Their music is intensely rhythmic and hedonistic.”Madrid’s socially disadvantaged immigrant quarter, Lavapies, inspires Amparanoia. “They’ve decontextualised flamenco from any trace of authenticity, to create something new. So they rip old forms from their moorings, reconstruct them with new instruments and crash them together with the street language of today’s urban young.”This is the point of their music,” says Fernando Neira, critic for the daily El Pais. We are not flamencos, there are plenty of others doing a good job at that,” says Ojos’ Ramon Gimenez, 36, a Gypsy and flamenco guitarist.But traditional music in its pure form doesn’t connect with young people, they reckon. Spain’s metropolitan society has within a decade become a mosaic of colours, languages and cultures to match London, Paris or Lisbon.Groups such as Amparanoia and Ojos de Brujo stake no claim to pure flamenco “Flamenco is a serious business. It looks to Africa and the Maghreb, and to Latin America, mirroring social trends. But only now, as Ojos’ reputation sweeps south of the Pyrenees, is mass acclaim building at home.This is Spain’s first pop music not to ape European styles.
Like the young Turks 25 years ago, today’s mestizo (mongrel) bands defiantly reflect the explosive social transformations rippling through Spain.Ojos de Brujo rail against war, global poverty, slums and racism, and champion the cause of squatters, outcasts and losers. Fusion seems a limp description for this extravagant mix.Ojos de Brujo emerged from a group of buskers living in a squat in Barcelona’s Raval district, the red-light quarter. They’ve taken Spain’s ancient Gypsy and Moorish traditions and reworked them with a joyful vibrancy.
Amparanoia and Ojos de Brujo head a movement that has transformed Spanish popular music. Ojos de Brujo (Sorcerer’s Eyes), are an eight-strong group fronted by the pipe-smoking Gypsy Marina las Canillas. This lively collective spikes flamenco with rap, hip-hop, reggae, African and Caribbean rhythms driven by strumming guitars and electronic technology imported from New York dance-halls. They craved punk, anarchism and sexual excess: the things they’d never had.
Today, the streets of Madrid and Barcelona echo once more to those broken rhythms. From the urban mixed-race neighbourhoods has sprung a colony of young musicians with a distinctive voice. Back in 1979, prompted by the death of the dictator Franco, Spain’s youngsters dropped flamenco and syncopated clapping in the streets, to embrace the hedonism of la movida. Most of his career since he hung up his little Union Jack badges and his bowling shoes has seemed to be an exercise in saying: “Look, that was then, this is now.” He has pursued this policy to the point of perversity.. As sure as The Clash can never reform, now that Joe Strummer is dead, so I believe Paul Weller will never reform The Jam This single was proof he didn’t have to. Because there are certain impossibilities in music and life that result from the passing of time and the changes we go through. That’s us, Jonathan Ross screams it every Saturday morning, we’ll still jump around to “Town Called Malice” when no one but our mates is watching but we’re more likely to pour ourselves into a glass of wine while chilling out to Wild Wood.And though the cynic in me assumed that Weller was being played on XFM because his radio plugger will have done a deal with the station, promised them the exclusive on The Strokes or someone, as soon as I heard the single, I knew they were right to play it.
