Lola Flores: a beginner's guide

In a nation of flamboyant entertainers, Lola Flores outshone the field in colour and charisma to become a star of the world of flamenco-related song, dance, theatre and cinema. And a century and a quarter after her birth in poor, Catholic provincial Spain, she is still a huge figure, with posthumous side roles nowadays as queer icon, star of viral beer adverts, subject of fashion tributes, and, since last year, of a museum devoted to her life in Jerez, her home city.

She was born in the deeply flamenco-imbued sherry capital the year after the famous 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo (a flamenco fiesta) in Granada, organised by Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca to purify what they saw as an ancient folk tradition fallen into gaudy showbiz adulteration. This was the era of flamenco variety shows in theatres, cafés cantantes (late-night bars) and bullrings, and the rise of the copla, a flamenco-related song form also conflated with the similar tonadilla genre, performed with dramatic orchestral accompaniment and many castanets by stars like Imperio Argentina and Concha Piquer. It was to this end of the spectrum, rather than the purist flamenco concursos and peñas (clubs), that Lola was drawn.

Lola was brought up in a taberna run by her father. Her mother, a seamstress, had part Roma ancestry, and Lola readily adopted the exotic Romani aura. Her first hit song, ‘El Lerele’, is an outstanding example, with esoteric lyrics referencing Spanish Roma language and myths. She enthusiastically took flamenco dance classes as a child and by 1939 was attracting attention as part of the cast of the flamenco show Luces de España in Jerez’s Vilamarta theatre. From this flying start, she found a bigger role in a Madrid show, Cabalgata, which was soon touring across the country, accompanied by Lola’s mother as a (somewhat questionable) chaperone.

In later life, Lola was frank about her use of sex for advancement, at a time when the Civil War plunged many into depths of poverty, forcing swathes of Spain’s working class women into prostitution. In her autobiography and numerous TV interviews, Lola described how the impresario Adolfo Arenas was so smitten that he offered her 50,000 pesetas to sleep with him, which she accepted. Arenas also facilitated Lola’s next significant step to fame when he set up a revista (stage show) for her, co-starring the man who became her lover and professional partner for the following eight highly successful years.

The show was named Zambra, after a Roma dance, and the star was Manolo Caracol, the biggest name in popular flamenco. A powerfully built and imposing singer, Caracol was an absolute caricature of Andalusian machismo, with women, cigars, drink and bullfighting comprising his chief preoccupations. Lola Flores’ extravagantly voluptuous dancing verged on the scandalous for the period: it was reported members of the audience made the sign of the cross when the duo embarked on the torrid number ‘La Niña de Fuego’, which became a huge popular hit and one of a dozen songs associated with Lola for the rest of her life.

Lola rapidly became a part of the prolific film output of Spain – and even more so in Mexico, which was then a sort of Latin American Hollywood. She recorded the big hit ‘Maria Bonita’ accompanied on piano by the great bolero composer Agustín Lara and later acquired one of her lifelong nicknames, ‘La Faraona’ (The Pharoah), from her role in the movie of that name. In 1952, she made her first appearance in Cuba, at the Teatro America in Havana, giving rise to her celebrated quote, “Havana is just like Cadiz, but with Black people”. Here she became firm friends with Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz before Cruz’s US exile. The pair performed together often, including Lola’s last great televised show from Miami in 1991.

Lola’s marriage, in 1957, to the guitarist Antonio González Batista (known as El Pescaílla), made an impression upon her musical style. Although she fuelled the celebrity media with a succession of highly public affairs, including two star footballers in rapid succession, Lola’s only marriage lasted the rest of her life and produced three children, including her daughters Lolita and Rosario, both now successful singers. Lola’s husband – talented, handsome and married at the time they met – was also one of the originators of the style known as Catalan rumba, a mixture of fast-strummed ventilador guitar, handclaps and touches of Cuban
style percussion.

As a double act, they ushered in Lola’s highly successful transition to rumbera, and incidentally, proprietress of a tablao (flamenco cabaret). The nightclub, named Caripen, attracted the cream of the Madrid farandula (showbusiness society) in the 1960s flamenco entertainment boom, which was shortly to slip from fashion with the arrival of rock and pop, and the simultaneous rejection of the association of flamenco with the regime of General Francisco Franco, who had promoted the genre as a national art form. Lola’s relationship with the Franco years was ambiguous – she accepted the adulation of the ruling circles, and never overtly antagonised the establishment, but managed to retain, with her adventurous personal life and spirit, a sense of artistic rebelliousness.

After Franco died in 1975, the installation of democracy and a move towards artistic freedom and modernisation led to the showbusiness world of the copla and flamenco becoming passé. Lola Flores continued to be a fixture of mainstream media, though her life began to be undermined by illness – breast cancer – and a financially crippling trial for tax avoidance, during which she made the famous remark, “If every Spaniard would just give me one peseta, I could clear this up.”

Lola died in the Madrid home she’d named Lerele in 1995 and was buried in great pomp, with a crowd of 150,000, many singing another famous hit, ‘La Zarzamora’. By this time the flamenco and tonadilla repertoire had begun a return to fashion, helped by the tastes of film directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, who had Rosalía singing Lola’s ‘A Tu Vera’ in his Dolor y Gloria film in 2020, and Carlos Saura, who included Lola Flores in his intellectually acclaimed 1990s masterpieces, Sevillanas and Flamenco along with newer icons like Camarón de la Isla.

Tributes on the centenary of Lola’s birth included popular singer Joaquín Sabina rather oddly describing her as “Spain’s Mick Jagger” and the Cruzcampo beer recreating her likeness using AI in their controversial “With Much Character” ad in 2021, which flooded the internet.