copies.

  Camarón’s final albums took ages to record. He would, occasionally, slip off into a state of numbed semi-consciousness. His penultimate album was called, simply, Soy Gitano, I am a Gypsy. Even when he was off the drugs and battling cancer, he had his own mixture of favourite prescription drugs – rohypnol and other downers – that he would put together to cope with the pain and withdrawal.

  Camarón toyed with his body the way he would muck about with the recording machines that he collected, but never really mastered. Just as he saw the machines as practitioners of some sort of musical alchemy, so he gave his body over to the alchemy of powders, pills and liquids. He was, eventually, out of his skull much of the time.

  In the end, he needed a personal nurse to help him manage his habit and point him towards various cures. At one stage he suffered temporary paralysis to a hand. At the nurse’s house he would chase the heroin dragon and then turn suddenly, uncharacteristically, loquacious. When the nurse and his wife finally went to bed, a puppy-like Camarón occasionally turned up in their room saying he was lonely. Paranoias crept in. He disliked solitude. And nothing is more lonely than the road. Towards the end, all he wanted was to be with la Chispa and his children. ‘I’ll study a lot and make a record every couple of years,’ he told friends. Tobacco, inhaled deep, held down, smoked with a profound and needy pleasure, stopped that happening. In fact, by the time he died, tobacco had already done serious damage to the quality of that voice and, especially, the lungs that drove it. Camarón, unbelievably, had begun to lose that remarkable control of pitch and breathing that was part of his uniqueness. He could not control his breath sufficiently to sing the more difficult palos as he would have liked to. Some of the posthumous releases of his music have used the artificial wonders of recording studio machines to improve the mythical voice.

  Sung flamenco is a complex, difficult thing. There are strict rules about rhythm. And there are dozens of palos. Each has its own rule-book and, often, exacting demands on the singer’s ability. By the time he was fifteen, when Antonio Vargas recorded him at the Venta de Vargas – the noise of the occasional lorry coming down the road audible in the background – Camarón had a virtuoso’s control of many of them. But he also had a distinctive voice which, magically, tapped the raw, emotional depths of cante jondo, while still retaining a master’s control. ‘He improvised often without adulterating the essence … He searched for points where he could twist and tease the traditional styles so as to make the resulting song his own,’ the critic Manuel Ríos explains.

  It was when he went to Madrid and met up with an extraordinary young guitarist called Paco de Lucía, that the amazing things began to happen. A whole school of flamenco had grown up with the rule-book as written by Antonio Mairena, a singer and academic of flamenco who died in 1983 having ‘recovered’, and written down, many of the older palos. Camarón and de Lucía were part of a new generation which gradually introduced changes.

  New instruments appeared. The old formula of guitar and voice was widened out. The guitar itself went from being principally an instrument of accompaniment to having a strong voice of its own. De Lucía brought in a percussion instrument from Peru, the cajón – a wooden box that the player sits on and beats – which is now an accepted part of flamenco. Flutes, bass instruments and string sections also appeared. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra even played on one album.

  The break with orthodoxy came after Camarón split, not so much with Paco de Lucía, but with his father. The father, Antonio Sánchez, produced Camarón’s first eleven records, with his son always on the guitar. When Camarón changed producer in 1979, he turned to Ricardo Pachón. The result was La Leyenda del Tiempo, a record which scandalised purists. Even some gypsies returned it to the shops, claiming ‘this is not Camarón’. The poetry Pachón and co-composer Kiko Veneno turned to for the words to their music was not the old romance stuff but later Spanish classics like Lorca and, even, the Persian Omar Khayám. They also brought in instruments as foreign and bizarre – to flamenco purists – as keyboards, electronic bass and, even, a sitar. It was, according to one biographer, ‘the most important flamenco record of recent decades’. Camarón himself was scared by the reaction of the purists, and asked to tone things down in later albums, but a mould had been broken. Spanish geniuses, however, famously take a long time to achieve recognition. The record sold only 5,482 copies before his death.

  It was enough, however, to take flamenco to a new audience. ‘Suddenly the people who liked what he was doing were the same people who liked rock or who liked jazz,’ Pachón told me after waving me into his Seville townhouse in what looked like a Japanese kimono. Camarón started appearing at international festivals. The world’s musicians began to fall in love with him. ‘He was a musician’s musician. Those who knew, could tell he was doing something extraordinary. It didn’t matter what their own musical background was,’ explained Montiel. The list of admirers was long, from Mick Jagger to Quincy Jones.

  A would-be young Spanish rock star known as El Gran Wyoming (who would go on to be a motor-mouthed, satirical television presenter) was dragged, unwillingly, to a Camarón concert and remembered it like this. ‘This wasn’t a show, it was something else. That man was not going through a memorised repertory. He wasn’t pretending. I saw my idols of that moment. El Camarón was like Janis Joplin, li
ke Joe Cocker, like Jimi Hendrix. He wasn’t good or bad. He was, as the saying went back then, “strong stuff”.’

  Camarón’s rise coincided with a special period in Spanish history, a sudden explosion of freedom released by Franco’s death. And here was flamenco, stripped of its tacky, folkloric, flag-waving adornments. It was, if you like, a people’s music, at a time when the people were, once more, in control.

  Flamenco’s continuing development is best summed up in the words of one nineteenth-century soleá. ‘How are you going to compare/ a pool of water with a fountain?’ it asks. ‘The sun comes out and dries the pool/But the fountain keeps on flowing.’ Flamenco has kept on flowing, and changing. Spain is the wealthier, and luckier, for it. It boasts one of the Continent’s few, living, evolving home-grown music and dance forms. It is a vivacious beast that time, fashion, the disdain of some and the over-enthusiastic embrace of others have all been unable to put down.

  On the tenth anniversary of his death, I took my partner – a die-hard Camarón fan – and children to a flamenco mass in Camarón’s memory at the church on the Calle Real. My partner soon proved that Camarón, even from the grave, could exert a star’s debilitation of his fans’ nervous systems and mental composure. There were tears in the car, outbursts of rage at the idea that we might arrive late and a jumpy desire to see la Chispa and Camarón’s children – would they look like him? – in the flesh. A priest, well-known for his love of flamenco, had come from Madrid to take the service. He sang much of it himself, mostly off-tune, to flamenco palos and, eventually, in a very un-priestly moment, shed tears for Camarón. At the door afterwards we thanked him, saying we had never seen a priest cry in church before. ‘Some priests are very roguish … but we are also good people,’ he replied. It could have been an epitaph for Camarón himself.

  On a Sunday evening in Seville, I followed another Tres Mil gypsy, Amaro, and his family in their huge green Renault Master van out past the rubbish and bonfires of Las Vegas. We crossed the wide Avenida de la Paz to a street of warehouse units and workshops, appropriately named Las Herramientas, the Street of Tools. Here, squeezed between a frozen foods warehouse, a metal-beating workshop and a place selling second-hand fridges, was a unit that had been turned into a chapel of the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia.

  Popularly known as the ‘Gypsies’ church’, the evangelicals have captured some 100,000 Spanish gypsies – some 15 per cent of the total – since the first few gypsy pastors were recruited while picking grapes in France in the 1960s. As flamencoised music blasted out from the unit that housed the church, Melchor, the pastor, explained why it has done so well. ‘The gypsies have, historically, been ignored and forgotten, not just socially, economically and politically but in the religious sense as well. The Catholic priests never explained the Gospel well,’ he explained. ‘I feel proud of my culture, of who we are. The evangelical church does not ask you to change your culture. It embraces it. We write our songs and use our own rhythms, with all their strength and ability, to express our feelings. Here it is gypsies who do the singing and who do the preaching,’ he said.

  Although the church also welcomes payos, I found it hard to spot any amongst the two hundred people sat on the hard wooden benches, women on the left and men on the right. Wind whistled through the warehouse roof, clad in rainwater-stained chipboard, and strip lights hung from bare metal girders.

  The contrast with the overstuffed baroque churches of old Seville could not have been greater. The walls of the gypsy chapel were of rough-painted breeze-block. A couple of posters provided the only decoration. One, bearing a photo of a waterfall in green woodlands, exhorts: ‘To all the thirsty, come to the waters.’

  There were babies in pushchairs and kids running backwards and forwards, fighting over crisps, or taking messages from their mother to their father and vice versa. There was music, too, and palmas.

  The message from the preacher struck at the hearts of a people used to living on the margins, suspicious of a world ruled by ambition, frenetic work and money. ‘The system of this world is “Have, have and have more”. It produces hate and enmity. It brings chaos and death,’ the preacher, a large gypsy man in a beige suit and tie with his top button undone, said amid loud cries of ‘Amen!’ ‘Alleluya!’ and ‘Blessed be God!’ ‘The system of God is to forgive, to forget and to live in delight. It says: “I am happy with what I have and will give what I can.” It brings love and a chance to live in delight and full freedom.’

  Melchor explained that the church was also heavily involved in drug rehabilitation and education. I had already been told that ignorance was largely to blame for heroin’s success amongst gypsies – with one group of women in Algeciras getting hooked after using it to deal with period pains. ‘Drugs are a social problem that affect the poor especially and, within the poor, the gypsies. We have to educate our young,’ he said. ‘We ourselves have had problems and the Gospel helped us. Many gypsies have been rehabilitated this way.’

  There was a strong sense, despite the apocalyptic, fundamentalist rhetoric, of honest men (for this was a male-led affair, though the women’s pews were fuller) determined to lead their families through the dangerous waters of a world into which Spain’s gypsies, by choice or not, sometimes find it so hard to fit. I am no church-lover. Stepping out of the industrial unit at the end of the service, however, amid hand-shaking and back-slapping, I found myself wishing these Philadelphians well. I was concerned, too, for the children here and their worried parents.

  Camarón, a man whose clanking neck jewellery could include, at the same time, chains and medallions bearing images of the Virgin of El Rocío, the Star of David, the Christ of San Fernando or the anchor of the Brotherhood of Esperanza of Triana, was never much interested in the evangelicals – though his wife, la Chispa, was. His chosen delights were, in the end, his ruin.

  Rafael told me a story, one which Camarón’s brother Manuel did not recognise and Enrique Montiel thought could be another myth to have emerged around his figure. ‘Two days before his death, a doctor who was treating him in Barcelona found a note he had written on the bedside table. The man kept it. Now he feels guilty about it, and wants to get it back to the family,’ said Rafael, who claimed to have read a copy. ‘The letter said the following: “To all the young people. Life is beautiful, but it is also bad. I, who am telling you this, am almost free.”’

  Rafael, unfortunately, did not seem to have grasped the message. Driving around Las Tres Mil one day I saw him striding off towards Las Vegas. He was a man obviously looking for a deal. He had admitted to using coke a bit, but swore there was nothing untoward in an occasional habit. ‘When you have children you have to start acting responsibly. You have to know how to control yourself or you are lost,’ he had said.

  On my return several months later, however, he failed to answer my phone calls. I wondered whether I had offended him. Eventually a mutual friend explained. Rafael had been swallowed up by Las Vegas. It was time to move on, to leave Spain’s gypsies and their remarkable music behind. I wanted to stay away from politics and history, however. The country’s endless roads, and their bars, had introduced me to some of the stranger offshoots of flamenco. Now it was time to turn off them to visit somewhere else. I wanted to find out what lay behind the colourful neon signs that, so loudly and obviously, decorate a different kind of roadside establishment.

  7

  Clubs and Curas

  I have retired to my local bar to leaf through the morning newspapers. Breakfast is served without any words being exchanged between myself and the waiter, beyond a brisk ‘buenos días’. He knows my order. It appears automatically, the clanking, bashing, steaming and sizzling of coffee machine and plancha, the hot plate used for frying and toasting, starting as soon as I am spotted walking through the door. This can be a complex business. How do you keep your fingers clean when the toasted roll you have been given has a large pool of olive oil washing over its crusty banks? And, once the oil is on your fingers, how
do you stop it sticking the pages of your newspaper together? The little, square, tissue serviettes, grabbed from the plastic container on my table, pile up in front of me.

  When it comes to sex surveys, I am used to turning to Cosmopolitan magazine or its glossy equivalents. Spain, however, has the august Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the state-run National Statistics Institute. So it is that, between sips of café con leche from a small glass that burns my finger-tips, I am informed that the instituto has discovered the following: more than one in four Spanish men under forty-nine have had sex with a prostitute during their lives, while one in seventeen have done so over the past year. ‘Both figures are noticeably higher than those observed in other surveys in Europe,’ the investigators comment. The instituto did not dare say it directly, but it was calling Spanish men the most enthusiastic brothel johns of Europe. Could that be true?

  I looked around the bar, with its varnished, cork-tiled walls and strange 1970s decor. I wondered idly about the people here. Which of the men was a brothel regular? Could it be the blue-overalled painters and decorators renovating some apartment in our block? Was it the insurance-salesman type, frowning over his copy of El Mundo? Could it be the old man with the small moustache, leafing through the conservative ABC newspaper? Or would it be the chain-smoking ‘intellectual’, one eye on the National Geographic documentary showing on the television set perched high above the door, the other watching the nurses file in from hospital for breakfast? And what about the nurses, or the elderly, carefully made-up ladies who gather here to swap tales of ailments and operations while updating their oral births and deaths column on the barrio. Were their husbands, boyfriends, sons or brothers brothel-goers? Did they care? Did anybody? Should I? Did the instituto’s figures say anything about Spanish society? Or was this another bizarre, even prurient, subject that only an anglosajón would consider interesting? There was only one way to find out. It was time to let some neon into my life. I would have to visit one of those gaudily lit clubes de alterne, the brothels that dot Spain’s main highways.