Stephen Phelan

“Dictatorships end, but their effects don’t leave your body so easily. It took decades to shake them out of my joints by making a record called Bailar en la Cueva [To Dance In The Cave]. You could say I didn’t dance until I was 45.”

AS photographed at night from a satellite, or the International Space Station (ISS), the Iberian Peninsula looks encrusted with lights along its coastal edges. Madrid forms a big pulsing cluster near the centre, while surrounding hinterlands only seem to show in those images as something of a void. Ever-fewer people live out in Castile y León and Extremadura, the two adjoining regions that cover much of what is known as La España Vacia, or “The Empty Spain”.

“The problem with being black is that your identity is assumed from the get-go. Actually, no, the problem is when you accept it. That’s what makes you unhappy. And the only thing that matters is living life as you feel you’re meant to. People get serious about books and plays, me included, but you should never forget it’s all play. And in the end, it’s all dust.”

ONCE upon a time, in the woods outside Pola de Somiedo, lived a family of Cantabrian brown bears. The villagers reported sightings of a mother bear – who had lost a leg to a hunter’s trap – and her two cubs, and two adult males, either of whom might have been the father. In those days, near the end of the 1980s, they seemed to be the last of their kind in this part of Asturias.

By 15 Step even the upper tiers of seated sections are bouncing like babies to those tricky drum patterns while Yorke reminds them that “it comes to us all”, whatever “it” is. Old age and/or death, most likely. He is almost 60 now and spry as hell but also grey-bearded as a sea dog while he dances little jigs around the deck to The National Anthem and its stupidly great bassline, which he apparently wrote when he was 16.

IT’S already after sunset when we push out from the slipway with the low evening tide. We pass almost silently under the Somo-Pedreña road bridge and out through the mouth of the Miera River, just in time to see the streetlamps of Santander come on across the bay. I’d be more entranced by the city’s… Read more »

The ARMH stepped back and gave her a moment to say or do whatever she felt compelled to. Josefina climbed down a little wooden ladder to the excavation. Treading carefully in her trainers, she leaned in close enough to run a finger along a bare vertebrae. Then she bent right over in the dirt, closed her eyes, whispered something, and kissed the skull.

Who, or what, is Irish, or Basque, in the context of this cave? My people, if I can call them that, have been around for 2,500 years, give or take. His may be much older – the origins of the singular Basque language and culture remain an ethno-anthropological mystery. But according to radiocarbon dating of the ashes they dropped like breadcrumbs on their path through Atxurra, the ones who came to make art here were mid-to-late period Magdalenians, between 12,000 and 14,500 years ago.

I RODE into a rocky canyon on a horse named Estrella, our passage soundtracked by Ennio Morricone’s demoniac theme music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Whistles, wails, trumpets, whip-cracks, gunshots – I might have heard that legendary film score in my mind even if the trail guide wasn’t playing it through her iPhone on a tinny little saddle-mounted speaker.

THE fall of the Mayan Civilization left their stuffed-out centres of power and culture to be reclaimed by the jungles of what we now call Guatemala. Tikal, El Mirador, Copan, Tak’alik Ab’aj … so many mighty cities lost for centuries, while lumberjacks and gravediggers kept finding little pieces of them all over the place. Those pieces sustained a booming black market in Mayan artefacts, even after each site was formally discovered and protected.