First it was Lola Flores and now Camarón de la Isla. Three years after Faraona was resurrected thanks to artificial intelligence and the voice of his daughter Lolita, the Cruzcampo beer brand is releasing a new ad featuring the flamenco singer as the protagonist, but without the deepfake.
The new campaign, which is called Gitana, was presented yesterday in Seville, at the Guardiola Palace. However, the spot premiered on Sunday, January 21, coinciding with the 101st anniversary of the birth of Lola Flores. With it, the new ad begins, in which Camarón’s voice stands out in a short document unpublished until now, in which the gypsy singer dedicates a buleria to Cruzcampo.
Yesterday, at the presentation, Tomatito, the guitarist of Camarón, and his widow, Dolores Montoya, the Chispa, explained how the fragment was forged. It was in 1989 during the recording of his multi-award winning album Soy gitano at the Bola studios in Seville. “At that time, the recordings were very direct with the musicians and the clappers all together and when we finished the day we stayed for a while playing flamenco and ordered some Cruzcampo, because it is a beer that has always been very close to flamenco”, explained Tomatito.
It was in one of those relaxed and festive moments that Camarón started: “De la Cruzcampo yo no me quito, de la Cruzcampo yo no me aparto”, which more than three decades after his death takes on great value.
In reality, Camaron’s adaptation is from an old song of his that said “De la bebida yo no me quito, de la bebida yo no me parto”. Producer Ricardo Pachón has had this recording adapted to Andalusian beer in his archive for more than 20 years, until it reached the ears of the beer brand.
For his widow, Chispa, it was very exciting to hear the voice of her husband again in an unpublished document because “my husband has never left and I remember him every day”. And he affirms that he sees it in the faces of the four children he had with Camarón, in his eight grandchildren and also in his great-grandson, who carry singing and music in their blood.
Camarón’s brief intervention is well linked to Gitana, a song by the band Derby Motoreta’s Burrito Kachimba that is the basis of the ad. A typical Andalusian bar is the beginning of the story. Lola Flores appears on the TV: “El acento es tu tesoro, no lo pierdas nunca”, and next to it, a typical gypsy girl from the historic Marín factory, in Chiclana, who gets rid of the old souvenir cliché and comes to life .
Actress and dancer Carmen Avilés is the flesh and blood gypsy who empowers herself, lets her hair down and modernizes her eyeliner. Like Margot Robbie in the movie Barbie, the gypsy takes to the streets proud of her roots because, as she says at the end, “the accent is much more than a way of speaking”.
“I learned to dance flamenco in the dining room of my house and under the gaze of one of those flamencos we had above the television – recalls Avilés-. In the ad, she wears an impressive traditional dress with frills and red moons of more than 30 kilos created by Leandro Cano. “Fortunately, the designer made another one 10 kilos lighter for when she had to run,” explains the protagonist, who also dances a buleria choreographed by Triana Ramos, who has directed Rosalía’s dancers on the Motomami tour.
In her journey through the streets of Jerez and Cadiz, the gypsy meets Martirio, icon of the modern gypsy, the singer Pali or the rocker Silvio. Also a greyhound, in memory of those he painted with the women Julio Romero de Torres, the tattooist Jorge, the designer Sara Gómez (ArteKm22) and the musician and producer Negro Jari, of Senegalese descent. A future look at flamenco, but clinging to its roots.
