Listen/read: Flamenco innovator Lole Montoya: “I would not be able to sing something I’m not feeling”

You can also listen to this story – below or via your favorite podcast app.

Whenever I look for information of an artist I admire and I can’t find much on the internet, I read it as a good sign. I suspect there’s most of times a connection between keeping it private/humble and being pure at what you do. As if a true interest and devotion to your craft felt too big to coexist with an obsession with your own self or career. And that’s the case of Lole Montoya. It’s impressing how this woman has been changing the course of flamenco from the seventies on and still she’s kept it so natural, so discrete up to these days.

Gypsy blood runs through Lole’s veins since she was born in Triana, the cradle of flamenco. Her family is so deeply rooted to flamenco that she doesn’t even remember the moment in which she decided she wanted to dedicate her life to singing - she says it was as natural as learning how to walk. Her also well-known mother, Antonia La Negra, was born in Argelia and grew up surrounded by Arabic music, a very strong influence that conveyed to Lole in the same strong way and that we can find in all her music.

By the time she became an adult, Montoya had already shared the stage with flamenco legends like Camarón de La Isla. Lole y Manuel, the duo she made together with the acclaimed guitarist Manuel Molina in the early seventies, felt like a bloom in the just finished Spanish dictatorship and changed the whole Andalusian music scene.

During childhood and adolescence Lole and Manuel had received a variety of influences related to their specific familiar circumstance and current time: classical music, Arabic melodies, ethnic rhythms or rock. They deliberately allowed those influences to penetrate the core of flamenco and break the purist moulds: they injected poetry, light and colour into them. “We were never rockers or hippies, but we shared those years with them, and were open to their culture and music”, claimed Montoya for a Spanish media some years ago.

They dared to do so with no doubt or fear to the critics by flamenco orthodoxes, who would sometimes consider them as heretic or say they were making ‘wrong flamenco’. They didn’t care because they were very aware that purity must admit evolutive transformation and they were making music from a very honest and devoted point of view. “Lole y Manuel knew very well what they were doing. People saw us on stage in a truthful way, because we were very convinced of what we were doing”.

They got to make lyrics less inextricable and introduce cante flamenco to the general public - which not many musicians of this genre have accomplished - and created a new path that Paco de Lucía, Camarón de la Isla, Tomatito or Manolo Sanlúcar would find smoother thanks to them.  

But becoming the gypsy pharaoh didn't give way to selfishness or narcissism for Lole Montoya. Just the opposite, it only enhanced her modesty and connected her even more to the purity of her craft: “I’ve never enjoyed behaving as a diva, neither claiming who I am in the music of this country […] I got offered a lot of money in exchange for personal information, but we sold records, not our lives”.

Lole says it doesn’t feel special to her knowing she’s a myth for so many people. For her, success consists on “saying what you want to say and people knowing you for that […] I respect people that perform music for money, but I’m too picky, I would not be able to sing something I’m not feeling”. She stresses the truth underneath their music, the meticulousness with which they made every song, and the connection and warmth she’s always felt towards the crowd. “There’s no creativity in making your own little kingdom of ‘first me and then me’, you lose the ability to dream, and that’s anti-cultural”.

From what you’ve read, you can picture how authentic and honest Montoya’s relationship to music is, and how this strong passion leads her to not take her fame and wealth as first priority. In some interviews, she shows irritation about the music industry and institutions in Spain: she complains about the “people who only care about money and want to recuperate expenses the moment they’re generated”. “I have no interest in working like that, I want to work with dreamers, people who make you see the youth of their vision, not ‘take the money and run’”.

Another illustrative example is that she didn’t even know that her song ‘Tu mirá’ was in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill vol. 2’ until she saw the movie at the cinema. Sadly, the music industry is often not capable of understanding what devotion to music consists of and taking care of it. Admirably, this hasn’t damaged the bond that Lole Montoya has with the crowd. She sweetly describes an intimate relation to the listeners at performances: “[Despite the problems with the music industry] I have no problem with the crowd, because I’m always eager to sing, and they are always eager to listen to me […] we never had to ask for silence in a concert, people were always quiet”.

Lole Montoya performs at Le Guess Who? 2022 on Saturday, 12 November as part of the Hidden Musics project.