Victor, being something of a name, was herded into the Plaza de Toros, the bloodied sand newly relaid. It was perhaps appropriate that a star should be given an arena capable of holding 4,000 or so spectators. The market square was not designed for such a crowd, but towns' market squares and indeed whole towns or villages which were never designed to stage events with thousands of people were to eventually do so.
A few years before Victor made his successful appearance at Alcúdia's bullring as part of the line-up for the 1989 Sant Jaume fiestas, something had been stirring across the waters of the Balearics in Ibiza. In the 1960s, Ibiza's remoteness was such that the regime put up with the hippies, whose only brushes with the forces of law tended to result from beach nudism or being instructed to wash when a hippy wedding was taking place. Though many of the hippies moved out during the '70s, they left a legacy that burst out musically in the mid '80s. Arguments still rage as to where acid house or rave music originated, but there was no denying that Ibiza was pretty significant. It acquired and still holds a mythical status in popular music culture.
Mallorca, by the end of the 1980s, was playing musical catch-up with Ibiza, and indeed it has never caught up. But Mallorca, as was the case across Europe, had caught the rave bug. The question was - what was to be done with it?
Rather like the BBC had sought to deny the existence of pop music in the 1960s and thus also denied the existence of youth culture, so Mallorca, via its fiestas, sought to turn back the tide. The fiestas, though, if they were to mean anything in this more modern era, had to become more inclusive. Youth needed a voice, youth needed its music, and the market squares thus began to be turned over to a new noise. The bands of music played on and the pipers continued to pipe, but musical youth was also now to be heard, be it rock or more likely dance, as in acid house and any other genre of what has since come to fall under a generic title of electronic dance music.
The squares of the villages and towns both in terms of their size and the proximity of residences were never built for what became the equivalent of raves during fiesta time. Some of these fiesta raves acquired such a reputation that they attracted youth from across the island. The dilemma was though, two-fold. One, the youth culture couldn't be denied. Two, to remove it from the fiesta heartland, the village square, would smack of a sort of fiesta separate development. Nevertheless, and eventually, some town halls had to take action. One was Sa Pobla. Its famed Districte 54 party was banned. It was soon after revived by genial mayor, Biel Serra, in 2011. He was appealing to the kids' wishes and appealed to them not to let him down, which is exactly what they did. Drunkenness, vomiting, some violence all occurred. Serra was rightly angry. Districte 54 is no more.
But one town had, many years ago, appreciated that it simply couldn't cope with the influx of youth. There had to be a location outside of the town. In 1995, therefore, Maria de la Salut gave its blessing to something called Rock 'n' Rostoll (the rostoll part refers to what remains in a field after a harvest of wheat). It turned out to be the perfect solution: a sort of Yasgur's Farm that admitted not a half a million strong but more like half a thousand strong that has grown over the years. There are now two stages - rock and electronic dance - on a finca off the old road between Maria and Muro. Its twentieth edition takes place this coming Saturday. Rave and rock. The fiesta lives on. But not in the square.
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