The dancing was inspiring, but the revolution never happened

Flamenco music and dance – it just gets your pulse racing.

That was the feeling that came over me the first time I went to a concert. That was in Paris, oddly enough. I was there on a school trip, the first time I’d failed to spend a holiday with my parents, making it an important rite of passage in itself. 

The music captures the soul of Spain and the musicians were, indeed, Spanish. The setting, on the other hand, was pure French. And it was a curious time in French history: the Easter of 1969. 

Less than a year earlier the city had seen the great events of May-June 1968. Many had then believed that the very foundations of the French state were under attack, that a new French revolution was taking place. Students in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the main university area, were out on the streets daily, battling against riot police.

Paris May-June 68: a student flinging cobblestones at police lines

The students’ weapon of choice was the cobblestone, dug out of the roadway and used as a missile against the police lines. When I first saw one of those stones close up, I have to say I was amazed by the strength some of those students must have had. I couldn’t have thrown one far.

Many Paris streets were still cobbled at that time, but that was changing. For me, the most striking legacy of those events, was seeing the heaps of cobblestones piled in the courtyard of the youth hostel where our party stayed. Clearly, the authorities weren’t going to be caught out again: they were removing a far too easy source of ammunition for future rioters.

Do you remember the start of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Butch, played by Paul Newman, casing a bank which he’s beginning to realise now has too much security for his gang to raid again, asks ‘What was the matter with that old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful.’

A security guard replies ‘People kept robbing it.’

‘Small price to pay for beauty,’ says Butch.

Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy,
regretting the disappearance of the beautiful old bank

For as long as the cobbled streets of Paris were only causing havoc to car suspensions, the beauty seemed worth the price. But when they provided the fuel for revolution, the price was deemed too high.

Not that there ever really was a revolution. Years later, I heard a radio interview with Maurice Grimaud, Paris Police Chief at the time, and he said that it was a strange revolution that didn’t cost a single life – two people died on the fringes of the fighting but none at all in the fighting itself. And, as he pointed out, the conflict was entirely contained within the Latin quarter – he never lost control and never allowed it to spill out of the small area where it began.

That didn’t stop Charles de Gaulle, then President, running off to the French garrison in Baden-Baden, ready to form a government in exile and prepare for a new triumphant return in arms to the fatherland, just as he’d done in 1940. But by 1969, he was back in the Elysée Palace. Though not for long: he resigned as I was travelling back to school.

So it was in a slightly febrile atmosphere, the jittery climate of Paris in 1969, between the May-June days and de Gaulle’s departure, that I saw my first Flamenco concert. An oasis of pleasure in a desert of tension. And it marked me. It left me with an ineradicable love of Flamenco. What’s more, whenever I hear Flamenco again, I think of that strange moment in Paris half a century ago. 

As I did the other day, as we approach the end of our stay in Valencia. It was another great performance, full of verve, dynamism and beauty. There are moments whenever I watch Flamenco when I wonder how they manage to do it. The boots hit the stage with such force. The singing is so powerful. The guitar playing so frenetic. The dancers are full of passion while maintaining such dignity.

The performance also gave me a sense of political wistfulness. Because the audience was made up of French and German and Dutch as well as Spaniards. And even a group of English people.

Brought together in joint enjoyment of an exciting evening.

Passion and dignity combined

It was clear that the groups had a great deal in common, bound together by a shared culture. How could one of them be about to sever its links with the others? Why was Brexit going to force those Englishmen to break their bonds with their fellow Europeans?

It’s a strange, incomprehensible state of affairs.

It’s clear that more and more people in Britain are turning against Brexit. It is tearing the ruling Tory Party apart. It has caused major divisions within the Labour opposition too, divisions that would doubtless explode if ever the party came to office and had to deal with the issues of leaving the EU.

No one seems set to gain from Brexit, and yet no one seems to be able to do anything to stop it. Britain seems bound, inevitably, for a great leap backwards. A change against progress and towards a world that prefers walls to bridges.

Ah, well. Another good reason for going to a Flamenco concert. Get the blood stirring, the feet tapping, the hands clapping. And take your mind off the sheer cussedness of the world. 

I met Flamenco soon after a revolutionary movement that reverberates still today. And now I’ve enjoyed it just before a reactionary step of equal moment. Sadly, while the revolution never really happened, Brexit I fear most certainly will.