I have come to Seville on the AVE, the high-speed train that links the city to Madrid. When it began operating in 1992, the AVE slashed the overland travel time between the two cities by more than half. It did this in uncharacteristically smooth-running, gleaming, punctilious style. Benito Mussolini would have wanted one of these – a nation’s glory encased in a 300 kilometre per hour train. But here, too, is a monument to enchufe. Who, after all, doubts that the reason Seville got Spain’s first high-speed train was because a Socialist prime minister and his deputy, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, both came from here. It remains the envy of virtually every other major city in Spain. Not even Barcelona is connected to the capital like this, the job of shifting 5,000 business executives back and forth each day being done, instead, by fuel-guzzling, cramped and crowded shuttle jets. There is a whiff of corruption to the AVE too. A dozen years after it was completed, court cases are still pending to determine where all the money went.

Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the richest places on the planet. Visitors do not generally care that this all came to a rather abrupt halt. They may, in fact, like the idea. For they have been left the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century baroque architecture, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the white-and ochre-painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.

Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘You are here to enjoy.’

Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches, palacetes, bars – allowing everybody to discover, and claim for their own, some favourite, hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here, at a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters serve stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold manzanilla sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de La Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was once the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth-century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype Don Juan asked for the following words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ‘Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel paintings here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that, as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else.’ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby, air. Around the corner, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list of personal jewels, in fact, it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty Andalusian beauty, simply demands your attention.

It seemed a shame, therefore, to be stashing my valuables in a lock-up at Santa Justa railway station, keeping just a small amount of money in my pocket and preparing to turn my back on the more obvious delights of the city. This time, however, I had not come here looking for baroque Seville. I was not here for the spotted dresses and handsome, oil-haired jinetes, horsemen, of the April Fair. Nor was I coming to see the spooky Easter Week processions of the ku-klux-klan-hooded nazarenos as they parade their statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Attractive as these things are, they sometimes feel like part of a fossilised, if lovingly-maintained, Seville past. I was, instead, on a quest. I wanted to find the raw, unadulterated soul of modern flamenco. For that, I needed to find Seville’s live, beating, musical heart. I knew I was not going to find it in the city-centre tourist shows, the flamenco tablaos.

I took a hire car – insured against all eventualities – and drove out past the tropical-looking gardens of the Parque María Luisa and the pavilions left standing from Seville’s first international expo, held in 1929. From here, the broad and elegant Avenida de la Palmera, with its tall palms and purple flowering jacarandas, pointed me out in the direction of the sherry town of Jerez. Elegant, turn-of-the-century mansion houses lined the road, though most seemed to have become offices for international accountancy firms. Then came the imposing stadium of Real Betis Balompié, one of the city’s two eternal rivals in the country’s soccer first division (the other is Sevilla FC).

Here, rather than continue towards the promised land of Jerez or the delights on the coast at Cádiz, I took a sharp left. The urban landscape went rapidly downhill. The car ducked under a railway line and there, easily recognisable by the junked cars, the patches of balding wasteland and the colourful rubbish piled about, was the most infamous barrio in Seville, ‘Las Tres Mil Viviendas’, ‘The Three Thousand Homes’. I am glad, at this stage, that nobody had told me, as I sat waiting at the traffic light, that some local citizens were, at that time, raising their own particular tax for visiting or leaving the barrio. A brick through the windscreen as you waited at the lights, a wrench on the car door, a wave of a knife and the highwaymen of Las Tres Mil would snatch whatever they wanted.

There are monuments to the failure of 1960s planning all over western Europe. Las Tres Mil is Seville’s offering. This is where the gypsies of the riverside neighbourhood of Triana, once the cradle of flamenco, were moved. They were sent here together with chabolistas, shanty-town dwellers, from the outskirts of the city, some of whose homes had disappeared when a tributary of the River Guadalquivir, the Tamarguillo, overflowed its banks. They were, according to the jargon of the time, ‘la gente del Aluvión’, the ‘people of the flood’. Las Tres Mil, The Three Thousand Homes, was to be their Ark.

Perched on the west bank of the broad River Guadalquivir, their original barrio of Triana looks across its murky waters at old Seville. From its riverside cafes you look out at the splendours of the Torre de Oro, the white walls of the Maestranza bull-ring, the palm-lined Paseo Cristóbal Colón and a city skyline crowned by the twelfth-century minaret turned cathedral bell-tower, the Giralda. For several hundred years this was part of Seville’s docklands. It was famous for its artisans. Their reputations spread, in the wake of the Spanish galleons, across the New World. Fifty years, or a century ago, this would also have been the place to look for the raw substance of flamenco. Théophile Gautier, the French Romantic, came across a group of gypsies camped out beside a bubbling cauldron. ‘Beside this impoverished hearth was seated a gitana with her hook-nosed, tanned and bronze profile, naked to the waist, a proof that she was completely devoid of coquetry … This state of nudity is not uncommon, and shocks no one,’ he said.

In the 1950s, flamenco was still part of its everyday life. ‘In the afternoon one could hear the tune of bulerías and tangos (two flamenco styles or palos) coming from a cluster of houses. A baptism, a wedding, a request for a woman’s hand in marriage, a son returned from military service, a woman who had just won the lottery … any event set the tribe into action. Triana still had melody,’ recalls Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer who grew up there.

From Triana the gypsy singers and dancers would be called across the river for the juergas, or parties, of wealthy señoritos and bullfighters. They would come, too, to the popular cafés cantantes of the late nineteenth century and, in the twentieth century, to the tablaos, the tourist shows. Then they were dispatched back across the bridge to their own side of town. Spaniards as a whole have never learned to love their gypsies – who are estimated to number some 650,000. Even today polls show that many would rather not live beside them.

There are gypsies left in Triana, but nothing like there used to be. The melody has gone. Las Tres Mil was an excuse for a huge real-estate scam. The gypsies were lured away from their forges and houses in the Cava de Los Gitanos and the chabolas on the edges of Triana.

They were promised brand new, ‘modern’ housing. Orders were issued for the demolition of their old homes, many with shared patios that acted as the centre of social, and cultural, life. The Cava de Los Civiles (literally ‘the civilians’), the payo, non-gypsy part of Triana, remained relatively untouched. Gleaming new blocks – their unimaginative name of ‘The Three Thousand Homes’ a giveaway to the bureaucratic nature of the project – way to the south of the city would keep them happy. It would also keep them out of sight and, by extension, out of mind.

In the tower blocks of The Three Thousand, one of Spain’s most enduring urban legends was born. An old gypsy, at a loss about what to do with his mule in a fourth-floor flat, made him a stable in the spare room. By day the mule would work or, simply, feed on the grassy verges of Las Tres Mil. At night, however, his owner stuck him in the lift and took him home. A local photographer snapped the donkey peering out of a window. Ever since then, first-hand sightings of donkeys have been made, almost always falsely, in the flats of gypsies wherever they settle in high-rise Spain.

Las Tres Mil is part of a vast collection of similar estates properly known as the Polígono Sur. The latter houses some sixty thousand people, 20 per cent of them gypsies. They are hemmed in on three sides: by the railway tracks to Cádiz; by the busy Carretera de Su Eminencia, the Highway of His Eminence; and by the high walls of what used to be the Hytasa textile factory. One in every twelve Sevillanos live here. That is 1 in 700 Spaniards.

The rudimentary four-to eight-storey blocks drip with colourful washing. Self-built walled or fenced gardens eat up the wide pavements. Some are outdoor cages, covered in wrought iron bars to keep out the junkies who come to shop in the city’s drugs supermarket, a desolate corner of the barrio known as Las Vegas. Immortalised in a song, ‘En la Esquina de Las Vegas’, by the flamenco-blues guitarist-singer Raimundo Amador, this wretched, abandoned section of Las Tres Mil is home to thriving communities of rats and cockroaches.

The first time I drove in here, I had not yet worked out quite how bad Las Vegas was. On two visits, separated by a year, the talk each time was of a shoot-out as the drugs clans fought their turf wars. The odd police car cruises by. But Las Vegas is a place without law. The occasional shiny Mercedes or huge white van are a sign that, despite the trappings of poverty, large sums of money run through the barrio. Three gypsy clans are said to rule the place.

My first guide to Las Tres Mil was a man I will call Rafael, a local gypsy musician and producer. Driving through Las Vegas with him was a disturbing experience. Bonfires blazed on strips of wasteland, gypsy youths gathered around them. There used to be traffic lights here. Now there are decapitated posts with jagged, rusting tops. Rafael showed me a rough, hand-painted sign pointing to some kind of chapel. The sign pointed to a hole in a wire fence which, in turn, only gave access to the back of a semi-abandoned building and the waste ground around it. ‘That is where they go to do their culto, to worship, after they shoot up,’ he explained. ‘They have a little room down there somewhere. They say there are pictures of Christ on the walls.’

Skeletal junkies, the war-injured of the narcotics trade, shuffle backwards and forwards. Poorly bandaged wounds are evidence of the daily damage they inflict on themselves. ‘I call them mutilados – the mutilated ones,’ explained Rafael.

Some of the mutilados are themselves gypsies. Heroin has scythed its way like a grim reaper, syringe in hand, through one generation of Spanish gypsies. It now threatens a second one. Many junkies, gypsies or payos, have come to live here, scraping a living from the drug trade in order to fuel their own addictions. Some blocks are half abandoned. Flats change hands for as little as 150 euros, with no paperwork and no proof of ownership – just a roof and little else except a ready supply of heroin or cocaine.

Groups of dealers hang out by the wrought-iron cages that have been put across the entrances to each of the apartment blocks. A permanent layer of rubbish lines each street and the big green rubbish containers are burned out heaps of twisted, molten plastic. We passed an almost completely abandoned eight-storey block. A curtain of rough material hung across the entranceway, giving the smack addicts a bit of privacy as they hunted for undamaged veins. ‘Look!’ said Rafael, pointing to a gushing sewer pipe. ‘The shit is just falling into their back yards.’

The rest of Seville is frightened of this place. ‘Don’t go there,’ they told me in a Seville production company that had made a film on the barrio’s flamenco talents. ‘You won’t find a taxi driver ready to take you.’ In fact, I have never found a taxi driver who refused to go to Las Tres Mil or most of the rest of Polígono Sur. Las Vegas, however, was out of bounds. ‘They have car races there – and they don’t care about looking before crossing a junction,’ apologised one driver. A young French photographer I ran into here was greeted afterwards in a bar in central Seville as if he had returned from the front line of a war. The waitress almost fainted with relief when he reappeared. She did not know that we had spent the afternoon with José Jiménez, ‘el Bobote’, a flamenco dancer who travels the globe accompanying some of Spain’s greatest dancers. He had chosen to continue living in his flat here, despite also owning a house in a middle-class district of town.

The first people I spoke to in Las Tres Mil were three local Spanish Jehovah’s Witnesses – inheritors, if you like, of the bible-selling tradition of that nineteenth-century British eccentric George Borrow who befriended gypsies and wrote extravagant travel books. ‘Are you carrying anything valuable? Don’t let them know you are foreign. It’s dangerous,’ they warned. In fact, if you discount Las Vegas, Las Tres Mil is no worse than many inner-city estates in Britain. With its streets alive with people, it is, in some ways, a lot better.

The first time I came here, Rafael was still trying to get something done about Las Vegas. He wanted a police station here, but suspected his efforts would not work. The police, and authorities, he had concluded, preferred to have Seville’s ‘drugs supermarket’ here in a corner of Las Tres Mil than elsewhere in town. The barrio’s grim statistics are, as a result, nothing short of spectacular. One in three children do not even make it through the school gates in the morning. ‘We get people who are sixteen, eighteen or twenty turning up here who have never stepped inside a school,’ explained one teacher at an adult education centre. Some residents do not, officially, exist. ‘They have no ID card, no social security number. It’s as if they had never been born,’ a social worker told me.

I had not come to Las Tres Mil, however, to see its miseries but, instead, to discover the miracles that burst from its asphalted-over soil. For, if Triana, along with Jerez, the Bay of Cádiz and a handful of other spots strung along the line connecting them, was once the cradle of flamenco, Las Tres Mil can claim to be a new repository of that tradition. It is also the birthplace of some of flamenco’s newest, most surprising, offshoots. Flamenco is by no means an exclusively gypsy music. Many of its greatest exponents, however, are gypsies.

Triana’s gypsies brought their music with them. The new generations from the barrio have flamenco in their veins. But these are modern, urban gypsies. They have also grown up with rock, pop, punk, hip-hop and the influences of ‘world music’. They have fused flamenco with modern urban sounds, or with music and instruments from far away, adding to the continued expansion of Spain’s unique contribution to the worlds of music and dance.

Flamenco and its new bastard varieties, which stretch from flamenco-rock and flamenco-rap to easy listening flamenquillo, is everywhere in Las Tres Mil. It spills out of kitchen windows, hammers out of car sound systems and plays on people’s lips. In bars and on street corners, it can suddenly appear. A man draws the first few phrases of a song out from deep inside him, and suddenly his friends are tocando palmas, beating out a complex, staccato, machine-gun rhythm with their hands. This, along with a dancer’s stamping feet, is the traditional source of flamenco’s percussion. If the song is successful, that might just be the start. The juerga – the partying – begins. Nobody can predict when it will end. That, anyway, was what I had been told – though the reality, in my brief experience of the barrio, did not quite live up to the description. This, though, was why I had come to Las Tres Mil. A decent flamenco juerga in the barrio, I was told, was something that should not be missed.

The barrio’s list of flamenco artists is long and glorious. This is the home of Farruquito, the latest dance phenomenon to start touring the globe, and the rest of his clan. His family’s flamenco pedigree stretches back several generations. From here, too, come the Amador brothers, guitarists Raimundo and Rafael, who fused flamenco with the blues. With a group called Pata Negra they proudly declared that ‘todo lo que me gusta es ilegal, imoral o engorda’ – ‘everything I like is illegal, immoral or makes me fat’. Rafael Amador has fallen victim to the barrio’s worst side. Drugs and alcohol have spoilt, if not his talent, then at least his ability to use it. Raimundo, meanwhile, has pursued a highly successful solo career. He sometimes plays with his blues idol, B. B. King.

Some of the best-rated singers, men like the mysterious Pelayo, a Las Vegas gypsy who has spent many years in jail, refuse to sing professionally. They will only sing if they feel la gana, ‘the urge’.

El Esqueleto, a civic centre just around the corner from Las Vegas, is a prime example of the surreal, absurdist sense of humour of Las Tres Mil. Like much of what has happened in this neighbourhood, it was started in a burst of enthusiasm but was abandoned when only half built. What was left was a jumble of beams, pillars and girders, a skeleton of a building which soon became known in barrio jargon as just that, ‘el esqueleto’. By the time the building was restarted, the name had stuck. It now bears the grandiose name of The Skeleton Civic Centre.

My search for a decent juerga did not start successfully. Rafael told me it was impossible to predict where and when one might happen. I could hang about the barrio for weeks without getting lucky. On a warm summer’s evening, however, he called me to meet him at El Esqueleto. A working musician, composer and enthusiastic promoter of local talent, he wanted me to witness the public presentation of his latest musical discovery. ‘Es un monstruo’ – ‘He is a singing monster,’ he insisted. A local Andalusian television station was devoting an arts show to Las Tres Mil. Rafael’s newly found young talent, a teenage gypsy boy, was to sing.

Among the crowd gathered here at the door to El Esqueleto was el Indio, The Indian. A former novio de la muerte (fiancé of death), or member of the Spanish Legion, el Indio is a Seville eccentric. He dresses as a Red Indian brave, complete with a homemade bow and sheath of arrows. If this was Seville’s Wild West, el Indio played the part of its downtrodden native.

Today he was bereft of his bow and arrow – they had been confiscated, once more, by the police – and was dressed just in shorts. His weathered, sagging body was criss-crossed with scars that welled up over a patchwork of fading tattoos. A white feather was stuck through a hole in his left nipple. A single spike of hair pointed up to the sky from the centre of an otherwise shaved head. El Indio is a payo – a non-gypsy – who knows how to make the gypsies laugh. They salute him with that time-honoured, hand-raised Indian greeting – ‘How!’

A scar on his stomach was the result of an operation on a burst gut. ‘I drank too much beer,’ he explained. No reason was offered, however, for another set of scars, which poured off his right shoulder like molten wax. They ran in raw, red dribbles of raised skin down his arm and chest.

Two gypsy brothers, Juan and Rafa Ruiz, joined us, hoping to get on the show. They had been singing and dancing on the streets of Seville for years but dreamt of becoming real, professional artists. They get occasional invitations to play at romerías, the festive pilgrimages of the summer months in Andalucía, or for parties of huntsmen, modern-day señoritos who like to end a day of blasting at wild boar or deer with music and juerga. ‘When the party is on, everyone wants to be a gypsy, but when it is over, they don’t want to know anything about you,’ explained Rafael.

Juan began to strum a rhythm. El Indio broke into dance, his body curving around his flabby, exposed belly as he stamped the tiled floor with his dilapidated sneakers, beat his thighs and threw himself into a clumsy spin. The gypsies cracked up with laughter.

The television studio was in a small theatre in the centre of Seville. I took Juan and Rafa and a couple of teenagers from a music workshop at The Skeleton, who were also due to play, in my car. They wanted the air conditioning on full blast and the windows closed. ‘The wind will wreck my hairstyle,’ explained one. Juan spent the journey fiddling with the radio trying to find a station playing decent flamenquillo.

At a traffic light, Juan wound down the window and, for no apparent reason, started shouting to a Japanese girl. ‘Hello guapa – good-looking – don’t you remember me?’ Words and smiles were exchanged. The window was rolled back up. ‘I know her,’ he explained. ‘She sings bulerías.’ Even the Japanese, he said, were hung up on flamenco.

At the television studio, Rafael introduced me to the ‘monster’. Carlos was seventeen years old, pouring with sweat, but already affecting a star’s disdain for lesser mortals. He instructed a photographer not to take pictures of him. ‘You can do the others,’ he said.

As it got closer to his performance, Carlos’s already considerable range of nervous tics and twitches increased. He pinched his nose, scratched his chin, craned his head forward to stretch his neck muscles and, with both hands at once, tried to fan himself. An hour before it was time to go on stage, his shirt was already drenched through. His cool, clean ‘look’ was getting increasingly wrinkled. Occasionally he let out a thin, clear, falsetto note and loosened his throat with the first few bars of the purest-sounding flamenco, his voice gliding through the quarter tones. The boy obviously had talent.

A production assistant came backstage carrying a form. It was Carlos’s agreement to cede his performance rights for the evening. He looked at it in panic and handed it to Juan. He, in turn, looked at it in panic and handed it to me. It was my job to fill it in. As I asked Carlos to spell out his name, I realised why I was doing this. Carlos could only just spell. The speed with which Juan handed the form over made me suspect he could not read either. Little surprise, then, that the constant lament of the artists in Las Tres Mil is that they are ‘being ripped off ’. Finally it was time for the monstruo to appear on his television debut. Rafael had invented a twee stage name for him. He has a surname, however, that would ring bells amongst the local flamenco cognoscenti – that of a family of Triana singers.

The performance, when it came, was a disaster. Carlos was being launched, not as a flamenco singer but as a sort of pop balladeer. He sang a middle-of-the-road, instantly forgettable ditty penned for him, I suspect, by Rafael. This is an old trick. Pure flamenco is hard work, with a small, intense, knowledgeable, and highly critical, hard core of buffs. If you want to make money, sing something else. To make things worse, Carlos did it to playback and did it badly. His lips and contorted, pop-star body movements were badly out of sync with the words being sung.

Afterwards, we congratulated him effusively. He thought he had done well and there, out on the street, as the boys and girls from the music workshop were packing their percussion in the back of the van, he broke into true song. It was the same high, clear, pure flamenco voice he had warmed up with. Shed of all pressure, and of the baggage of pop culture, he was a flamenco thoroughbred. The boys from Rafael’s workshop could not help but reach for their instruments and start beating a rhythm. I tried to work out what form of flamenco he was singing. A high-pitched tanguillo perhaps? I wished I knew more.

By now, however, it was 2 a.m. We were in a narrow, residential street in the old quarter. The security guards came rushing out of the theatre, trying to shush everybody up. A few minutes earlier the show’s production team had been treating the Tres Mil gypsies as artists, plying them with drink, slices of cured Serrano ham and canapés. Now they were out on the street again and not needed. Guillermo, a music producer, looked on. ‘If they do that in their barrio, people just say: “Hey, look. He’s in a good mood.” But you can’t do that here, not in the centre of town.’

The kids from the Tres Mil piled back into their van and were gone, singing their way home. We were not invited to the juerga which, I suspected, would carry on back in the barrio. A line still separates gitano from payo. I was not going to force my way across it. I was, however, enviously aware of missing something. I realised I would have to look elsewhere for my raw, pure flamenco.

My next stop, I decided, should be a place where gypsies have plenty of time to sing and nowhere to escape to. That meant taking the road out of Seville towards Mairena, to a building whose purpose could be recognised by its high, modern brick walls and even higher watchtower – Seville’s jail.

The relationship between jails, gypsies and flamenco is as old as flamenco itself. At the base of the family tree of flamenco styles lie the tonás which are, in turn, divided into the martinetes (originating from the blacksmith’s forge), the deblas (from the gypsy word for goddess) and the carcelera, the prison song. The words to these songs speak of five hundred years of persecution of gypsies and their culture.

The carcelera predates the introduction of musical instruments into flamenco, throwing it back, at least, to the mid-nineteenth century when the first written accounts of the music appeared. It may come from even earlier, perhaps to the time in the eighteenth century when Fernando VI ordered Spain’s gypsies to be jailed if they refused to give up their caló language and way of life.

It is a pure lament of prison hardship – a sub-genre of the global experience of gypsy pain and suffering that has fuelled, and continues to fuel, much of flamenco. The words to one typical carcelera go like this:

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.

Things got better as the afternoon went on. Backstage, guitarists and singers were indulging in bouts of spontaneous musicality, groups forming, breaking up and re-forming. On stage, soloists were being joined by other competitors to provide a backing chorus and palmas. Some ended up dancing their way up and down the stage to wild applause from the mainly gypsy public.

The defining moment came with the appearance of a small, quiet man with a broad, nervous smile. In his black clothes and shiny boots, I had barely noticed him backstage. He came, anyway, from Valencia – hardly the cradle of flamenco. The stage, however, transformed him. He sat down beside the guitarist, stared down at the floor and steadied himself. Then he began pawing the floor slowly with one of those shiny, Cuban-heeled boots. His body tensed, a heel clicked against the floor, he reached out a hand to the audience, lifted his face to us and began to sing.

He was called Ángel. He had a powerful, rich voice that Victor, the prison officer in charge of the show, compared to that of a once-famous singer of popular coplas, Rafael Farina. ‘In fact,’ said Victor, who obviously knew a thing or two, ‘He is probably even better than that.’

Already excited by what was going on, both backstage and front, I found myself transfixed by this Ángel. A tingling, euphoric sensation came over me. It appeared to sweep through much of the audience too. The female prisoners jumped to their feet as the little man reached his peaks, then sat as he drew back into soft lament. Occasionally, a voice from the crowd would shout praise or encouragement. He got a standing ovation and I, finally, got the flamenco epiphany I had been seeking. I have never looked back. Ángel opened the door to a whole world of music – which I am only just beginning to explore.

Afterwards, the jury and singers gathered beside the star attraction of any modern Spanish jail – the outdoor swimming pool. One jury member told me that the top four in the competition could all sing professionally. That provoked the fourth-place winner, a nervy, speedy gypsy from Madrid, to ask me to ‘have a word with the governor. See if you can get me a weekend pass. But what I really need is a manager. I’ve been going on stage since I was a child. I can sing anything.’

Ángel came second. I would have chosen differently, but the jury had its rules. Ángel wore his talent lightly and was immensely, childishly pleased. The prizes were handed out by a once-famous female flamenco dancer whom I had never heard of. She gave the winners prints of herself dancing. The Valencian brought his over to me and, once again, I found myself doing the writing for a gypsy. ‘To María Heredia, con todo mi afecto!’ I scribbled on it. ‘I’m giving it to my girlfriend here in the jail,’ he said, winking. News of his triumph had probably already reached her. One of the women’s modules overlooked the swimming pool. A running commentary was being relayed from block to block via the peculiar Spanish prison language of hand signals. Manicured hands with long, crimson-painted fingernails poked out from behind the bars, gesticulating and wagging fingers in a private language far more complex, but just as secret, as the old fan language of Spanish courtiers. ‘I certainly don’t understand it,’ the prison’s deputy governor said.

The prison flamenco contest has a chequered history. It started off with a bang, after the son of the great Agujetas won first place, tying with an expert in camaroneo (as singing in the style of Camarón de La Isla is known) called José Serrano. Both men were let out early and their record was released in the US. Later editions were far more modest or, simply, failed to happen, drowned in prison bureaucracy. With this edition, it was picking up again.

I wanted to track down Antonio Agujetas, the son, and José Serrano to find out how the jail competition had changed their lives. My attempts to get hold of the former came to nothing. I called the local newspaper in Jerez, a town that is considered one of the last repositories of traditional, authentic flamenco. ‘I saw him in the street the other day, with a group of so-called friends. It was, I’m afraid, a pathetic sight,’ the newspaper’s flamenco expert confided to me. ‘He is in and out of drug rehabilitation programmes and argues with his father all the time. He’s in no state to be interviewed. It’s a sad story, but all too common.’

Tracking down Serrano was similarly complicated. Eventually Antonio Estévez, a local builder and small-time flamenco patron in the industrial town of Dos Hermanas, just outside Seville, found him for me. ‘He’s a difficult man. I don’t know if you have been warned, but he is going to ask you for money,’ said Antonio. I had not been told. We had an uneasy meeting in a bar. Serrano was there with his wife – large, dark and frowning with suspicion – his trousers clumsily darned and several days’ stubble on his face. At forty-two, he was my age but looked a decade older. I refused to pay for an interview. Then, as his wife looked sternly on, he pleaded on behalf of his children. A twenty-euro note exchanged hands. His wife gleamed happily. It was a mistake. After that, Serrano gave whichever answer he thought I wanted to hear.

We drove up to Cerro Blanco, a gypsy barrio of crumbling, one-storey houses in Dos Hermanas. Serrano ushered us into a dilapidated, single-bedroom house furnished with nothing more than a bed, a kitchen table, a few plastic chairs, a loudly humming refrigerator and a rusting sink. ‘What was the best thing about winning the prison flamenco contest?’ I asked. ‘Getting out of jail early,’ he replied with great conviction, as a six-year-old son clung to his leg. ‘I saved myself three or four years inside. I couldn’t believe it when I got out. I kissed the ground, just like the Pope.’ He repeated the now familiar explanation about how prison added ‘sentiment’ to a flamenco voice. ‘Singing outside jail is not the same,’ he said. ‘You don’t get the same feeling.’

Serrano had grown up in Las Tres Mil. He had started off as a child doing the rounds of Seville’s tourist cafes in the company of the Amador brothers, singing, dancing and passing around a hat. The Amadors had gone on to enjoy phenomenal success. Serrano had served eighteen years of a sentence for murder.

He occasionally sang professionally, but winning the jailhouse flamenco contest had obviously not made him a star, or produced wealth. Dishevelled drunks and junkies wandered the barrio. The neighbouring houses, looking out over a patch of wasteland, were no better than his. Antonio, who dripped with gold accessories himself, had warned us not to bring any valuables. ‘They know me, so they won’t rob me,’ he said. ‘But you should be careful.’ Once again, however, the gypsies were more friendly than threatening.

‘He can’t be bothered to look for performances,’ explained Antonio, as we left. ‘If you don’t make an effort, people forget you. You know, I wanted you to do that interview, and I was about to give him money myself. But he’ll only spend some of it on food, the rest will probably go on cocaine.’

Serrano, however, has not gone back to jail since he left it half a dozen years ago. Nor has he got hooked on cocaine or any other drug. He is not interested in travelling, even if that means he can never expect to have a proper career as a singer. ‘I like my home. I like being with my family,’ he says. A gypsy man who can earn enough to keep his family going, without working too hard, still gains respect from his peers and family. By those standards, Serrano’s voice has been a success. And that is impossible to begrudge.

Persecution and jail have been part of the culture of Spain’s gypsies almost ever since they first crossed the Pyrenees in the fifteenth century. They arrived in groups of up to a hundred each led by a man using the title of count or duke. Often they claimed to be pilgrims, or said they had been expelled from their former homes by Muslims. In fact, this was the final stage of a slow migration over five centuries in which they had crossed Persia, the Middle East and Greece after leaving India several hundred years earlier. Their skills with horses and, it is said, their music, meant they were initially welcomed. But, like the Jews, the Moors and the Moriscos, the gypsies were ordered out of Spain. They stubbornly refused, however, to budge. The first expulsion order came in 1499, signed by Isabella and Ferdinand, the same Catholic monarchs who had thrown the Jews out seven years earlier. Camarón de la Isla, like his brother Manuel, had a Star of David and a crescent moon tattooed together above his right thumb. This was, the latter once explained, meant to be a symbol of the shared history of persecution of Jews, Muslims and gypsies in Christian lands.

Over several centuries Spain’s gypsies were repeatedly ordered to change their ways, stop using their language and stop even calling themselves gitanos. They were threatened with expulsion, with galley-slavery on the Spanish treasure galleons and with transportation to the New World.

But the gypsies, who were largely sedentary from early on and sometimes based themselves in so-called gitanerias in or beside major cities such as Madrid and Seville, simply never obeyed the expulsion orders. They also roundly ignored the commands to ‘mend’ their ways. One royal order explicitly excluded them from the right of avoiding arrest by seeking refuge at a church altar. The Inquisition had its turn with them too. The Church was especially worried about gypsies who married their cousins. In 1745, Fernando VI succumbed to a strange fit of ‘enlightenment’ thinking and had them rounded up en masse. Some nine thousand were sent to jail.

Gypsies were, as now, widely blamed for things they did not do. In The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and His Fortunes and Adversities, a sixteenth-century Spanish novel, the hero asks whether a group of bandoleros are ‘all gypsies, from Egypt’. The answer was a resounding no. ‘They were all clerics, friars, nuns or thieves escaped from jails or convents,’ the anonymous author wrote. The worst ‘were those who had left their monasteries, exchanging a passive life for an active one’.

Not all was hardship, however. Gypsies have always had their patrons, supporters and defenders. These included lords, priests and ordinary folk ready to stand up for ‘good gypsies’ and protest or intervene when the entire community was punished for the sins of a few.

The roguish British bible-seller George Borrow, who wandered Spain in the 1830s, was just one of many travellers to fall under their spell. He even devoted a book to them, The Zincali, or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain. Others, he noted, were similarly captivated. These were ‘individuals who have taken pleasure in their phraseology, pronunciation, and way of life; but, above all, in the songs and dances of the females … In the barrio of Triana, a large Gitano colony had flourished, with the denizens of which it is at all times easy to have intercourse.’

Borrow can be taken with a large pinch of salt, but his description of the moment a gypsy wedding party starts dancing in a room piled three inches thick with sweetmeats gives an idea of the wildness of juergas past. ‘In a few minutes the sweetmeats were reduced to powder, or rather to a mud, the dancers were soiled to the knees with sugar, fruits and yolks of egg. Still more terrific became the lunatic merriment. The men sprang high into the air, neighed, brayed, and crowed; whilst the Gitanas snapped their fingers in their own fashion, louder than castanets, distorting their forms into obscene attitudes, and uttering words to repeat which were an abomination.’ Yet, still he loved them.

Those old gypsy protectors and enthusiasts have their modern equivalents. They include the social workers of the Tres Mil and those of the jails. There is something deeply attractive about the naivety of some gypsies, about their simple, yet historic, refusal to sign up to the modern world. Those who have won their trust were, I found, highly protective of them. Then there were the legion of payo flamenco buffs. These were often the first to say that, although there are many great payo flamenco singers, you could not do it properly unless you had gypsy blood in your veins. Access to duende, the mysterious, magical force that inspires the best flamenco, was, I was told, available only to true gypsies.

Gypsy-chasing was not the exclusive domain of absolute monarchs, however. General Franco ordered the militarised rural police, the Civil Guard, to keep the gypsies under control, specifying it as a task in the force’s 1943 code. The generalísimo’s regime patronised what some people have, only half-jokingly, referred to as ‘nacional flamenquismo’, a folkloric accompaniment to the ‘nacional catolicismo’ ideology of his regime. The popular copla, which many flamenco artists turned to, was the radio music of the regime. Franco, in short, was happy to see the spotted shirts, tight waistcoats and the broad Cordobese hats of what might be described as musical-hall gypsiness. There were no lack of gypsies and other artists prepared to play ball. Spain’s gypsies have always known how to adapt. It was under him, though, that the gypsy families were cleaned out of Triana.

Despite all this, the Spanish gypsies’ culture and social structure, already different from other gypsy groups around the continent, held strong. They remained stubborn, sometimes rebellious and always proud. They saw off, in short, every threat that came over the horizon, except drugs.

Gypsy culture is slowly being diluted. Some gypsies are now unrecognisable from other Spaniards. Life expectancy, however, is reported to be almost ten years lower than for other Spaniards, while only 1 per cent of gypsies go to university. Traditions remain strong. The checking of a bride’s virginity by searching for blood on the sheets used on her wedding night is still practised by some. The gypsies kept their own laws and, until recently, still turned to their own elders, the so-called tíos, or uncles, to mediate in blood and honour disputes. But the rise of drug barons, gypsy politicians and, some say, evangelical pastors, has shaken their authority, if not the respect with which the elderly are still held. The tíos often established frontiers between competing groups so that they should not need to sort out questions of honour by turning to violence. It is something prison governors are still careful to do.

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.’

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, like 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.