Saturday, July 07, 2012

All The Nice Girls Love A Sailor

Hetty King was her name. In 1909 Hetty took the world of the music hall by storm and all the nice girls loved a sailor, primarily because a sailor had a pocketful of cash and a parrot in a cage. Quite what the parrot had to do with anything, I'm not sure. Be this as it may, back in Hetty's day, the loving of a sailor probably didn't usually extend to his going downstairs on a first date, or on any date come to that.

The Virgen del Carmen fiesta in Puerto Pollensa will this year feature a sailors' party. All the nice and not so nice girls will have the chance to love a sailor as will, one supposes, all the nice boys. But Hetty would never have sung about such things, while the chances of there being a genuine virgin over the age of consent at the Virgen fiesta would be pretty slim, one imagines. Not that it follows that a nice girl has, by definition, to be a virgin, though presumably Hetty would have preferred this to be the case.

While sexual behaviour has changed over the past 103 years, so has music. Thankfully, there is no longer the music hall. As Alexei Sayle once put it - "Friends often ask me, 'Lex, why's there no music hall any longer?', and I tell them, 'because it was crap' ". Yet fiesta music still retains some semblance of the traditional. And in a Mallorcan stylie, this means men with bagpipe things and whistley things and a brass band. Yes really, 'appen, the brass band.

Far less traditional are the fiesta DJs. These come in different guises. Regrettably, there are some who seem to think that they are the Hairy Cornflake or Ooh, Gary Davies, as they insist on going all retro and dragging out your favourite discs of the '70s (of which, let's be honest, there can be very few). Better news comes in the form of the current-day DJ, mashing-up, sound clashing, making one hell of a racket and applying so much bass that a tsunami in the nearby bay is threatened.

Better news musically, but not better news if you happen to want a good night's sleep and are anywhere in the vicinity of the sailors' party that will last until five in the morning.

This party, revived this year, was a previous tradition of Virgen del Carmen. Its new incarnation, going as a sailor, is simply a thematic device; the party itself is not new. And staging a party that goes on all night slap bang in the middle of a town is also not new or original. Most places in Mallorca indulge in such parties at least once a year; more often, if you are really lucky or unlucky, depending on your point of view, your age probably, your need for sleep or your need to be up at six o'clock to go to work.

The thing with these parties is that there appears to be a view that everyone welcomes them and will want to join in. Current-day DJs might mean that not everyone does. While I happen to think they are a great idea, I also don't happen to live anywhere near where one occurs. I still might think they were a great idea if I did, but then I might also not think they were.

While the night parties are common enough across Mallorca at fiesta time, there has been an increase in the trouble that they attract. Excessive drinking, anti-social behaviour, e.g. taking a leak in the square, and violence have dogged some. Pollensa town has experienced problems and so, most obviously, has Sa Pobla; the Districte 54 party has been dropped again this year, mainly for cost reasons, but it led to all manner of incidents last year having been banned by the previous town hall administration because of the potential ASBO-ism.

Holding an all-night party in an urban setting, be it the town square or wherever, is bound not to meet with everyone's approval. One can argue that, well, it is just one night, but in Pollensa, for example, it isn't. Or hasn't been. There is just the slight hint of double standards about such parties in that there is so much insistence otherwise on limiting noise, or at least trying to.

These misgivings notwithstanding, they are a good thing. They are a real expression of a Mallorcan summer, and the island would be a worse place without them. Noise is an inevitable by-product of summer and especially of a summer where tourism is so central and where the fiesta is also so central.

All the nice girls will love a sailor, come next Saturday night. One hopes that they will still be loving the sailor when he has had more than his fair share of rum and when he starts to think about getting the parrot out of the cage. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

No comments: