Waiting For A Festival

In 2001 a series of concerts was created under the title "Waiting For Waits". The promoters wanted to be able to close the series with a performance by the American singer Tom Waits. They invited him but he didn't come. They waited and waited. In 2008 it looked as though they might be lucky. Waits was coming to Spain. He never made it as far as Mallorca though. In 2010 the final series took place. The last concert was staged at Palma's Teatre Principal on 14 November. As the main promoter, Tomeu Gomila, has remarked: "Unfortunately, Tom Waits didn't come. It was a bit like Waiting For Godot".

There is now something of a revival. It's called "Folk You". The description of it as a festival suggests more than it will deliver. Festivals, generally speaking, imply more than concerts over two consecutive evenings. That the highly regarded English folk singer Martin Simpson will be performing cannot disguise the fact that this is not a festival.

In the UK and in music terms, the festival has acquired a specific meaning. It is one of spending entire weekends in a field getting wet and muddy but also of listening to and seeing artists at the height of their popularity, others which are seeking popularity and others still whose popularity may not be as it once was. The music festival is nowadays very much more sophisticated, organised and sanitised compared to the time when the Isle of Wight was converted into something not much better than a living hell, but its roots are those of the British heirs to Woodstock.

Mallorca doesn't have a festival. Or rather, it has a whole load of them, typically seasons spread across several weeks that are devoted principally to classical music: Deya, Pollensa, Santanyi, Valldemossa and its Chopin Festival. The festival, in terms of being a more compact event and of having a packed line-up, doesn't exist, though at least Sa Pobla has had the good sense to change the organisation of its jazz festival. No longer are the concerts spread over three to four weeks; they take place on consecutive evenings. If there ever was a philosophy of tourist attraction behind the festival, then it makes greater sense for it to be confined to one week and not several.

Mallorca has also had its festivals, not that these conformed to the in-the-country festival principle. There was the bizarre international song contest in Playa de Palma in the 1960s - Eurovision minus almost the whole of Europe. It was revived for a time in the 70s, but there was a different, more of-the-moment attempt. It was made by the Barbarela disco in Palma, though it was also a contest. Over 140 acts performed for up to fifteen minutes in a competition which was eventually won by Los Bravos. The line-up, though, had included groups of a very different style - Focus, the Dutch prog rock band was one; Daevid Allen's Gong was another. Getting Gong to compress anything into a mere fifteen minutes must have taken some doing.

There was another so-called festival: Selva Rock. It was in fact only a one-night affair and its original incarnation folded after its August 1983 edition because the rock being played did not reflect the new generation of Spanish rock music that was coming out of Madrid's La Movida movement. Then along came Palma Pop-Rock, eighteen hours of music in the Sa Feixina park, but still a contest, confined to a maximum of three songs per group.

Mention of Barbarela is probably important in this festival context. It was a disco that became famous outside Mallorca. It was one of Europe's premier clubs and it was Mallorca's first mega-disco. But this club scene was to be eclipsed by Ibiza's clubs. In popular and youthful musical terms, Mallorca has been playing catch-up ever since the 1980s.

Nowadays, it's not as if there aren't events which are identifiable as festivals in Spain. Benicassim's line up over four days in July includes Blur, Bastille, The Prodigy, Florence and The Machine and Mark Ronson. So why can Valencia have one and Mallorca cannot? Maybe it's more a case of doesn't want rather than cannot. But is the emphasis on classical music entirely appropriate? Podemos in Palma have called for that city to be one of rock 'n' roll and heavy metal: an expression of greater musical democracy. Or maybe it has to do with logistics and the environment. Find a suitable place in the country and you can probably anticipate that the enviro-lobby would, so to speak, have a field day. Then there are Mallorca's restrictive attitudes towards camping; not that these cannot and are not occasionally got round.

Like Waits, there will be a lot of waiting. Waiting for a festival that is unlikely to ever happen.