I nearly went home before anything even started.
The whole thing began because a guitarist in Cádiz mentioned a peña outside Jerez and said, “Thursday can be alright.”
Not good. Not amazing. Just alright.
Which usually means one of two things in flamenco:
either something memorable happens,
or you spend four hours drinking beer beside a television nobody’s watching properly.
The bus journey out there was grim in that very specific edge-of-town Andalucía way. Warehouses. Dusty petrol stations. Random patches of scrubland with plastic bags caught in bushes. At one stop a man got on carrying what looked like an entire bathroom mirror for no obvious reason.
By the time I arrived I thought the place might actually be shut.
Half the shutters were down. One weak light inside. Football on television. No music.
An old man was sitting near the bar watching the match with the sound muted. Or maybe the sound was broken. Hard to tell.
I stood in the doorway for a second wondering if I’d misunderstood the address completely.
The bartender looked at me, nodded once, then carried on drying glasses.
I ordered a beer because leaving immediately would have felt strange.
Nothing happened for ages after that.
Not “nothing happened” in the storytelling sense where something is secretly building underneath.
I mean literally nothing.
People wandered in and out. Someone carried boxes through the room. A woman arrived with supermarket bags and disappeared somewhere behind the kitchen curtain. Two men spent at least fifteen minutes arguing about a cable.
At one point I checked the time and realised I could still technically make the earlier bus back if I left immediately.
I nearly did.
Then one of the men started tapping compás on the table while talking.
Just absentmindedly.
The old man near the television joined in a few seconds later without even turning his head.
Nobody announced anything. That’s what I remember most clearly.
No “ladies and gentlemen.”
No scraping back chairs.
No signal that the night had suddenly changed direction.
A guitarist appeared eventually. I honestly don’t know where from. He was carrying the guitar with no case and still wearing a supermarket fleece.
The woman with the shopping bags came back holding a cigarette and a small glass of something clear. Then she started singing while still standing up.
The first couple of songs were messy.
Someone lost the rhythm clapping.
A chair made a horrible cracking sound.
The guitarist stopped halfway through one section because a string sounded wrong.
Nobody seemed bothered.
That was probably when I relaxed a bit myself.
Because in some places flamenco feels slightly too aware of being watched. You can sense everyone trying to produce “a flamenco experience.”
This didn’t feel like that.
It felt more like people had ended up there because it was Thursday.
Then, somewhere later, maybe an hour in, it suddenly became very good.
Not gradually.
One minute people were still ordering drinks and talking over each other, and the next minute the whole room seemed to tighten around the rhythm.
The old man finally turned away from the football.
The singer sat forward in her chair and hit one heel against the floor so hard the glasses shook slightly on the bar.
Nobody applauded afterwards because nobody wanted to interrupt it.
That part only lasted a few minutes really.
Then the guitarist lit a cigarette.
Someone laughed about something I didn’t catch.
The television changed channel.
I stayed for another beer mostly because I couldn’t work out whether the night was finished or not.
On the walk back to the bus stop I realised I’d spent most of the evening thinking nothing was happening.
I think I was wrong about that.
