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Let's move on to the musical angle. How has the group become enriched?

The trips. On the fifth album, ‘Empaquetado al vacío / Vacuum packed’, we go back over postcards from all over the world. We have influence from Cuba, from New York... There are songs that spring up and are enriched with the trips and communication with others. We played at Cuba's National Theater with Herbie Hancock, in Argentina we were at La Trastienda and at a ‘squatters'’ house in La Boca neighborhood with Caramelo Santos and Manu Chao. It gives you another vision. You go along absorbing things in an honest way and grow inside. And that cures you of your nationalism. I used to say: “I'm from San Roque”. No, I was born in San Roque; I don't know where I'm from any more. I met my wife in New York at CBGB singing for David Byrne and she lives with me in Seville now. I've met someone I live with, I'm very happy and when I go there I've got twenty phone numbers I can dial to meet with people like David Byrne, the Living Colour members, photographers... And these relations enrich you. Instead of being locally-oriented like we used to be at the beginning, now we're a group that has a lot of directions and a lot of places where we can lay our eggs.

Chico Ocaña, Mártires del Compás (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

And there's always a hand outstretched to Africa...

	"Instead of being locally-oriented like we used to be at the beginning, now we're a group that has a lot of directions and a lot of places where we can lay our eggs"

Yeah, the thing is I was born on a double border, next to a bit of London and opposite Africa. I've seen the immigration question for years. Besides, I was an emigrant for some time in Germany. And my brother spent twenty years there and I know what that's all about: the pain you feel when you can't converse because you don't know the language. On the other hand, with our language difficulties, we've gone everywhere and we've opened up our ways to other ways in order to enrich ourselves. Instead of intruding, we've gone there to thrive. We keep on traveling all over the world, our albums come out in the United States and that means, even if it doesn't sell, that there's a reaction within world music. We don't get in there as Latino, but as Anglo Saxon, which is the heaviest thing that can happen to a group like us. Everybody goes Latino there and goes and lives in Miami. I'd never go and play in Miami or pick up a Grammy as long as they prohibit access to Cuban music.

Within flamenco, that so complicated world...

... and lying...

...how has Mártires del Compás evolved?

At the beginning everybody attacked us because flamenco critics are the biggest liars in the world. First of all, they haven't got a clue, and second of all, they're always talking about the past like Fraga. After ten years with the group and twenty-seven years studying flamenco from the inside, there are few people in this country who can stand their own with me on the subject. If somebody dares to try, I knock them for a loop because they can just talk about jack, queen and king. You have to be very guileless to be a good enthusiast. And the flamenco critics in this country are liars, blurred and haven't got a clue about what evolution is all about. Mártires has done evolutionary work in flamenco texts and cantes that will receive due credit some day.

And there are very good concert performers in guitar, but they accompany cante. How many? When I was a boy there were fourteen in my hometown and seventy thousand in Seville who knew how to play, accompany, not just to be virtuosos. That's why all the good guitarists that make albums now for people who sing, make them scream because they work in tones and chords that have nothing to do with flamenco. That's not evolution; that's cutting down the possibilities. There are around fifty cantes and nothing but tangos, bulerías and alegrías are sung. I make up cantes; the ‘petebulería’ is mine, the soleá is my soleá. Who's going to tell me that what I do isn't a soleá, that it's not a malagueña, that it's not an alegría, that it's not a taranto? You do the flamenco. Flamenco critics are the least documented because they read the four books there are out there and start to talk about Mojama or Charamusco, who are people they haven't even met. The soleá comes out of a person, that's what's important; how he upholds it, whether you like it or not. I don't like the cantaores with smooth voices; I like raspy voices. I like Tío Borrico, I like Rancapino, I like myself, I like Fernanda and Bernarda, I like Caracol, Camarón, Capullo, El Moneo, Los Zambos, Tía Anica la Piriñaca. And I don't like either Mayte Martín or Miguel Poveda. I don't like smooth cantaores. They've got a beautiful voice, but I don't like that flamenco. I like action-reaction flamenco of the moment, which is how I discovered flamenco and how it comes out of me. The rest are studies, dragging your way to that. Flamenco has haughtiness and a way about it. It isn't just singing, dancing and playing, it's knowing how to be a person, with good taste. Flamenco is he who's cocky. And the other flamencos are the ones that live in Fuente de Piedra, at the lagoon. I'm a flamenco...

Chico Ocaña at the record label offices (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

Without being ringed...

I'm ringed.

And how has the selection of the songs for the compilation been done?

Well look, making churros. I burnt my entire hand. My friend has a churro shop at Puerta de la Carne which has been around since 1812, and once in a while I get up and I go and eat churros. Since I don't know how to do it, the oil scalded my hand. And at that instant they called me to propose the compilation. I went home, started to think about it and worked it out. It's not complicated either: six times three, eighteen. It's not like that completely, but there's an anthropological order. It starts with San Roque, the origin of ‘flamenco billy’, and seeks a common thread in the songs characteristic of these ten years, for the geographical location, the people... the entire range of possibilities we provide within the six albums. It wasn't hard for me. I didn't have to seek out something specific because my sixty-nine songs are my sixty-nine children. And I love them all the same. I know which is the biggest and which is the smallest, but I don't discriminate any of them. My mother, since I'm a twin, taught me that very well. ‘Mine’ doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My ball was our ball. And my mother was our mother. When I'm writing I'm very plural and I talk to the whole group.

In fact, someone from the outside was put in charge of the documentary, weren't they?

We wanted to have Javier Mariscal's brother so that the workshop would do all the design. And it's out of friendship, not snobbism or arrogance. I had a book with Kiko Veneno where there were drawings by Mariscal, ‘Cantes inoxidables’, which didn't come out and I wanted to work with him so that he'd know I'm not the kind of guy I'd been made out to be to him by that man. That was made clear and now I'm a very good friend of his brother Tono. If there'd been bad vibes, I wouldn't have been talking about Mariscal or that design or that cutting. A different editing would have come out because the tapes are ours. I've worked in video and I know how to cut, but I didn't want to do it myself; it would have been very local, very selfish. I consider myself good at it; it's one of the things I kick ass at. But if I do it myself, no. It was a tribute to people and to do it, it had to be somebody from the outside to visualize that journey.

What key moments for the group would you highlight from the DVD footage?

The moments you remember but that don't appear. There's a lot of footage, from New York to Argentina, Cuba... it was impressive. A lot of the footage is going to appear in a film called ‘Ar meno un quejío’, which was recorded over the past four years and is about to be wrapped up. There's drama with a couple of actors, the group... and a lot of patience. It begins near San Roque, in Castellar, where I had the first studio with the punk group I started with. They closed the border with Gibraltar on us; they put up a bigger gate and we couldn't get in any more. Before that we used to go in a little boat. And we went to the castle, which was full of Germans, full of hippies. It starts off there and finishes in a sunflower field. It's very nice; I love the way Fernando de Fran has handled the footage. There are few films in the genre so human and so nice in how the pictures are handled. I think people are going to flip out.

Is there any new music on the horizon?

For the time being, we're on tour. Our sixth album is coming out in the United States with a new cover. We perform this summer in New York, Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana... And if the record sells well, then we'll have to go more. Apart from that, all the concerts are in Spain. We've just finished the Don Quixote tour now around Castile-La Mancha, where we'd never been before. Other things have come out of those ten concerts, like lyrics from Don Quixote. It really pissed me off to see hip hop people doing a sung version of Don Quixote, which was really awful. I'd never do it like that; I'd do my own version, since it's the only book you can take to your time. I've got my own Don Quixote song, which I made up during these concerts. Just like the song about the Housing Minister's thirty square meters (the proposed minimum dimensions for subsidized housing), which goes like this: “With the minister's thirty meters, I'm going to have to add a Velcro ceiling, so that when she comes, I can put the cat, dogs and ferns up there”. Now I'll do some tribute about the bishops demonstrating against homosexual marriages. I already did one to Fraga about the ‘Prestige’ (an oil tanker that sank off the coast of Galicia), so I'll leave the dinosaur alone. PP's ex-ministers, that one who spoke in the senate about homosexuality as a disease... those are the things I like to attack. They put it on a platter; that's why Mártires del Compás is indefatigable. When have you seen priests demonstrating in the streets or nuns asking for marriages between mothers and fathers? It's extreme right-wing. Look at the Prince of Asturias' wife, divorced and...

The conversation about the current scene of Spanish society continues off the record... though there are no comments about anything that isn't or isn't going to appear in songs by Mártires del Compás. For sure

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