Gaiety And Mirth: Mallorca pop songs

Strange to report, but I can't recall ever having mentioned Petula Clark before. It's not as though one would, let's be honest.

Many of us will mostly remember Petula for her Tony Hatch phase in the 1960s, but she had been around a long time before issuing the sound advice to not sleep in the subway, darling. She had great success in the 1950s, a period of her career with which I was mercifully unfamiliar until the other day. Thanks to a discovery by Mary Lawrence (on the Bonygraph Forum), I am now aware that in 1955 Pet had a hit song which got to number 12 in the UK chart. Its title? "Majorca".

My initial thought on this masterpiece being unearthed was that there might have been something behind it, as in it was some sort of promotional effort by pre-mass tourism Mallorca to put its name on the map. It doesn't appear to have been. From what I can gather, it was originally a French song to which English lyrics were added by one Johnny Lehmann. And what lyrics they were. "There is no place on earth with gaiety and mirth like you find on Majorca, isle of love." "Their wealth is meant for sharing." "Once you've known its spell, you'll never say farewell, 'cos your heart's in Majorca, isle of love."

You wouldn't be able to use "gaiety" in quite the same way nowadays while their (Mallorcans') wealth may have been meant for sharing in 1955, but I am not convinced that it is now. The bit about knowing its spell, corny though it is, probably would still chime with many today though.

When Petula was singing about the isle of love, Mallorca would have been largely unknown to the record-buying public. Go forward ten or fifteen years and everyone would have heard of it but for different reasons to Petula's romantic ones.

Yet no one had burst into song about Mallorca again and it is surprising that so few songs have been devoted to Mallorca. I spent an admittedly short amount of time on Google trying to find some and came across hardly any. However, there is always Ivor Biggun and "The Majorca Song".

Also known as Doc Cox from the "That's Life" programme, Ivor painted a very different picture of Mallorca in 1987. "To the land of sun, fornication and fun." "Buenos knockers, por favor." "She was topless, I was legless." "She swallowed my pina colada." "Olé, olé, olé ... I think I'm gonna be sick." If Petula might just have been doing a song promo for Mallorca in 1955, Ivor most certainly wasn't. What is odd that it took as long as it did for there to be a song like Biggun's.

I thought that there had to have been some musical tributes to Mallorca by Spanish acts, but they aren't that obvious either. There was one by an act called Los Mismos which, in their 1968 gear, featured a female singer who had spent far too long with her hair in curlers and two chaps with beardy looks that had been knicked from the Mamas and the Papas and floral jackets knicked from ... the Mamas and the Papas. I'm not sure what they looked like in 1964 when they released on the Belter label a belter of a song entitled "Puente a Mallorca", but so much of a belter was it that I don't recommend you bother listening to it. Los Mismos, and you'll begin to understand why you might give "Puente a Mallorca" a miss, scored a major Spanish hit with "Supercaligragilisticoespialidoso" in 1965.

Otherwise, there really isn't a great deal that amounts to a body of musical work with Mallorca as its theme or with the island in the title, though who of course can forget the Eurodance anthem "Mallorca" by the German group Loft from 1996. Plenty of us, I daresay. So successful was it that it failed to chart anywhere, though remarkably it has nearly two million views on YouTube.

Loft were about as far away from Petula Clark as you could get. Forty years had intervened, but forty years had failed to bring forth a genuine musical celebration of Mallorca. A further sixteen years on and there still hasn't been one. So it is about time that there was. I'm sure that David Guetta could be persuaded to put some dramatic house electropop together and slap Mallorca on the label. Or what about Coldplay? A stadium-arm-waving emote by Chris Martin looking meaningful and running along some velvety white sands as Rihanna emerges from a turquoise sea.

Whatever a Mallorca pop anthem for the modern day might be, one thing's for sure, it wouldn't have a line about gaiety and mirth.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.