Duende: a journey in search of Flamenco, by Jason Webster

Liz Thomson finds the real rhythms of Spain in this tale of Brit abroad

Aldous Huxley described flamenco as "dismal Spanish wailings punctuated by the rattle of the castanets and the clashing harmonies of the guitar". Clearly, the doors of perception did not open for him that day – or perhaps he was on a cheapie to Torremolinos, watching bargain-basement flamenco over a jug of cheap sangría.

Since the Sixties, when the Brits took off for the costas, there can be few who haven't experienced what passes for flamenco. Despite mostly second-rate performers, it's almost impossible not to feel its visceral thrill. Just as Don José lost his heart, and much besides, to the shameless Carmen, so we fell for its rough embrace. My first encounter was at a Costa Brava nightclub called Las Cuevas, where the male lead was the now celebrated Antonio Gades. I was nine!

It was a woman, Italian as it happens, who broke Jason Webster's youthful heart, leading him to abandon his Oxbridge career as an Arabic scholar and to head for Spain with a cheap guitar and a desire to do something "colourful, exciting and wild". He fetched up in Alicante, where a friend of a friend was happy to offer a bed. There Webster taught English, spending his meagre earnings on guitar lessons under the Latin-tempered Juan, practising until his fingers bled.

"Duende," explains Juan, is being in love. "It is being with people you love and care for." Soon our would-be guitarist is in love with Lola, the wife of his boss at the language school, whose dancing ambitions have been thwarted by her macho snob of a husband. Like many so-called Spanish sophisticates, he considers flamenco an embarrassing reminder of the old Spain.

Fear of discovery propels Webster to Madrid in search of "real" flamenco. He thinks he finds it with a bunch of gypsies and is prepared to share a room with cockroaches and "the unforgiving stench of cat piss" in order to learn at their feet. They accept el churumbel (gypsy slang for kid) at a terrifying price: soon the skinny, blond honorary gypsy is sniffing coke and stealing cars. Only when one of the gang dies in a high-speed escapade does Webster come to his senses and split.

In Granada, he plays guitar for dance classes, hangs out with the ageless and enigmatic Grace, an Englishwoman who has discovered her own particular duende, and watches the great Paco de Lucia perform amid the splendour of the Alhambra. In the magic of the flower-scented night, Webster, the Arabic scholar, recognises that such artistry requires "genius and discipline: the subtle concept of duende at the heart of flamenco cannot be produced by cocaine, any more than LSD brings genuine enlightenment".

A few years on, Webster is living in Valencia with a dancer whom he accompanies only as she works out. The book ends with the guitar no longer the centre of his life, merely an essential part of his day. He has come of age. Reading Duende, you learn a good deal about an ancient and complex art form that the unlamented Generalissimo ordered reinvented for the tourists: flamenco-lite was as much a part of Franco's Spain as straw donkeys and bullfight posters.

These days, real flamenco is being taken seriously again, in Spain and beyond: the Escuela de Baile in London's Camden Town offers courses on palmas (clapping) and castanets, as well as on voice, dance and guitar. But if a white boy can't sing the blues, can a mere Brit play flamenco? If only Duende came with a CD: El Churumbel would be a great title.