Flamenco Express Diary

Another show is over. As the van batters down the Endless Dark Motorway of Pain, we finally drift off with our thoughts. Or rather, the one thought. ‘Bed!’ Ten hours ago we were (for the purposes of this exercise) arriving fresh and relaxed - if a little peckish - at the theatre, having miraculously avoided any motorway tediousness, ready and focussed on our task - to find an Italian restaurant up to Mateo’s standards.

The artists need to eat, the technicians need to begin pointing the lights in the right direction. Again, everything is going according to plan, specifically, the lighting plan mailed to the theatre some days before. The technician is ready in the Tallescope dark and begins his wrestling match with the burning lights, which seem to have a life of their own.
‘Downstage… Left…OK.’
‘OK? Move me on Mike.’ - The jargon is not very colourful.

The singers and guitarists arrive to tease the best sound possible from the building, allowing in advance for the dampening effect of the audience. If it is a plaster-laden rococo wedding cake like one of Matcham’s masterpieces, we are in clover. But some of the more minimalist halls are a little colder and even less predictable. An experienced resident sound technician is invaluable in those circumstances.

The red and blue and green Xmas deeley lights flicker on the desk.
‘More reverb… A bit more volume in the monitors….’ - Not quaint, but effective.
Setting the sound for flamenco is very exacting and often seems to be dicing with feedback. Requests sometimes raise eyebrows from technicians in first-time flamenco houses.

The dancers take the stage. Where are the hollow spots, the sweet spots, the dead spots? How slippery? Which light can I use to spot my turns? Where do I exit? -
“No - this is when I begin my footwork..”

The rehearsal is over. The Half Hour ticks by. The house lights go down, the audience glitters expectantly, the first beats of the opening martinete sound out, there is no escape now, the show is under way in the usual blur of sound and lights and heart and adrenalin and scrambles for the interval drinks.

British audiences are reaching flamenco in new ways. Many now come because of their YouTube discoveries rather than to relive Costa Del Sol night club memories. And there are now many more authentic jaleos from the average regional audience than ever. More Spanish people are living and working in Hull and Bristol and Tewkesbury. And more British young people are hearing flamenco. With the help of the most modern technology, one of the most essentially primal artforms is spreading and growing. Which is how it should be.

The show is over, and everyone is sweating. Which, again, is how it should be. Everyone needs more water, and time to readjust from the stage high, and to talk without the performance looming overhead, and very soon something to eat. A french musician comes to the stage door to invite us to a local club where there is Gypsy jazz until 3. We would love to, but simply can’t. We have to do this all again tomorrow, or be on planes to Madrid or Jerez.

This particular outing began a year ago with an email to a database entry, and is nearly over. This time, there were no problems. It was a typical, non-eventful, efficient day’s artistic creation. Sometimes, believe it or not, things can be quite different.

———————————————————————

CORK 24/4/02

We’re taking flamenco to Cork in the spring. I try to fight off the approaching stereotypes. Fat chance. The pilot makes his announcements in a whiskey and rainwater, oysters and black stout accent. The land positively glows green beneath us as if to say: “All the fairy stories you heard are true.”
It rains from the minute we arrive. ‘Thank God - You lads have brought the rain with you.’ says the taxi driver, with a completely straight face. We tell him why we’re here. ‘The Opera House? A fine theatre. Now you boys mind you don’t go to any of those wicked pubs, and have a nice time in Cork.’ It is genuinely difficult to be politically correct to such a place.
We do go to some of those wicked pubs I’m afraid - but strictly on the business of promoting tomorrow’s show. We have competitions organised through the venue and by local radio presenter and fiddler Eoghan Neff. We end up playing and singing with two local singers, a guitarist and three fiddlers, who swap instruments between choruses. Irish-blues-flamenco fusion. Some delerious fool delivers a high-folk, calf-covers-of-pissed-on-green acapella rendition of Yeats’ ‘Golden Apples of The Sun’. No chairs are thrown, not least by me. From where I am it sounds great…. But then it would. What a place to do business.
We get back to the hotel. The second round of drinks is pending. Just before I get up to order, the barman comes over and says: “I’m off home now lads. Help yourselves, so.” I swear to god, a serve-yourself pub.
This, apparently, is Cork. I want to eat it all up.  For the record, the Opera House stage is a little quiet and a little hard, but very adequate, and with no rake or slipperiness. The general stage sound is excellent for flamenco.
The audience is fantastically open and warm and receptive and encouraging.The technicians are alert and inventive. And the front-of-house staff bring the company refreshments without being asked. As the man said: ‘A fine theatre, so’.
A fine town too. The Jerez of the North, if you like. Forget swimming with squeaky dolphins before you die, Cork is far more fun, but not necessarily drier.

————————————————————————-

WILDERNESS NIGHT

We had a full house for the show (The Swan Theatre, Worcester ) which was a real pain in the neck because we weren’t on any sort of percentage deal. But it went well enough for the first of the season, and everyone was happy. Especially given the date. For some reason, the first anniversary seemed a strange day to be going to the theatre.
We eventually crammed everything into the van around the baby buggy and drove off merrily into the night. “Be home by 12.30″, I remember thinking.
Half an hour later we were sitting by the side of the A46 looking at the stars and waiting for the recovery truck to come. We had begged to stop because of the terrible smell in the van. At first I hadn’t noticed it, being up front, or I assumed it was just the baby. But then even I had to admit that something was on fire and we had to do something quick.
We pulled up in a lay-by behind a parked car-transporter and looked under the van. The exhaust pipe had broken off and was leaking gas into the cab. We called the breakdown service and waited… And waited…. And waited.
Three hours later we were still waiting. Everyone was being very British about it, really. We didn’t start blaming each other or bursting into tears or shouting “I can’t stand it any longer! I’m going to jump!” I didn’t have to stand over any snivelling Richard Attenboroughs writhing in the bottom of the van trying to steal the last of the rations and say “Pull yourself together man!”.
Instead, we all followed the baby’s example and tried to get some kip. I was in agony already. My legs were crammed up against the dashboard like something dreamed up by Torquemada.
The driver of the recovery truck was having problems finding us. We kept telling him where we were. Or rather, where we thought we were. The trouble was we weren’t there. Even though we thought we were.
The van started to get cold, the battery was running down from having to have the lights on. The baby kept waking up and crying. The seats kept getting harder. Visions of corrugated iron sheeting kept swimming in and out of my fuddled mind. I was wrapping myself up in it to keep warm and cosy. It seemed like a blessed relief. We ran out of water, pear drops and cigarettes. I don’t think any of us slept. At least they better not have because I couldn’t get a wink. We were getting hungry and started joking about who was going to be eaten first. Naturally, the baby lost.
Someone pointed out that human flesh tastes of pig. Another voice in the night pointed out that pig therefore tastes of human flesh. We all fell a bit quiet.
The discomfort reached that point where you want to scream with pain, but know it wouldn’t do any good. You feel so uncomfortable that you start to blame yourself. You think it MUST be your fault. Your tormented psyche thrashes around for someone to blame. Anything to preserve some strand of human dignity and generate enough spleen and bile and adrenalin to keep you warm and alive.
Anyway. After a lot of mucking about we didn’t die, and the first truck finally came at about 4.30. We didn’t even have the energy to cheer. He was going to take the baby and the advance guard back to London as a priority.
Almost immediately the second one arrived for the rest of us after another hour, and the first bout of torture was over. Now we had to get to London, towing the wretched Ford Transit Minibus behind us.
It was not the speediest trip outside the Nurbergring. We finally got inside the M25 at about 8 o’clock, after we spent the whole journey trying to keep the breakdown man from falling asleep at the wheel….
From the northern approaches I saw the sun coming up like a big red dustbin lid over the city and didn’t feel at all poetic. The last suburban fields were a simmering thin green soup of mist and rush hour exhaust. There were sad, hoar-frosted broken-down old Edmonton ponies just waking up and nosing the bushes as if they were looking for the light switch or their false teeth. The old dears had spent all night standing up in the cold. Tough. I couldn’t have cared less.
All I wanted was my bed and for the physical pain to stop. We ploughed through the rush hour brushing aside the commuters and giving the driver – who’d never been to London - a mini guided tour. That’s the famous Oxford Street, that’s the famous London Eye, and the famous Tower Bridge. I was for ceremonially slaughtering him on the famous Ludgate Hill. But by that point I wanted to kill the entire human race for getting in between me and my bed or for being asleep when I wasn’t.
When I finally dived into The Big Black, the Sneak Preview of Death, I got a brief flash of a merrily burning ‘Wily Coyote’ plunging into a lake in a hiss of soothing steam. The rest is silence.

————————————————————————–
AIRPORT FUN

Eleven fifteen they released us from the airprison. Some people had nowhere to go and were still waiting to find out were they were sleeping. People with kids. Old people. They may still be waiting as I write this twelve hours later.
This had the lot. Starving children, thunderstorms, men with machine guns…
The day had started so well. A beautiful Constable sky, smooth take-off into it from London City Airport, the prospect of a nice full house in sunny Jersey with time for a fresh lobster after the show. Time - 4.20pm ish. We’re all seated on the plane looking forward to the drinks trolley.
Then the announcement that raised the unanimous unspoken grunt of “Typical” in the cabin:
“There is a technical problem… We will be landing at Gatwick for a minor adjustment and taking off again shortly. There is nothing to worry about.” Not much.
We landed at Gatwick around 5.20. An hour after we took off from City - the same time it takes to fly to Jersey. There was the usual obscure aura of irritated tinkering that accompanies all interruptions to mechanised transport. We sat some more looking out the windows or at the ceiling. Then the rain started.
So we sat on the plane for several hours, in fact, while the thunderstorm crackled and spat all around us.
We survived on occasional rations of hypermarket Just Juice and water and some stuff which looked and, I assume, I suspect, tasted like that legendary substance - ship’s biscuit. ‘My God’, I thought, ‘I’ve been press-ganged.’ Well I didn’t, but I might have done had I not been stupified with boredom to the point of physical pain.
The kids seemed to be coping better than most, but not because their every need was catered for as in a normal prison. No, because (presumably ) their needs were almost totally ignored by the airline and airport. Though you have to say that the cabin staff did their best in the circumstances. You do have to say that.
So first they starved us and then, when they agreeed to let us go back into the airport, they lost our baggage. By this time Jersey airport had closed, and people just wanted to go home. They couldn’t. So then they starved us some more.
They told us the flight had been cancelled and that the next flight would be at 12.45 the following afternoon.
They told us they would put us up in hotels and pay for taxis for those returning to London.
They told us there were no baggage handlers available at that time. That’s what we were told.
Those are some of the things we were told, by a lot of different people wearing strange multi-coloured hats and scarves bearing their names and pictures to remind them who they were and what they looked like and what they were supposed to do. I suppose. Because that’s all they did seem to know. One of our dancers lost it gloriously and addressed the assembled masses with defiant revolutionary fervour and got one round of applause out of the weekend.
Some of us, the lucky few who could at least take their disappointment to a bed or bar somewhere, eventually staggered out in the first wave, gallantly leaving our starving, increasingly vocal companions behind to their fate.
Then just as a finisher, to add that essential garnish of genuine nightmare, as I was fleeing through one of many gleaming white hermetically sealed sci-fi corridors the two large men in black showed up.
Walking slowly down the corridor towards me getting bigger all the time. Men with very functional, obviously expensive, long, matte black objects born visibly on their chest among a lot of other dark, hard objects of various shapes and sizes. It was not a nice sight to see. And after the day I’d had, they looked like my coup de grace, and I wasn’t quite expecting that.

I swore audibly and involuntarily. A medical curse. The larger and more sensitive of the two took exception. I was told in no uncertain terms not to swear as there were children around. There were’nt, of course. They were all back in the Starvation Lounge listening to their parents swearing and passing out.
But nevertheless, I was convinced that if I opened my mouth again, he would kill me. So it’s OK to starve children, but not to swear in front of them. And this from a man apparently on his way down to mow them all down for being a nuisance. They dress to scare the Bejasus out of you, and then when it works, they apparently threaten to kill you. That, presumably, is what you’re meant to think. After a day of British European’s hospitality I was very, very tempted.

———————————————————————————