MERCE: Flamenco is eternal; it has almost two centuries of history. The only thing I do with this new work, “Aire,” is to make flamenco for the 21st century. I sing about the things that happen every day. I have great respect for the basics, for the roots of flamenco, but you can’t keep singing lyrics that are 60 years old. You have not lived them, and you can’t feel them. I want to attract new people to flamenco. For me the greatest satisfaction comes when I see a lot of young fans at my concerts. It’s marvelous.
I’m in favor of what’s called fusion when it’s good, when it really serves to enrich and enlarge flamenco. If I add drums or percussion, it’s because they are expressive of flamenco. I do a blues number on this album. Blues and flamenco both come from the street, from the people, so they are very similar. I love this roots music, jazz, blues, so we fuse them, but for a reason, not just for the sake of it.
My family have always been singers. For me, singing is the most normal thing in the world. It’s not that you need to study it, because flamenco is fresh and living, but if every 10 minutes you hear something new, you learn. What you need is a base, roots–from that you can express your feelings, your personality. If you don’t have that base, if you make a record to be commercial, then not even you will believe it.
I have always sung, since I was tiny, and at 13 I began to sing professionally. I told my father I wanted to stop studying, and I began in a show in Cadiz and then went to Madrid, and started to tour Europe and America. I appeared in Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” with [the Spanish film-maker Carlos] Saura, all kinds of things. You must start as a novice before you can become a bullfighter; you need all that experience behind you for the day you walk out onstage. It must progress step by step. Hurrying never works; you must give time to everything.
Yes–now I am making flamenco that is accessible. It must be universal, for everyone… Now anyone who wants to can go to a flamenco concert and you don’t need to know it or understand it. The beautiful part is that you feel it. Flamenco is very passionate, very sentimental, with much heart and much truth, and you really express this heart when you are playing live to an audience.
We hope to tour Europe and America in the spring. I find that outside Spain I’m treated with great respect and warmth, and people understand flamenco. I have had a lot of experience abroad–in 1974, for instance, I toured Japan, and I was stunned that a country which has nothing to do with our culture has such a tremendous love of flamenco. They’re really crazy about it.
I don’t understand anything, but I like everything. I listen to blues, jazz, son, classical music–there’s always something that gets me, I always take something away.
I play cards, I go to see a good bullfight or to watch Real Madrid play, I throw tantrums. The world of flamenco today is not what it was. I used to go to lots of clubs, where we’d have fun singing and playing. Today that’s much harder, and I don’t go out at night much now. I live in Madrid, but I have a house in the south, and we spend the whole summer there. I have two daughters. My son, Curro, died in 1994 [when he was] 14 of heart problems. That was a real blow. It’s the worst thing that can happen to you, you never get over it, but you keep working, life goes on.
It’s very hard to explain. I’d say this: sometimes when you perform or record or meet friends, you think, I’d give anything not to sing today, because you just don’t feel like it. But as a professional you have to give everything, so that day somehow you go out onstage and it turns out to be better than ever–I think that must be el duende.
