One man has done more to popularise flamenco in the past twenty years than anybody else. He was, of course, a gypsy. His name was José Monge Cruz, better known as Camarón de la Isla, the Shrimp of the Island. The Shrimp was a man with Mick Jagger lips and one of the worst, most bouffant, hairstyles since James Brown. He also possessed the best, most tragic, flamenco voice of the past quarter of a century.
Camarón was an intense introvert – a man of profound, hermetic silences. He lived in a period when young singers, thanks to the influence of pop and rock, could become living legends. It was also a time when flamenco itself opened up, incorporating new instruments and allowing itself to be influenced by the turbulent popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Camarón himself would lose from this meeting, dying a rock star’s early death. Along the way, however, he ensured himself the same kind of mythical status of fellow tortured, ‘live fast, die young’ stars like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. He died in 1992. Some say that flamenco has yet to recover.
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