Fun, Fun, Fun: Of holidays lost

"Well, she got her daddy's car, And she's cruisin' through the hamburger stand now. Seems she forgot all about the library, Like she told her old man now. And with the radio blastin', Goes cruisin' just as fast as she can now. And she'll have fun, fun, fun, Till her daddy takes the T-Bird away."

You would stop short of describing these lyrics as "immortal", but in their simplicity, Mike Love summed up youth and summer over fifty years ago. It was what Love specialised in: simple lyrics. His ego assaulted as much as his concept of the pop song was under attack, it was he who took greatest umbrage at the intrusion of Van Dyke Parks into the lyrical world of The Beach Boys. Parks made things complicated and sophisticated, and in the process reached far more deeply into Brian Wilson's multi-stranded mind. Three years after "Fun, Fun, Fun", the first collaboration with Parks and so the sidelining of Love ushered forth "Heroes And Villains" with its allusions to the genocide of native Indians and to the good and bad guys of the music industry.

There is a great deal that is analogous between pop music and tourism of the 1960s. 1964 was still a time for the pioneer, for the frontiersmen of the untamed holiday lands and for those who followed in their droves in airborne wagons. It was a time that was essentially innocent in all respects. Though Brian Wilson could sing of making love in "Don't Worry Baby", it was a time before sex was invented. The girls would borrow the T-Birds and cruise to the beach to be with the surfer boys but when they got there, the result was just innocent fun. For the tourist to Mallorca - young female ones - there was always the dubious charm of the "picadores", the Latin lovers of legend with their phrase-book chat-up lines who targeted easier pickings than those on offer locally who were shielded by chaperones and a strict Catholic upbringing. But for the most part, the third S had yet to be added to those of sun and sea. There was, though, an F-word, and it was "fun".

In 1964 both industries - music and tourism - were only just coming to terms with whatever monsters they were creating. The changes over a three-year period were enormous. The number of tourists rocketed, with all this implied for infrastructure, logistics, marketing, foreign exchange. Operations had to become more sophisticated because they were more complicated. The music industry, meanwhile, was undergoing constant transformation and experimentation along with the advancing production techniques that facilitated output like The Beach Boys' "Heroes And Villains".

1967, in Britain at any rate, was a landmark year for all sorts of reasons. Socially, the summer of love, the pill, the Abortion Act represented fundamental change. Musically, it was "Sgt. Pepper's", "Their Satanic Majesties Request", Pink Floyd and all the rest. For tourism it was a year when, with numbers already rising rapidly, the most ambitious scheme for tourism development ever was architecturally conceived - Alcudia's massive Ciudad Blanca.

For a three-year window, there was a time when tourism was innocent fun, but the dynamics had altered. There were now arguably more villains than heroes in the tourism industry. Gone were the visions of the first pioneers, such as Gerard Blitz of Club Med and Vladimir Raitz of Horizon. Fun became distorted amidst what was a process through which the visitor became a commodity. The very word "tourist" has a mechanistic quality to it: someone who makes a tour, someone who moves and is to be moved. Tourism became a commodity industry. It was de-personalised in the pursuit of more sophisticated systems of process management and mass production.

It was perhaps all a consequence of semantics. The promotion of the "tourist" meant that the alternative of "holidaymaker" was lost sight of. The latter carries an implication of fun that the former doesn't, but while there was of course still enormous amounts of fun, the perception had shifted away from that core element of what holidays should, above all else, be about.

Come forward to the present day, and while fun remains, it has itself been made mechanistic. There is prescription: what you will do. There is proscription: what you can't do. When there are millions of people, there have to be rules. Of course there have to be, but in a sense it isn't the proscription that is at fault so much as the prescription: everything that is laid on; the removal of improvisation and adventure; the branding; the packaging; the facilities of contemporary life - from information to be demanded, not stumbled across, to wifi and the obliteration of free time.

Fun. It should be the first word in the tourism industry's lexicon. Unfortunately, the daddies of the industry have long since taken the carefree T-birds away.