Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a guitarist. He made his debut in London at the age of 22.

That was in the 60s when the guitar was hugely popular and it launched a career that's been going strong ever since.

But the music he plays comes from far away, from Spain,

and an ambition and passion born of poverty and hope. It's Flamenco, and he's been called

its Savior because he's taken it back from the flashy and the shallow

and restored it to its rightful place where as he says it expresses deep feelings of

happiness love sadness hardship and the struggle for life.

He is Paco Pena.

It's interesting, Paco, even if you don't speak a word of Spanish and I don't. You can still tell somehow when you hear

flamenco sung that it's coming from deep in the bowels of emotion somewhere.

It's true. I almost feel that it comes from the center of the earth. It's a people singing, their history, their memory.

And there's been a lot of struggle in And the Lucia in southern Spain throughout many centuries of mismanagement, wars,

discrimination against races, against, you know, all kinds of things happening, and

that reflects in the expression of the people that have been at the receiving end.

So you don't necessarily have to have a beautiful voice to see it because that kind of suffering comes through something.

You hear the voice is often

very rasping and crack pretty rough actually.

It is actually yes and as you suggest the quality of Lamenko is not necessarily the voice,

is really what you do with it and how you can touch people with it.

It's almost like exposing your inner self

...