In the land of traditional flamenco, this five-piece from Seville combined in 1973 their musical heritage with psychedelic rock to produce a mighty flamenco rock fusion. Unappreciated at the time, this groundbreaking LP sounds today free of any ties and absolutely devastating. Few initial audacities can match these Andalusian guys’: to name themselves Flamenco coming from Seville and playing their style of music. They were a long-haired five-piece into psychedelia in the land of orthodox arte jondo (traditional Andalusian music). True B-list rock artists in Seville, usually ignored and unrecognised even in their most undisputed values, until very recently no one took their explosive fusion of flamenco and psych-rock seriously. The curious thing is that you don’t need to have changed your basic opinion about the band to appreciate that other aspects of their music (a sense of cheek, making a racket, their freak attitude and diabolical fusion mix) have become free of any ties, so that today the only LP by Flamenco sounds resoundingly glorious. Behind the group were the Garrido brothers, tireless promoters of the local Sevillian scene from 1967, first in Los Soñadores (with two released singles and also featuring Tele, future drummer in Triana) and later in Galaxia (with another two singles and a sound that already flirted with psychedelic fusion). It was in 1972 when, under that beautifully provocative name, the executive production of their manager, Emilio Santamaría (father of Eurovision winner Massiel), and the musical production of Carlos Montenegro, they released this, their only LP (Ariola 82.124-I), and four singles, all included in the album and produced with the charts in mind, although they didn’t get anywhere near them. At first glance, Flamenco may have been filed along with many of the light flamenco pop acts from the 70s (Payos, Gazpacho…) but today there’s no doubt about their singularity, although at the time the fact that they dared to use texts by Lorca or tanguillos (a flamenco style) by Paco de Lucía didn’t grant them the first division status and respectability they were after. Nowadays, this bastard son of a record sounds absolutely de-vas-ta-ting. Music that is jubilant, hungry, perhaps rough, but mighty. It has nothing to do with the purist rigor with which a few years earlier the pioneering Smash had defined the genre. This was… something else. Besides, why shouldn’t they do it, when the American group Carmen was at the time releasing their own, soulless flamenco rock mix worldwide (including Spain). You only had to put the record on and it was obvious. The band bared their souls on the opening track, the ardent ‘Dímelo’, a simple flamenco rumba in its origin but here transformed by psychedelic additions in perfect collusion with borrowings from Santana’s Latin rock and Osibisa’s Afro-rock. It’s a track that practically defines the record and its extreme manners freely permeate the two sides of the album: ‘Todo se va a acabar’, ‘Algo me va a pasar’, ‘Anda jaleo’… Guitars, distortion, organs, fuzz, percussion and the singer’s jonda voice inviting the listener into a psychedelic discotheque. Only a madman would nowadays dare to underrate a group like this. They were fundamentally bright musicians capable of articulating a personal proposal using ingredients that, years ago, were not at all part of the diet of the Spanish flamenco rock intelligentsia, but which today stand up joyful for anyone with a pair of ears. Vicente Fabuel