prologue
OFTEN WE END up doing what we almost want to do because we lack the courage to do what we really want to do. For years I lived in Italy because I wanted to be in Spain.
As a teenager, Spain had captivated me. Touristy photo books showed a technicolour land of cathedral-like blue skies, dark, open-faced women with bright red carnations in their hair, and the delicate columns and lines of the Alhambra and the Great Mosque in Córdoba. It seemed ancient, mysterious, exotic; a mythical country of semi-madness where men in tight trousers fought deadly beasts and people spoke in earthy, gutteral sentences that gave great philosophical importance to everyday tasks such as buying the milk. Outside my window, the Fens of East Anglia stretched an eternal grey in every direction; a flat, wet desert of inbred farmers and plump girls on bicycles, where the only possible excitement was trying to persuade Blind Bob, the barman at the Red Lion, to give me a drink despite the fact that I was underage. In the books, Spain and its people were always beautiful and warm and passionate. It felt like a lost home. One day I felt sure I would go and live there.
But things got in the way: a chance to live in Italy and the beginning of a self-destructive relationship; university to study Arabic; a year living in Egypt eating beans and running away from over-zealous papyrus salesmen. In my ignorance I thought I was being drawn to the Mediterranean in general. I was wrong. I never found the human warmth and openness I sought and expected to find – the Italians were too busy worrying about how they looked, the Egyptians about the next meal. It was, and always had been, Spain.
Then a chance to remedy things came unexpectedly: after four dry, affectionless years, my Florentine girlfriend left me on the day of my last exam. Bound by the addictive ideas of first love, the plan had been for me to go and join her in Italy once my degree was over: after a relationship built on phone calls and holidays, we could finally be together. But after so much time spent dreaming of an end to our separation, the opportunity to make it real proved too much, and the self-destructive streak in her took control just as my time at university came to an end. No more girl, no more Italy, no more university, no more Middle East.
Suitably heartbroken, I realised that my chance to make a break for Spain had finally come. Loveless and eager for adventure, I was free to escape the mistakes I’d made and explore the passionate world that had inspired me as a teenager; a world I felt I should have been experiencing all along. Spain, I felt, was calling me. But I was keen not just to float around. I wanted something to do there.
‘All that university stuff’s self-indulgent crap!’ a drunken busker assured me in a pub one evening after offering to rearrange my nose.
‘I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do with your degree if you’re ever up shit creek? You can’t eat a degree. At least I can play “Streets of London” and earn a few quid that way.’
He hit a nerve. After four years’ study, all I could offer were five different words for ‘camel’ and the classical Arabic term for masturbation. I desperately wanted a skill, to be able to do something with my hands after years of sitting in libraries concocting meaningless arguments to impress my tutors with. But bricklaying and plastering had only limited appeal. I wanted something more creative.
The busker took pity on me and asked me to buy him a drink.
‘Tell you what,’ he said as I handed over a large brandy and soda, ‘you should take up the guitar, learn a few chords, like me.’
I had never been particularly musical, although the guitar had always appealed to me. But at the age of nine, inspired by a man in a pork-pie hat in a ska band on the television, I temporarily forgot my deep-felt ambition and took up the saxophone instead. It was a mistake from the start: the instrument was bigger than I was, then my teacher had a nervous breakdown and fled to a hippy commune in Scotland. Finally my saxophone was stolen by the school thief. I gave up music after that.
Playing an instrument, however, was precisely the kind of skill I wanted to learn now. I realised all the wrong choices I had made could be cancelled out at once. I was free to live in Spain and to pick up the instrument I had always intended to. All at once it became clear: I should learn flamenco guitar, the musical heart and essence of Spain. It was colourful, exciting and wild – everything my life wasn’t. The decision itself was deceptively simple. With almost no idea about flamenco, or where it might lead me, I decided to start straight away.
It was a frightening thing to do, though – leaving everything, a structured life, the network of friends and comforts of an environment I knew well. University life was easy and sheltering. That was precisely why so many of those apparently wise and wrinkled old dons wandering around the quads seemed so childish once you got talking to them; bickering and flirting just like the post-adolescents they were teaching. At university you could live all the adventures you wanted in your head just by going to the library and reading about exotic places, while still enjoying cycling around town with a flowing scarf and snuggling by a fire with a pint in a warm pub in wintertime. I began to have doubts.
‘You should think about staying on to do some research,’ my tutor said when I saw him in the street. ‘Whatever you do, don’t just take off somewhere. Have you thought about a life in academia? I can just see you as a lecturer.’
I bought a ticket and a guitar and caught a plane the next day.
A journey and a quest lasting several years lay ahead of me, an experience that would change me for good. There was far more to flamenco – and to Spain – than I could ever have imagined.