This Much Is True

The Pollensa music festival is one of the cultural highlights of the local summer. This is not a thing for the hoi and the polloi, the general riff and the general raff of lager and chips; this is the extreme sophisto wing of musical culture in the northernmost parts of the island, nary a karaoke machine within the vocal carry distance of a Leona Lewis wannabe, not one tribute act an Abba-ing or a Take That-ing. This festival, started not by a Mallorcan but by a Mancunian, Philip Newman, is classical heavy, pop lite, or usually pop non-existent. However, once in a while, up pops a pop sort of act. When I say pop, I mean old rocker or, in the case of Tony Hadley, old new romanticist. And why should I mention Tony Hadley? How sharp of you. Very good question. Why would I or indeed anyone mention the Hadster? The answer lies in the fact that he is in a short line of long-ago pop/rock artists who have been invited to appear at the Pollensa festival. The line is so short, it comprises only one other - Roger Hodgson - and he was a replacement for Paul Carrack.

The question is, of course, why book Tony Hadley? Here is a singer set adrift, sent into a rock winter Russian front, consigned to be the Rudolf Hess of the pop world, ever associated with Spandau, languishing in the long-years of the incarceration of memory bliss of Musclebound and Through The Barricades pop-Lebensraum, but without having been the führer behind the whole gig, a role reserved for the foppish Adolf of the Spans, Gary Kemp. And when the Kemp twins decided to go and play at being Krays and Martin ended up leaving it aht, you slag, on Albert Square, Tony ceased to register either on the pop charts or in the pop stratosphere, save for endless plays of "Gold" on Capitol Gold or as the mind-numbingly unoriginal theme accompaniment to athletics championships.

A clue perhaps as to the question, why Tony Hadley, may exist on his website*. For there, if you go to "calendar", you will find that rare is a box per day that contains anything other than a number. For the whole of May, just one event: "opening couture brasserie, delicatessen and food hall, Neptune Quay, Ipswich". There we go, everybody, Ipswich, and not even a vocal performance by the sounds of it. Let's just put it this way, Tony's calendar does look a little light, though to be fair it fills up in the autumn because of course the Spans will be on their comeback tour. But till then, very little. Indeed there is so very little, that if you go to the month of July, and look at day 11, which is when Tone is due to appear, you will find ... only the number eleven, no more, no less. No mention of Pollensa, a music festival, Mallorca, nothing, nada. Perhaps it's not been updated. Don't know, but this much is true, as the title says today, as he appears on the festival's running order.

* http://www.tony-hadley.com/

(As Hadley is due to be appearing with the Barcelona Jazz Orchestra, I imagine he will be reprising his jazz-swing phase from the "Passing Strangers" album, so don't necessarily expect Spandau. See the WHAT'S ON BLOG - http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com - for a full schedule of concerts. Oh, and before anyone thinks otherwise, Tony Hadley was and is a damn fine singer.)


I should tell you that there is another version of this blog. I started it fairly recently through another blog provider, i.e. Wordpress, the reason for doing so being primarily as a sort of back-up but also so I could see how Wordpress works, and it works quite well, having certain standard features that the Blogger system doesn't. Anyway, while this "mirror" gets barely any visitors as it will not rate in Google to the extent that this original does, and is also not linked, it has had some visitors, and one - at least one - has stumbled across it through a string word search, probably through Google. I know this because one of those standard features tells me so, and the most popular (a slight exaggeration I feel) searches have been "jellyfish Mallorca" and ... "nude Nordic walking". Seriously, nude Nordic walking, which I did refer to in some jest several days ago. Clearly, though, such a thing does attract some interest. Each to their own.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Beach Boys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Hryc5t2wQ&NR. Today's title - ok, so Spandau Ballet, but who sampled it and made a terrific record in the process? The title of this is contained in the above.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)