JUAN Martin is playing the Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow for the first time since the death of fellow Spanish flamenco guitarist, friend and guiding light Paco de Lucia last month.

“I studied for a while with Paco at the end of the Sixties when I‘d go to his house, and he had a very important influence on me,” he says.

“We were of a similar age; we were both very young when we started and we were the vanguard, these two teenage players, but he was already an incredible player when I met him because he came from a family of flamenco players.

“He was an incredible technician, so the combination of Paco and my first tutor, Nino Ricardo, who was a poet of the guitar, was a great inspiration, but I knew I had to go away and find my own guitar voice.”

Juan’s travels took him from Malaga to Madrid and beyond as he blossomed.

“In flamenco, we have these set forms but I started to do my own thing and I found I had my own distinctive compositional voice and that’s the most respected voice in flamenco, not only playing well but having your own style and variations,” he says.

Juan gains most excitement from finding a new variation or melody. “It’s like finding gold,” he says. “It keeps you alive and so you have no choice but to keep going as no-one is going to pay a flamenco player in retirement.

“It’s a privilege to play. It’s something I still love doing. You communicate your essence through what you play and hopefully when people come to a concert you leave them with a special memory.”

Juan, who was born in Andalucia in 1948, started playing guitar at the age of six and he recalls being instantly drawn to the instrument. “For a start, I would say with the guitar, before I even picked one up for the first time, I was struck by its beautiful shape,” he says.

When he looks at a guitar, he sees “the shape of the perfect lady”. “So naturally I want pick it up and handle it,” he says. “In Spain, it’s called ‘la guitarra’, which is of course feminine.

“Not only are flamenco guitars beautiful looking, they are so light, only weighing two and a half kilos, almost like a feather.

“But they’re very hard to master, like a temperamental lady. If you touch the guitar correctly, it will respond. If you don’t, it won’t. It’s just your finger on the tip of the string; that’s very much your signature and that comes through immediately you play.”

Juan reckons the guitar is an instrument with a bohemian appeal. “Have guitar, will travel,” he says, as he travels Britain once more with his guitar and his flamenco singers and dancers from Spain.

“The guitar is every man’s instrument, whether you play blues, jazz, pop or flamenco. It has a universality that no other instrument has.”

Juan Martín Flamenco Dance Ensemble, with Raquel de Luna, Miguel Infante and Amparo Heredia, Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow, 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at www.atgtickets.com/york