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It's curious how young people are still being influenced by previous generations...

E.C. That's the way it should be. People ought to pick up their parents' vinyl records or buy records and listen to them. There's a lot of crappy music being made nowadays...

D. We were lucky that our parents had kick-ass records. Well, not my father; my father used to listen to José Luis Perales, ha ha ha. And Migue's brother had an enviable rock music collection. We didn't discover them going back to the past; rather we started from there. We recommend all young people to pick up the records from before they were born.

	El Canijo, Los Delinqüentes (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

E.C. And to eat a lot of ham.

And where do you place flamenco?

D. In the street.

E.C. We come from rock, but the thing is that in Jerez...

E.C. There's a lot of flamenco there. Our buddies are gypsies and flamencos; we've been in all the flamenco joints in Jerez. And doing a bulería beat all day long (and he does so on the table).

D. I remember perfectly well the first time I picked up a guitar, but not the first time I beat out a bulería rhythm.

E.C. We've had our fill at Uncle Luis's joint...

D. And what are the regional songs in Jerez?

And what role does flamenco play in the group's music?

D. The flamenco side comes from us being streetwise.

E.C. We love Agujetas, Chocolate, Tío Borrico...

D. We get it from being in the street. We play rock and flamenco flourishes come out. We do rock and roll... with a flamenco guitar.

E.C. We like to stick in bulerías from time to time, but our way; rock bulerías. We also put a lot of clapping in the tracks, a box drum... though that doesn't come from flamenco, it comes from Peru.

D. Instruments fuse just like different types of music. The box drum manufactured here in Spain for flamenco has nothing to do with the original one. And check out the lute; the Arabs bring it to Spain, here it's modified, it's taken to Cuba and there it became the tres and the Cuban lute.

E.C. Raulito (Raúl Rodríguez) plays the Cuban tres really well. The Son de la Frontera album is really good. I love it.

Why do you define the songs as “color comic strips”?

E.C. We don't like the album to have a single motif, that's all. We like for there to be characters, for there to be songs about real things that have happened to us, and above all, to make up surrealistic things such as ‘los trabubu’, El Pirata del Estrecho, Johnny Chaparrón... who are comic book characters. We don't like the album to have the title of a track. It's an entire work, which is ‘El verde rebelde vuelve’ (‘The Green Rebel Returns’), and all the tracks go lumped together there.

D. We don't see the record as a collection of songs we just string together, and that's it. There are songs that were left off the album, not because they aren't good enough, but because they didn't fit in with the motif. This record is special because it has a title made up by Migue for a fictitious radio program he used to write with El Canijo.

E.C. Since there was no way of getting us to study, we used to goof off all day. I wasn't in Migue's class; I was in the class next door and so he'd pass me a sheet of paper and we'd do the program that way. I was the character Farlopa pa la Tropa (Snow for the Troops). Willy, who was El Increíble Gorrión Mojado (The Incredible Wet Sparrow), also used to write... And we spent the whole year that way.

D. Green is also a tribute... it was his favorite color.

What does it mean to be a garrapatero? How can we explain it?

D. A genuine person, the real thing, a straight shooter who looks you in the eyes. For example, a bank manager isn't a garrapatero.

E.C. Yeah, yeah. It's got nothing to do with money or luxury... A shack, a dirt road more than a paved one.

Los Delinqüentes at Espárrago 2003 (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

You've created like a feeling of community...

D. Of brotherhood. Walking down the street, people tell us: “I'm a garrapatero”.

E.C. They identify with us. We're never going to lose that word.

What outlook do you have now that your third album is out?

D. We want to go everywhere where we're called.

E.C. What we like the most is playing live. We love getting the concert ready, rehearsing, setting up our stuff... That's all a real scene.

D. The live show is the absolute truth. And the lower the stage is and the closer it is to the people, the better. So the people can reach out and nearly touch you. We love it because we feel streetwise. The people in Jerez know what step to find us on every day.

And is composing something non-stop?

D. He's a machine.

E.C. I love composing, and especially after lunch, when you're half groggy after a nap. That's when the best things come out.

D. That time's very good for playing, for composing... and for everything.

E.C. And for ‘porking’, too.

And then the photographer goes and says: “The worst thing is working after lunch”.

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