Oddities Of 2015

Some examples of the varied and sometimes unusual past and present in Mallorca that appeared in my Enjoying Majorca column in the Bulletin.

The alternative fiesta of Sant Canut that competes with Palma's Sant Sebastià in January. "Being a saint, sort of, Sant Canut comes in the form of an image to be carried by the faithful. Dressed in a white, druidic gown with very long black hair, he holds an oversized joint; a very oversized joint."

The Portol (Marratxi) sardine tradition for the end of Carnival. "The Portol sardine, as is the case with some sardines elsewhere, doesn't actually get buried. The Mallorcans enjoy nothing more than setting fire to something, and little excuse is needed for a festivity to feature a roaring bonfire. The comedy sardine is toast, its final moments being marked by the sound of a trumpet reveille."

The "picadors". Not the lancing horsemen of the bullfight, but ... "The picador was the sleazy, smarmy, greasy Latin lover, the tourist gigolo of legend. He wasn't a myth. He genuinely did exist. And there were few places where he existed in greater number than in Mallorca (of the 1960s)."

Mallorca's bulldog spirit: its bulldog. "This canine, which came from guard dogs that were on King Jaume I's ships, is considered to be the only dog that is native to Mallorca. Its name is the Ca de Bou: bulldog. It has another name, and that is the Dogo Mallorquín."

The Duke of Swing. "A waiter in the San Pedro (Puig de Sant Pere) area of Palma. His name was Pedro (or Pere) Bonet." He was born in 1917 and at the start of the 1930s he began to be exposed to the music and entertainment of Fred Astaire, Django Reinhardt and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. "Bonet de San Pedro was to eventually join this unofficial royalty: he became the 'Duke of Swing'."

The weirdness of Hairy John. "Sant Joan Pelós, Saint John the Hairy. He has been around for centuries and on the feast day of Saint John (the Baptist), he prances around in Felanitx once more, wearing his strange mask and then handing out carnations to the spectators. His whole demeanour, his whole idiot-dancing style, plus the flowers make him a dead ringer for a flower power hippy of the late 1960s."

Moscari's bachelor boys and girls. The day of Santa Anna (26 July) is also the day of the "Fadrí" in Moscari: bachelor boys and bachelor girls, aka "fadrins" and "fadrines". No one seems to know why this day is as it is, but whatever the origins, at ten in the morning the "Fadrí Major" appears: the chief bachelor boy. He carries a reed adorned with ribbons and flowers and is joined by "fadrins" and "fadrines" in traditional dress. 

The Embala't of Sencelles. "There is little about it which makes much sense. What have mobylette motor cycles got to do with anything? Who knows, but there they are from some time after midday, hurtling around the streets while their riders are fired at with water pistols. The streets and roads get semi-flooded and will later on have more water deposited on them when the bales of packed hay arrive in town. And these come thanks to two teams - a male and female one. The two bales are then wheeled into the town's centre and unwrapped. This is when the battle kicks off. What does it entail? Nothing, other than chucking hay and smothering someone in it."

The Esporles sweet fair. "A giant sweet shop and a magician's bakery. Sugar, cream, chocolate, custards, this is a wonderland conjured up by some candy wizard. This is Esporles on the first Sunday in October: Mallorca's tribute to all our yesterdays of the pick 'n' mix and the corner shop with its penny-costing flying saucers and pink shrimps."

Jimi Hendrix in 1968. "The story of the Sgt. Pepper's gig has it that Hendrix cracked the walls with the volume that came out of his Marshall and Sound City speakers. Those attending were mostly British tourists. Hendrix was all but unknown in Mallorca, save for the likes of various locally based musicians, among whom were a couple of members of Los Bravos. After the performance - legend has it - Hendrix was involved in a night of decadence with four Swedish young ladies."

Rise To The Occasion: In-store music

Eroski's a strange old shop. Not just one. They all seem to be at it. I mean, when were they transported back in time to the days of ooh, Gary Davies and converted into 1980s' radio stations circa the era of Gary or Bruno or Simon Bates? What will they do next? Have the shoppers weeping in the aisles not because they've run out of stock but because of "Our Tune"?

There aren't actually any what were once called disc jockeys as such (they're now presenters, a job title with far greater gravitas), but you never know. Wasn't Chris Moyles discovered as the in-house DJ at Top Shop in Leeds or something like that? And look what happened to him. What has happened to him?

There has to be some method to the Eroski 1980s music madness, though I am blowed if I know what it is, why it is and who's responsible. What thought process is applied in order to come up with Climie Fisher's "Rise to the Occasion" while one is helpfully trying to explain the intricacies of weighing your own fruit and veg to a disorientated British tourist, rendered even more disconcerted by straining to recall what the song is and so completely incapable of taking instruction. "Look, see that picture. It's an apple. And its number is?" A complete waste of time.

There is, as with most things shopping, a psychology to all this, but what it is in Eroski's case is anyone's guess. I posed myself this very conundrum the other morning when attempting to figure out the point of Tears for Fears' "Advice for the Young at Heart". A pleasant tune, but was it having any discernible influence? Apart from making me tarry longer, simply because it is a pleasant tune and I wanted to listen to it, then no. The same Gouda slices as usual were launched into the bottom of the new, extra-deep, extra-non-customer-friendly trolley thing they've introduced, bouncing off the familiar iceberg lettuce, bunch of green bananas and bottle of moderately priced vino tinto. Was I inclined to draw on the inspiration of the music of the two largest egos known to the history of popular music - Roland and Curt - and indulge in an impulse purchase? Was this the thinking? Well no. Besides, who actually makes impulse buys in supermarkets? Oh, it's Tears for Fears, I must acquire that toaster or half a ton of mangoes.

There again, tarrying may have something to do with it. Find yourself propelled back to a nostalgic time when men turned themselves into wimpish extras from "Star Wars" (as with, for example, A Flock of Seagulls), and you are motivated to lurk and linger (possibly), and the longer the lingering, the greater the embarrassment that you aren't actually buying anything: only listening to the music. Oh well, might as well get some toilet rolls: you can never have too many anyway.

Yes, there is a great deal of psychology, and some of it which isn't total Horlicks (not that Eroski sells this). For example, it has been found that playing classical music can induce a tendency to spend more (this was from a study in a wine store): all to do with an implication of sophistication. Some of it does make sense. No music at all, and the store is unwelcoming. Hence, you would spend less because you want to get out quicker, though not as quick as if thrash metal was being played at high volume.

But while accepting there is this psychology, I still struggle to understand it in the Eroski context. Why 1980s music? Why all English? It has occurred to me that maybe the music is not for the shoppers but is to make shopworkers' lives more agreeable, but then wouldn't they benefit from selections by Enrique Iglesias and other Spanish hitsters? Probably not, as all Spanish hitsters sound exactly like Enrique and only have one song between them.

No, I don't get it and indeed I'm inclined to believe that it has nothing whatsoever to do with shopper behaviour or making workers' days more pleasant than the constant grind of having to ask for "Tarjeta Eroski" and try to flog you an almond cake or deodorant that's on special offer. It's all to do, I suspect, with DJs. Not Gary Davies or Bruno Brookes, but the DJs down the local fiesta, the ones who insist on putting DJ in front of their names just in case you hadn't realised they were DJs. (No self-respecting "producer" with a USB stick and a Mac armed to the hard-drive gunwales with mixing software would pitch up at, say, Magalluf's BH with DJ in front of his name.) No, the fiesta DJs are in thrall to Climie Fisher and the 1980s. It is from them that Eroski has taken the lead. Or is it the other way round?

Never Been Easy: Noise in Mallorca

Imagine that you are in Mallorca one hundred years ago. You are in a village. What can you hear? Voices, metallic tools striking earth or object, a newfangled automobile, animals. Even in Palma, things wouldn't have been so different, apart from there having been that many more voices, more automobiles plus ships and very occasionally by then an aircraft. Other noises would have been the music bands of the fiesta or the bells of the church; otherwise, noise was unobtrusive.

Of developments in the twentieth century, two were arguably more profound than others. Noise and light. They were profound because of their assault on senses. Both owed much to electricity which was, one hundred years ago, still in limited supply on Mallorca. Once supply was assured and grew, once other technologies advanced or were created, the twentieth century invented noise and light pollution. 

By the start of the tourism revolution, noise would still have been contained, but once Mallorca's industrial revolution arrived, the collective decibel level shot up. So many more voices, so many more vehicles, airplanes, and also the sound of tourism - entertainment. While Mallorca had its clubs before the revolution really started, they were mostly indoor and mostly confined to Palma. The club, the entertainment offer, the gramophone player went al fresco in coastal resorts.

Tourism is noise. Noise is tourism. It is the noise of millions of voices, cheers, shouts, screams, laughs. The noise of the pool aerobics pumping a beat at ten in the morning. The noise of the evening playback, karaoke, tribute act, live act. Noise, that of music and voices rising into the night skies above terraces, has existed as long as modern tourism in Mallorca has, but once upon a time that noise extended with little control into the wee small hours. It was noise that seemed appropriate and acceptable, the noise of enjoyment of balmy summer nights, starlit skies and romance, either personal or simply that of the holiday.

On 26 March 1987, the Balearics introduced Decreto 20/1987: Measures of protection against acoustic contamination of the environment. There were laws already in place, national ones, that dealt with noise, but the Balearics decree of 1987 was pioneering for a region of Spain. One of its articles referred specifically to the noise from "establishments open to the public" which did not have adequate soundproofing. It had to cease by midnight. Curiously, and from what I can see in this decree, there was no specific mention of outdoor entertainment. Nevertheless, a midnight threshold for such entertainment was to catch on, if only at the level of some municipalities. The twelve o'clock curfew came in.

Twenty years later, a law was passed. Ley 1/2007 "against the acoustic contamination of the Balearic Islands" drew on European legislation and made certain stipulations in respect of what were called "zones of special acoustic protection". These were zones with elevated noise levels on account of the existence of numerous activities, shows and public establishments; essentially, therefore, though not exclusively, tourist zones. This law established that there had to be restricted hours placed on activities which, directly or indirectly, caused these elevated noise levels. In its preamble it referred to "individuals' indisputable rights to relaxation, health and privacy", to the rights of citizens to have acoustic environmental quality and to the "main productive sector of the Balearic Islands", i.e. tourism. The preamble recognised, and said as much, that it was no easy task to reconcile these competing demands.

And of course, it never has been easy. Even had tourism been developed in specific tourist-only areas, absent of residential accommodation, it still wouldn't be easy. There is, or so one concludes from an overwhelming impression through the likes of Trip Advisor, an aversion among holidaymakers to noise going on late. Maybe even in those romantic days they didn't appreciate it either, though one feels that there was less opposition back then. There again, these are the views of British holidaymakers. The Spanish would tend to have a different take.

The twenty-first century has been one of a continuing fight against the noise pollution which sprang up with tourism but which was only belatedly tackled. Limiters, terrace curfews, these are evidence of this fight which has been occurring in the resorts for years now, and it is one extended to the La Lonja area of Palma, which isn't a specifically tourist zone but is one of those zones of special protection highlighted in the 2007 law.

I am personally inclined towards the romantic view, the one of those hot summer nights when there weren't the controls, but I am also inclined to a different productive view of the 2007 law and one that is increasing in momentum, namely that the Spanish day and night needs changing and that more sleep is required. It has never been easy? It would have been a hundred years ago.

The Revival Of The Xeremía

Maybe it's the name. It can be confused with "poble". The village. The people. It doesn't mean that, and indeed there isn't a truly satisfactory translation. Sa Pobla: the colony, the settlement, the inhabitation, the populace. Perhaps the last of these is the most satisfactory, a derivation from the passive verb - to people - while there is the assertiveness of the Mallorquín definite article, "sa", a powerful linguistic symbol of distinction with Catalan that is rooted in ancient Latin. Maybe it is because of the name that Sa Pobla became the spiritual heartland of a cultural hybridism that followed the conquest of centuries ago and which nowadays might be termed Mallorcaness, a place on which was conferred the Catalan-Aragonese cult of Sant Antoni and which has thus become the location for the annual gathering of the tribes of Mallorca for the fearful night of witches, demons and fire.

In some ways it is an unlovely town. Anonymous ring-road and low-rise factory and showroom units are the external non-descript artifacts typical of many Majorcan towns. The interior is a confusion of equally anonymous roads and streets criss-crossing in a Romanesque grid formation. Yet within this town beat the hearts of Mallorcaness, of tradition and of revivalism.

As with so much of the island's tradition and culture, the intervention of war and political dogma and then the industrial revolution of tourism, allied to the migration to the coasts and to employment in the new industry, undermined the long history of the xeremía, the Mallorcan bagpipe. Among traditional instruments, it wasn't alone in falling into disuse and silence. Its fellow x-instrument, the ximbomba, underwent a similar decline. This, the xeremía, is a bellow from the past that fades way back into the antiquities of Mesopotamia and Egypt, of pre-Middle Ages France and of the conquering King of Aragon. Jaume I and his successors brought more than just language and the cult of Sant Antoni, they also brought a bagpipe, and it moulded its sack into the Mallorcan xeremía, the word itself having been handed down from the French, "charamie".

It was, perhaps inevitably, Sa Pobla which led the revival of the xeremía, and to the fore was the cultural association known as Albopas. Where does it get its name from? Think about it for a moment, or if not ... Sapobla backwards; going backwards in time in revivalist terms. The association covers much of the traditional life of Sa Pobla; demons and what have you are all Albopas. It was not so very long in the past - twenty or so years ago - that the number of bagpipe players, the "xeremiers", numbered only around fifty in all across Mallorca. The number is now over 500. And whereas xeremier troupes were not so long ago confined to a limited number of towns and villages, now every village has its xeremiers.

The Albopas association is this weekend celebrating the twentieth meeting of xeremiers in Sa Pobla, an occasion which has, since the mid-1990s, contributed greatly to the revival of the local bagpipe and its accompanying flute-whistle and drum. The meeting has also been central to broadening the appeal of the xeremía to a more youthful age group. Twenty or so years ago, those few recognised xeremiers were getting on, thus endangering the tradition's future even more.

The success of the revival, demonstrated by the formation of xeremier troupes across the island, has also been recognised internationally. Seven years ago, Albopas went to New York for the World Fair of Mediterranean Music. Demons, xeremiers, they all flew off, and the pipers played Central Park along with other troupes from Palma, Sencelles and Sineu.

At midday today there is a procession in which different elements of the Albopas association will take part. In addition to the pipers, there will be the "caparrot" big heads as well as the Sa Pobla "Grif", dragon and, somewhat strangely perhaps, eel (though this is not strange as far as Sa Pobla is concerned; eels, farmed in Albufera, form a key part of the local cuisine).

It is odd to realise that many Mallorcan folk traditions which are nowadays firmly established and all but taken for granted are the result of revivals which have their origins only some thirty or so years ago. And they are with us thanks largely to the efforts of local cultural associations like Albopas, which have ensured that rather than die out and allow centuries of culture to be discarded, they are alive and, in the case of the bagpipes, making one hell of a welcome racket.

Microgroove Sensation: Radio and TV

Ever in search of the curious or obscure historical development in Mallorca, it was with keen interest that I discovered the other day that on 15 November, 1964 the first television set at the social centre in Colonia Sant Pere was installed. I have no more information but I am guessing that this was a pretty significant moment in the lives of the people of this one-time farming colony turned small resort on the bay of Alcúdia. Fifty years ago, owning a television set was all but unheard of. Indeed, there wouldn't have been a lot of point in having had a TV set anywhere in Spain until eight years previously. On 28 October, 1956 the first broadcast was made by TVE, the national broadcaster. To say that its subsequent development was swift would be an overstatement, but at least Mallorca was part of the reach by the time the TV was being installed in Colonia Sant Pere. By 1964 only 80% of the country was actually covered by the network and it could enjoy nine hours a day of broadcasting.

When they were tuning the TV in, they were probably benefiting from the original test card that TVE used. This comprised what looked like a games board with five mysterious circles. Prior to that first broadcast in 1956, there must have been households who were glued to the test card, listening to the voice reminding them that 28 October was the big day.

It is worth bearing in mind that in Britain the first commercial television channel, ITV, started in 1955. The development of consumerism was a factor of 1950s Britain as well. At the same time as ITV was launching, in Mallorca and most of Spain there was no consumerism and certainly no telly. So, in the absence of television, it was the radio which was the main source of home entertainment, and in Mallorca that meant, unsurprisingly, Radio Mallorca.

Founded by the brothers José and Onofre Fuster, Radio Mallorca first broadcast in November 1933. Ten years later it became part of the Sociedad Española de Radiodifusión and it enjoyed a monopoly until two other stations emerged. One was called Radio Juventud (youth radio, if you like) and the other was Radio Popular, which started broadcasting in 1959. It was under the auspices of the Bishop of Mallorca, so you can probably imagine that it adopted particular attitudes to content, but one thing that was notable about Radio Popular was that much of its programming was in Mallorquín, unlike the other two stations. Though it was essentially a church broadcaster, it didn't deal only in religious shows. It came to be highly significant because, in addition to using the local language, it put out programmes which discussed local culture and heritage. It played, therefore, an important role in starting a revival of Mallorcan culture that hadn't been subjugated by the Franco regime but which equally hadn't been given any great deal of prominence. 

It would be wrong, though, to think that Radio Popular was all religion and culture, because enter into the equation a young presenter by the name of Miquel Vives Martí. He was to transform Radio Popular by introducing youthful programming, including a sort of Top 40 music show. Radio Popular and Radio Mallorca, from the early 1960s, went pretty much head to head, but if Vives was the mastermind of music on Radio Popular, over at Radio Mallorca there was another young presenter who arguably became the most important voice ever of Mallorcan radio. And he was Miguel Soler.

Born in Murcia in 1939, Soler's ambition was to be a journalist. As it happens, he became one - with "Ultima Hora" - but he also became, at the age of twenty-one, the driving-force behind youthful music shows at Radio Mallorca. In 1961 he came up with the idea for a show called "Torneo en microsurco" (tournament of microgroove). The show which went out every week day at quarter past two was a sensation.

Of course, what both Soler and Vives could play was subject to restriction. It was primarily Spanish music that wouldn't fall foul of a regime that could no more understand Elvis than it could permit him; which was to subsequently also be the case with The Beatles. But some American music was allowed: Paul Anka, for example. So long as it was bland and uncontroversial, it was ok.

Radio Mallorca still exists. It celebrated its eightieth anniversary last year, and earlier this year Miguel Soler produced a book - "El club de los 60" - a collection of writings for "Ultima Hora" from back in the day and of stories of others who were to the vanguard during the unforgettable years of the 1960s. 

The television set in Colonia Sant Pere doubtless caused its own sensation, but in 1964 radio dominated, and so did Miguel Soler.

Photo: The TVE test card.

La Movida: A movement frozen in the 1980s

Assigning an exact time and place to the start of a "movement" is often simplistic. For a movement to start it needs to have had its antecedents, the stuff that had already happened which contributed to what might be taken as the defining moment in time of its commencement. In popular music there are various examples of these defining occasions, one of the most celebrated being the "gig that changed the world", the Sex Pistols at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Legend has it that in attendance at that gig were those who were to make up the first wave of the Manchester scene - future members of The Smiths, The Buzzcocks and Joy Division (later New Order). Whatever the truth of this legend, there is no disputing the fact that the Pistols launched not just a musical movement but an entire cultural movement, one that infiltrated literature, film, art and fashion.

On 23 May 1981, an event was staged in Madrid that was known as the "concierto de primavera" (the Spring Concert). It is taken as the defining moment for the start of La Movida, which was initially "la movida madrileña" (the Madrid move), but which became "la movida española", a 1980s cultural revolution in Spain, the importance of which might now be partly forgotten but which was fundamental in the transformation of the country. 

But as ever, there was the stuff which came before, including a tribute concert for Canito, a composer, singer and drummer, who had died in a road accident on New Year's Eve 1979. His brothers formed a new group, Los Secretos, who performed at the 1981 concert and who became associated and identifiable with La Movida.

Usually defined as a counter-cultural movement, La Movida was more a type of renaissance after the Franco years. It borrowed from punk culture up to a point, but it wasn't so much a tearing-down as an establishing of culture, a specifically innovative Spanish one no longer forced to cower in the face of repression. Among its more notable products was the film director/producer Pedro Almodóvar. If Julian Temple was British punk's film documentarist, then Almodóvar was La Movida's. And along with music and cinema, there was a cultural transformation in literature and publishing, television, photography and painting as well as an outburst of the satirical in the form of comic books and cartoons.

In what will sound like a worthy but extraordinarily dull paper, three sociologists have studied the "aesthetic canon of Spanish pop-rock". Published* in the "Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas", Fernán del Val, Javier Noya and Martín Pérez-Colman have taken the views of music critics and studied published lists of leading artists in order to arrive at a definitive list of the 50 most important musical acts who have contributed to this "canon". Of the first ten acts in the list, half of them were products of La Movida (Los Secretos aren't one of them; they are in 29th place).

The paper's authors find that this "canon" is heavily biased in favour of a kind of hybrid pop-rock, one which combines an essentially Anglo-American rock with Spanish elements; flamenco in particular. This is a pop-rock which dominates to the exclusion of many other genres - heavy metal, folk, jazz, dance are all but absent. And La Movida, despite being 30 years or so old, dominates, with even younger critics and journalists pointing to the importance of the music that came out of that cultural movement.

This in itself might not be surprising because of the significance of La Movida, but there are notable omissions from this "aesthetic canon". Folk is one, and Mallorca has offered a very good example of an act which might find its way onto a broader list - Els Valldemossa who, once they stopped appearing on Eurovision, rediscovered their Mallorcan folk roots. Another, most definitely, is the whole musical scene that broke out of Ibiza, also in the 1980s. Balearic beat - the house and electronic dance of Ibiza's clubs - and later the flamenco-infused chill and ambient of the Café del Mar might well lay claim to being the most important of all popular music to have come out of Spain, yet it doesn't get a look in. 

Three months before the Spring Concert, the failed coup took place. In the following year the first socialist government came to power in Spain. La Movida was itself identifiably socialist because many of its protagonists were socialists. But what was a counter-cultural movement became established. The authors conclude that "the middle classes (of today) have managed to impose their tastes on the production of the canon". It was an important movement but it ran out of steam and its protagonists became complacent. And kept listening to their 1980s' rock albums.

* http://www.reis.cis.es/REIS/jsp/REIS.jsp?opcion=revistas&numero=145; pages 147-180, click to see abstract and for PDF download of article in English and Spanish.

Hippie Island: The curious story of Ibiza

An exhibition being held in Malmö, Sweden will be coming to an end this weekend. It is an exhibition devoted to hippies of the Soviet era, entitled "The Psychedelic Underground of 1970s Estonia". The exhibition considers how the hippie movement in Estonia took shape and was able to survive, despite attempts to subvert it by a Soviet regime which viewed it as a genuine political threat.

It seems remarkable that a counter-culture movement based on peace, love, freedom and free-thinking could even have existed in the Soviet Union, but somehow it was able to establish itself, and in Estonia there were ingredients that made it more likely to catch on there than in other parts of the old USSR. Estonia is close to Nordic countries with which it has long had much in common, especially with Finland, as the Estonian language comes from the same Uralic family as Finnish. Since gaining independence, Estonia has moved pretty easily towards a Nordic liberal model, reflecting perhaps an inherent attitude among Estonians that had remained beneath the surface during Soviet times. It was also on the periphery of the Soviet Union, though that didn't mean it was wholly disregarded; its position on the Baltic was, after all, pretty strategic for a paranoid Soviet military and government.

But its location may, nevertheless, be important in understanding how a hippie movement could have sprung up, because there is a certain similarity, in terms of remoteness, to how hippie culture caught hold in Franco's Spain; this was not a culture of mainland Spain but of Ibiza.

It is one of the oddities of the 1960s and 1970s that hippies became associated with islands that were controlled by two fascist regimes. Ibiza was one, the other was the south side of Crete. The hippy trail that didn't venture beyond Europe had two end points; the shorter route was to Ibiza, the longer one was to Crete. The similarity between the two islands was their relative isolation. Franco could effectively ignore the hippies in Ibiza, as the Greek colonels could ignore those in Crete. So long as they caused no trouble, and they never did, then they were left alone.

Ibiza, though, became the epicentre of Spanish and European hippydom. It was cut off from the mainland but it was also a lot easier to get to than to Crete. Because it (and Formentera for that matter) was less developed for tourism than Mallorca (and possibly Menorca), Ibiza had more going for it as the magnet to attract Spain's and Europe's hippies.

It is a matter of interest, though, why hippies would have descended on an island under fascist rule and why, despite the remoteness of the Balearics, they were able to in such great numbers. Free-thinking, free-loving hippies were, as in Estonia, the total antithesis of an authoritarian state which, in Spain's case, was dominated by the straightjacket of Falangist intellectual dogma and strict Catholicism. But it is perhaps an example of how contrary the Franco regime could be, when it suited. Hippies they may have been, but they were still tourists - sort of - and they did add to the local economy.

Seemingly, the greatest concerns that the hippies had involved the Guardia Civil nabbing them when they were cavorting about kit-off. Otherwise, and as a report from the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" of 4 July 1970 revealed, hippies ran up against the forces of the law only when they were being asked to get washed. The report says that hippies were "invited" to wash and clean themselves up for a hippie wedding that was taking place on Ibiza.

It would appear, and this is an additional curiosity, that just prior to Franco's death and immediately afterwards hippies were abandoning Ibiza. It has been suggested that this was to do with external events, such as the end of the Vietnam War, and that the hippie movement had simply run out of steam. But even if there was an exodus then, Ibiza didn't lose its hippie culture or anything like it. What happened was that, in part, it metamorphosised, and music had much to do with this. In 1973, there was a notable arrival on Ibiza. José Padilla. He was to eventually become identified with the Café del Mar and ambient music, which, together with trance and rave, were to no small extent the offspring of psychedelia. The Ibiza clubs, and Pacha and Amnesia both opened in 1973, have of course become the stuff of legend.

The Ibiza hippie culture lives on. And as such, it is a fascinating example of how an imported social movement came to mould an island's very being. In Estonia, I'll bet they wished that they had had better weather.

Born To Run: Springsteen on a boat

The south-west Surrey music scene of the mid to late 1970s reflected a cultural mix of the council estate, the leafiness of suburbia and the background presence of the British Army plus white-boy soul tinged later by the mohair and pins of punk and the walking bass and chunking guitar of ska and reggae. If Paul Weller was the Woking working-class hero, JC, the member of The Members (the line-up once they acquired some fame) who I knew best, was a middle-class magpie of influences, taking from here, taking from there. The Members' "Sound of the Suburbs", replete with the Staines railway station announcement, was a brilliantly anthemic punk to post-punk dissection of the monotony and mundaneness of suburban life. Its reference points were ones with which we were all too familiar.

JC, so the story goes, met Graham Parker in the Three Mariners pub in Bagshot. It's a believable story, as I can believe that I might have been there. Graham was older than everyone else, and his influences reflected a greater worldliness than most of us could boast. It might not have been at the Mariners that he told me who these influences were, but it could well have been. And one of them stood out. An artist who was still relatively unknown but who would soon not be. Bruce Springsteen.

From the distance of years, it can be hard to appreciate how certain artists and bands took popular music by the throat and shook it with ever-increasing rattle and roll intensity. Springsteen was one such artist. Now and then, Messianic performers emerged with barely any warning. Springsteen smashed down walls plastered with posters of pomp and teenybop, but this assault was soon forgotten and the destroyers of the old guard were instead hailed from among the spitters, the rippers, the bin-liners of punk. 

Springsteen shone brightly but ultimately, though he had once blinded us all by the light, the light dimmed. Springsteen, forever "Born To Run", was long ago reduced to a middle-aged jog. Like predecessors (and successors) who appeared on tops of mountains and dispensed shibboleths of godlike truths to a music world wallowing in the shallows of irrelevance and self-regard, he became mortal, and mortality, where popular music is concerned, means being consumed by the irrelevance that had once been shattered.

I don't want old rock stars. I want the old rock stars to still be young rock stars. They mean nothing now that they are old. They assume parodical status and appearance. Paul McCartney, dyed hair and lined face with more than a hint of a lift, looking like the queens who would once flounce along Saint Martin's Lane and eye up boys for potential rent. Mick Jagger, his mouth having assumed such a gargantuan size that it has cracked his face into many parts. Keith Richards, plugged into the mains each morning, and volts into the lobe to activate the vocal chords.

Springsteen has been in Mallorca. Sort of. He has been on a yacht, a super yacht. David Geffen's "Rising Sun". It has been cruising around the island, Springsteen materialising from time to time, looking, through the long lens of the paps, as if he could be anyone trying his hand at paddle surf. Geffen has his own place in music history, one alongside Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joni Mitchell, a group and a singer who were once there on the summits calling from the gods with Springsteen and others who are now relics; those who have survived, at any rate.

We hold on to this past, this old celebrity. Or at least, when this past and old celebrity drifts across the Mediterranean into the view of a Mallorcan lens, we recapture it. Well, some may do. Bruce, I hope you have been having a nice time, but I'm really not interested.

And as the "Rising Sun" heads away from Mallorca, the sight of the island fading in the distance in the eyes of a faded rock star, we wonder - I wonder - if this was always as it was going to be. There are few larger motor yachts in the world. Few, therefore, that can be more expensive. "Born To Run" or born to float in luxury.

There are those, if they were perfectly honest, who would do the same. Not all perhaps. Weller has retained a modicum of the real world; more than a modicum  probably. But what of others? JC reformed The Members a while back. He has done film music, but the heady days of the Chelsea Nightclub are a dim memory. Graham? He's still playing in the US, having remained true to his musical roots. Still singing along to an acoustic guitar, just as he used to when we were all stoned at some so-called party. I don't know, though. I bet he wishes he had been Springsteen. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Summertime: Classic summer songs

Music is the sound of holiday and especially the sound of holiday remembered. It's why the classic song has that much greater power than one of the current day. Fun in the sun of summers past and happy days, it is a song that can spark off the memories as much as a photo album can or spark off nostalgia as much as the smell from a grill can. 

Holiday music of today can have the same trivial frivolity of, say, a "Beach Baby Beach", but it is dominated by two genres which share a common lineage - club and chill. And of these, chill, despite its inoffensiveness, has acquired a ubiquity, predictability and familiarity that has left it hanging limply from the white, sanitised walls of the "chill" bar. Unattended to because no one actually listens to it, chill has become muzak wallpaper, deprived of the hippyish, beachside, sunsetting or sunrising ecstasy of Ibiza whence it originated in the '80s.

The classic, on the other hand, creates an emotion that catches the breath and transports you back to when a song, like the holiday itself, seemed to be suspended in time, suspended under the sun of a long, hot summer; moments of laughter, splashing, diving, dancing, all frozen like an ice-cool drink in a lyric, a melody or harmony.

Arguably, George Gershwin invented the summer classic, but "Summertime" was not exactly written with days by the beach in mind. It is the title that offers the allusion to holidays. As such, therefore, in order to be a summer classic, the word summer has to be somewhere in the title. Or does it?

The answer is yes and no. The greatest summer-classic song of all time shares its title with Gershwin's. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (aka Will Smith) came up with the perfect, languid dance rhythm, sprinkled it with unforgettable imagery and sense provocation ("the smell from a grill", "the temperature's about 88") and borrowed the looking-at-girls summertime cruising of The Beach Boys, which had done more than anything to establish the summer-classic genre three decades before.

Almost any song you care to think of by The Beach Boys was a summer classic. Whether it was the euphoric burst of Brian Wilson's vocal on "Wouldn't It Be Nice" or the falsetto harmonies of "All Summer Long" (which was to become the song at the end of one of the ultimate summer films, "American Graffiti"), a Beach Boys song conjured up the atmosphere of sun, sand and sea. Indeed, with roots in surfing and California's beaches, an argument can be made for The Beach Boys having been the music of early mass tourism and even perhaps of having helped to inspire it.

While Brian Wilson was slowly going crazy, in 1967 there was the first summer of love, which, for all that you would have expected it to have produced otherwise, was notable for a song which was the total antithesis of the normal summer tune. "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" couldn't, in its title alone, have been further away from what people now required from a holiday.

Though Procol Harum had a monster hit, usual summer-classic criteria would exclude it from the ranks of the classic. It was just simply too miserable. Which was not the case when the second summer of love came along (two summers, if one is being strictly accurate). There was little chance of there being any misery. Why? In a word, ecstasy.

If you weren't loved-up in 1989, then you certainly weren't in Ibiza. But for all that this was the second summer of love - and perhaps it was just the sheer onslaught of music that emerged that year - it's hard to pinpoint any obvious summer classics: "Ride On Time", "Back To Life" perhaps. 

The onslaught since technology enabled pretty much anyone to make music has created bodies of work that are all but impossible to keep track of. Back in the day, when there was far less music, classics stood out. They were more easily identifiable with a moment in time, and so when Will Smith had his hit in 1991 (and the song contained the line "think of the summers of the past"), the second "Summertime" perhaps marked the last moment of the summer classic. Nowadays, it is lost in the weight of musical output, becoming a blur like all that chill. And somewhere in Majorca, there will be a chill bar that is playing what it calls a chill tune. It will be "Summer Madness". Kool & The Gang, 1974. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince reprised it.




Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Make Some Noise!

"If you come from Manchester, make some noise! If you come from Liverpool, make some noise! If you come from London, make some noise!" Whether it was Westwood, Trevor Nelson or P-Money, it didn't make any difference. Make some noise! The rallying cry of club time. "If you love Magalluf, make some noise! If you're having a great holiday, make some noise! If you're loving the heat, make some noise!"

Noise. Where would be without it? In some sleepy little village in the island's hinterland probably, surrounded only by the rustling of the bougainvillaea. There again, there would be a damn great Canadair suddenly looming into sound, preparing to dump its watery payload on the latest work of destruction by a pyromaniac, or a group of protesters demonstrating against the Castellano imposition, taking to the nearest dusty lane and smashing the pots and pans of a cacerolada. Or, and even in the sleepiest of villages, there would be the fiesta party, enough noise to waken the dead and unleash the demons with their whirling, fire-cracking tridents.

There is noise and there is noise. The natural Mallorcan noise is that of the Mallorcans themselves. When I first trod the boards as a teenager, my drama teacher took me to a courtyard, made me stand on one side while he was on the other. Pro-ject, he demanded. There is a difference between shouting and projecting, but the Mallorcans have been schooled in what is neither. It is a natural form of communication, known simply as loud.

Noise, you fancy therefore, begets more noise. From the natural state of noise, the addition of the unnatural registers far less than when the natural state is for quiet or for less noise. This unnaturalness is crucial to a Mallorcan summer (and sometimes a Mallorcan winter as well). Fiestas, parties, the endless stream of motos, grunting along the roads, the endless stream of traffic full stop. But rarely is it the case that whole groups of people are cajoled into making some noise, lots of it, over and over again.

The ceaseless, repetitious enjoinment of the audience at the Radio 1Xtra gig at Mallorca Rocks to make some noise on Saturday evening was like the whipping-up of troops into a frenzy prior to battle. The sheer relentlessness of the command was a mesmeric imperative amidst the mesmerism of the constant thump of music.

Make some noise. Away from Magalluf and a couple of hours later, there is noise. It comes from a villa that has been rented out. It is not from the apartment opposite where the Polish workers had been making some noise, a great deal of it, until three the previous morning, culminating in the smashing of bottles as they were discarded in the bottle bank. This hadn't been a noise of which I had been aware, thankfully because it was directed towards the sea and was blocked by the building itself. The villa's noise, though, was heading south and so in the other direction.

There is some noise, some music you can put up with, but seriously, Phil Collins? At gone two in the morning? And to make matters far worse, Phil Collins singing in Spanish. This affront to any possible definition of common courtesy and consideration required action. Make some noise? I did. It wasn't projecting, it was shouting. But I couldn't be heard. Not even by shouting through the open window through which the one-time Genesis drummer was singing his Spanish lament of one more night. One more night of making noise. Una noche más. De ruido. Though why the Germans in the villa had Phil in Spanish, I've no idea.

I don't really hold with this business of resorting to calling the cops, but I was willing to make an exception, thanks to Phil Collins. Plod was on the scene swiftly, but by the time they arrived, the windows had been closed, noise was not being made. I suspected a tip-off had been given by the Poles opposite in a rare moment of fraternity across the Oder-Neisse Line of the road.

It is quite possible that on Saturday night Mallorca registered its highest ever levels of noise. If it didn't, it wasn't for lack of trying. But then noise, and a great deal of it, is inevitable. Noise is summer, summer is noise. Restrictions on building work, sound limiters, terrace curfews. They may all have been designed to cut the noise, but there are always other noises to step up to the plate and replace them.

Make some noise? Easy, no problem, and it doesn't really need a DJ to command it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mallorca Pop Festival

Inedible burgers, indescribable toilets and virtual hypothermia. As introductions to music festivals go, the Hollywood festival in Staffordshire in 1970 should have been a deterrent to have ever again gone near some God-forsaken field in the English countryside. But 14-year-olds never learn. The promise of more Grateful Dead, Family and Traffic was just too great.

Back in the day, music festivals were the domain of the longhair. Popular music applied rules of strict demarcation. The type of band which could appear was regulated as was the appearance of those who attended. Desmond Dekker, just as an example, wouldn't have been allowed in the same county as Free let alone on the same stage. Nor, mercifully for all the pacifist longhairs, would have been the ska lovers with very large boots and very short hair.

Yet, what had been the first real pop festival, Monterey, had an eclectic line-up. Lou Rawls and Otis Redding were the soul antithesis of the tripped-out Dead and the folksy Mamas & The Papas. Dionne Warwick should also have appeared but had finally discovered the way to San Jose and had been double-booked.

The rigidity of popular musical genres that came about in the 1960s continued well into the 1980s. What started to break it down was the emergence of rap and of dance, in particular the Balearic sound that broke out of Ibiza.

Come forward to the current day and to an event such as BBC Radio One's Hackney Weekend, and it is clear just how little rigidity now exists. Kasabian and The Vaccines can play alongside Plan B and Jay-Z and Ed Sheeran and Ben Howard in one mix that is categorised simply as contemporary popular music. Rihanna, a Hackney headliner, can team up with Coldplay to create something as startling and cross-genre as "Princess of China". 

During Hackney, there were numerous references to Ibiza as well to Mallorca. And for Mallorca, read Magalluf. BCM and Mallorca Rocks were name-checked, but what was unexpected was the almost reverential tones that were reserved for Magalluf. Despite all the bad publicity and negative connotations associated with the resort's name, it is easy to forget just how important Magalluf is, especially when it comes to popular music and to the absence of musical barriers.

This importance is about to be made greater. The Fiesta Hotel Group, which together with the Ibiza Rocks Group created the Mallorca Rocks hotel, is to expand the Mallorca Rocks name. The Fresh Apartments Magamar are to become the Mallorca Rocks Apartments, while the Fresh Aparthotel Jungla is to also come under the Mallorca Rocks name from next year.

The Mallorca Rocks concert line-up is like a mini-Hackney, minus the Marshes, spread over several weeks There is no one dominant musical genre; it is a series of concerts that is a celebration of the staggering vitality and openness of today's pop and a reflection of Zane Lowe's musical direction.

Some of the Hackney artists are regulars in Magalluf and do the rounds of various venues and festivals during the summer. Ibiza's 123 (1,2,3 July, geddit?) features, for example, David Guetta and Tinie Tempah. But more remarkable, far more remarkable, is the line-up on the mainland for the Benicàssim festival from 12-15 July. Florence + The Machine, Example, The Maccabees, Chase & Status, Jessie J, Dizzee Rascal, The Stone Roses, Noel Gallagher, New Order and ... and Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan!?

Summer and music go hand in hand. Summer and pop music, that is. Summer is meant to be a time to be alive, not half dead and condemned therefore to the miserable sawing of a cello or the condescension of applause for some local folk-music combo with pipes and whistles and incomprehensible lyrics. Outside of Magalluf, however, mostly all you get are the tribs. Mallorca needs a festival. It needs a Hackney, one that is in tune with the egalitarian nature of today's pop, enjoyed by tourists of different types and by those of different ages. But not in Magalluf.

There must be some finca somewhere that would fit the bill and fit 100,000 people or more over three or four days. The trouble is that, even if there were, they'd never be able to arrive at an agreement. Land law for this, environmental law for that, protests by locals, protests by all manner of opposition groups (most obviously the enviros); they would never manage it.

But somehow in Valencia they can manage it and stage Benicàssim. If only there were a Farmer Ted, like the Farmer Ted who gave over his field for the Hollywood festival. And unlike 1970, the burgers would be edible, the toilets would have vanilla fragrance pumped into them and you certainly wouldn't run the risk of hypothermia because you had forgotten to take a sleeping-bag with you.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Festival Of Austerity: Pollensa 2012

Peter Greenaway's film "The Draughtsman's Contract" was my introduction to this most original of British directors. The late seventeenth-century civility of an English country house hid a secret, one that was slowly revealed by the landscape drawings of a young artist. The film is a murder-mystery masterpiece in a Baroque style, and it was the Baroque, in the form of Michael Nyman's score, that added to the film's overall weirdness.

Greenaway and Nyman have collaborated on several occasions since. Nyman has become one of the great names in the world of film music. He is to be the headline act at this year's Pollensa festival.

I went to the presentation of this year's festival programme with a sense of foreboding. It had already been announced that the festival would be broader in its scope in becoming more of an arts festival than purely a music festival, but the music is what the Pollensa festival has always been about, and the immediate pre-presentation information had suggested that there had been a fair cut to it.

Purely by chance, I opened the programme brochure at the page devoted to Nyman. Blimey, Michael Nyman. That's a coup, I thought. And it is a coup, but on closer examination it became clear that Nyman was a rare highlight in a festival programme which bears little resemblance to the diversity that has been evident at recent editions of the festival.

To be charitable, and one should be charitable, artistic director Joan Valent, working under considerable constraints, has created some musical themes within themes. Along with Nyman's Baroque and minimalist style, there will be other Baroque works. But in truth, this is a festival for austere times, there is no getting away from the fact. The number of concerts is down to ten, and five of these are by Josep Vicent's World Orchestra, or components thereof. This essentially youthful orchestra has a highly credible name, there's no questioning that, but for it to be responsible for half of the concerts is an indication of how the programme has had to be put together this year.

At the presentation, Pollensa's mayor Tomeu Cifre referred to the many difficulties that have surrounded the staging of this year's festival. There is bound to be criticism of the programme, but critics should take the charitable view. There isn't the funding available, and everyone knew there wouldn't be, while Pollensa town hall were left in the financial lurch last year when the Balearic Government's tourism ministry did not come up with the aid that it had promised.

It is very noticeable that the government's involvement this year does not come from the tourism ministry. It comes from the culture ministry, and it is about time that it did. I have questioned previously the tourism aspect of the festival, as I am far from convinced that it has ever generated a significant amount from what has always been a cultural event, primarily for Mallorca's residents. At least the festival now resides in the correct government ministry.

Mayor Cifre also referred to tourism in connection with the festival, but a look at the entire programme, which includes sessions on music in the cinema and the crime novel as well as an exhibition of plastic-art sculpture, gives the game away. It has very little for the tourist. The only other international name that many might have heard of (and I'm assuming that many might even have heard of Nyman) is Ludovic Bource, who won an Oscar for his score for "The Artist". Bource will be having a piano conversation with Nyman and Valent's pianos in a special presentation on music in the cinema. It is to take place at the Hotel Formentor, which exposes something of an elitist quality to the whole programme and not one for the general tourist hoi-polloi.

The most charitable view of this year's programme is that it was essential the festival went ahead, even if it faced mayor Cifre's many difficulties. The festival is part of Mallorca's cultural scene, and were it to stop for even one year, it might not come back. But one does have to ask just how valued the festival is. Camper have come on board as a sponsor, Colonya Bank is there, as Colonya often is, as are Barceló, through the Hotel Formentor, and the Son Brull Hotel, but when the festival's financial difficulties and therefore future became evident last year, I wondered whether private sponsorship would come to the festival's rescue. Up to a point it has, but it needs more. And you need only look at the music programme for this year to know that it does.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Streets

Am I the only one who doesn't give a toss about the Balearic Symphony Orchestra? Each morning (or so it seems), there it appears on news websites, fiddling on the streets of Palma while Mallorca burns and while I'm listening to Chris Moyles. Not that the Moylester plays much music, but that which he does certainly isn't classical.

I've never got the whole deal with classical music. It has no beat and you can't sing a long, unless it's that greater abomination - opera. Classical music discovered a nouveau-muzak audience courtesy of Classic FM around the time that supporters were unearthed who believed that football was acceptable because of Pavarotti. It wasn't the new rock 'n' roll, it was the new pretentiousness. Most listeners, I fancy, soon got bored and secretly tuned back to the Hairy Cornflake.

I have tried and it's not as though I consider myself a Philistine. There is even the odd CD lurking somewhere and gathering dust. But I can't claim to have ever parted with good money for a CD; someone was nuts enough to give me one.  

There were moments in the past, as with Blood Sweat and Tears and their version of Satie's "Gymnopédies", something of a precursor to ambient, or so I can now rationalise. "Pictures At An Exhibition" registered for a time but was promptly forgotten when the greatest horror in the history of music occurred - rock found Mussorgsky and other composers and it was called Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

So no, I really couldn't care less about the BSO. Its stunts of playing outdoors are clever bits of agitprop, but sympathy spreads thin when you consider that within its Moss Bros-outfitted membership there are some on a far from unappreciable wedge, one being funded out of the public purse, while it has been revealed that its management had left it in January owing about 1.3 million euros in unpaid social security and income tax. Now, it's going to lose around 30% of its funding from different authorities, and it's crying foul.

I am very sorry, but there are all manner of organisations and individuals losing funding, so the orchestra is just going to have to lump it. But faced with a loss of public finance, the propagandists are set to work, one line of attack being the tourist one. It attracts many tourists, blah, blah. Ok then, how many? Give us figures. And give us figures of tourists who are attracted specifically by the orchestra. They can't be supplied, because no one knows. Instead, all you get is some vagueness as to "many". How many is "many"? A hundred?

If it could be shown that the orchestra dragged in a tourist base equivalent to another branch of elitist tourism, e.g. golf, then the argument would be altogether stronger. Golf can prove its numbers, its specific numbers; they are around the 100,000 mark, which isn't bad. The orchestra won't attract anything like this number. It is a bonus for those who enjoy the classics, not an essential, and it costs public money to provide this non-essential. Golf, on the other hand, does quite nicely thank you, courtesy of the private sector.

The regional government says it has a cunning plan to help the orchestra, which is that the private sector can put its hands into its pockets. And so it should. We'll soon find out just how much the orchestra is valued, although don't underestimate the attraction to a sponsor of being associated with the orchestra, if only to satisfy the egos of company directors.

But the orchestra is part of the local culture, and the local culture should be supported because it is a "good thing" to support local culture. Shouldn't it? Absolutely, but the orchestra is not culture in a traditional Mallorcan sense. Musicians with folk groups have had funding slashed, and they are far more representative of local culture. Other parts of the arts have lost or are losing funds, the Pollensa Music Festival for instance. Unfortunately, and much as I would like to see all aspects of the arts, including the orchestra, being paid for by a generous public administration, there is, hasn't anyone noticed, a damn great hole in that administration's pocket. The orchestra can't plead a special case, because it has no special case to plead.

The tourism argument holds no weight. The orchestra can't enumerate its contribution, but other music on Mallorca can; you just have to count the guests at Mallorca Rocks hotel, for example. And where's the public money for this? The private sector is quite capable of driving culture in its widest sense if it can make money out of it. But of course Mallorca Rocks is Magalluf, it's youth, and it's rap rather than Rachmaninov.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Catalan indie bands on tour

With the invasion of "Anglo-Saxon" acts to Mallorca this summer, interesting to learn that Catalan indie acts are going in the opposite direction. Funds from the Ramon Llull Institute will send groups to festivals including South By South West in Austin, Texas which takes place from tomorrow. Finding them among what are, according to the South By South West website, 1800 acts in 70 venues over the four days might not be too easy though.

See more: Ultima Hora

The BAFMAs: Awards for Mallorcan achievement

Yes, it's that time of the year. Time for the BAFMAs, the Blog Awards For Mallorcan Achievement. In no particular order, the following are variously well-known and less well-known or were well-publicised and less well-publicised ...

Politician Of The Year (Shared): Miquel Ensenyat and Carme Garcia
Ensenyat, the PSM Mallorcan socialist mayor of Esporles, stood as candidate for the PSM at the national elections. There was little remarkable about this, except that Ensenyat is an openly gay politician in a land where the Church can issue warnings of the danger of voting for politicians who support gay marriage.

Garcia, the "turncoat" of Alcúdia, was also a PSM politician. "Was" being the operative word. She sided with the Partido Popular after the regional elections, despite the wide gulf in political ideology, leading to her being expelled from the party and to her suffering recriminations led by the previous coalition of PSOE and the Convergència. Though her ex-party and the opposition had a legitimate point and though Garcia secured for herself a role as second-in-command to the new lady mayor, her decision could also be seen as a blow for the chumminess of the previous male-dominated coalition which did not have the moral authority to expect her to support it in denying the PP, which had gained eight out of nine seats required for a majority, the right to govern Alcúdia.

Celebrity Of The Year: Tom Hanks
They sought him here, they sought him there. Through their long lenses, they sought Tom everywhere. There he was, at long distance, speaking into an iPhone, or rather there was the back of Tom's head speaking into an iPhone. There he also was just hanging around and doing very little, assuming you could make out it was Tom behind the security and beneath his headgear.

Business Of The Year: Lidl
Disproving the notion that Mallorca is not open to foreign companies, Lidl, exploiting a relaxation in commercial developments, expanded across Mallorca, bringing jobs as well as competition to the supermarket sector.

Event Of The Year: The Inca bullfight
If campaigners sought more encouragement in banning bullfighting in Mallorca, they got it during the Inca bullfight. The promoter caused outrage by taking to the ring to kill the bull after the bull had effectively excluded itself from the fight when it broke a horn. Rules don't apparently permit non-combatants to enter the ring. The gruesome video of the killing of the bull went viral and the video also highlighted and criticised the fact that minors had been allowed into the arena.

Beach Of The Year: Playa de Muro
The extension of Puerto Alcúdia's beach (which was voted Mallorca's best beach on "Trip Advisor"), the beach in Playa de Muro was the target of efforts by the town hall to improve it even further. These included instituting a fine for urinating on the beach, which drew a response from some who wanted to know where else they were supposed to go to the toilet, and a similar fine for a similar act in the sea. It wasn't entirely clear how Muro town hall proposed policing the latter, but with concerns about rising sea levels, the consequence of climate change, a ban on using the sea was probably a wise precaution.

Website Of The Year: Mallorca Daily Photo Blog
Just going to show that wit, informativeness, striking photography and personal dedication count for far more than huge budgets chucked at websites in promoting Mallorca. It deserves an award very much more prestigious than a BAFMA.

Musician Of The Year: Arnau Reynés
While more celebrated musicians took to stages in Mallorca this year, Reynés, the professor of music from the Universitat de les Illes Balears, who has performed in some of Europe's finest cathedrals, brought a tradition of music in Mallorca that is often overlooked to the small church in Playa de Muro and gave a summer recital, as did other leading Mallorcan organists.

Historian Of The Year: Gabriel Verd Martorell
Thirty-five years is a long time for any one historian to have sought to have proved a point, but Verd was still at it, striving, once and for all, to establish that Christopher Columbus was born in Felanitx. In a "solemn" declaration in the town, he claimed that Columbus was the illegitimate nephew of King Ferdinand and that to have had the title of governor general bestowed on him, which he did, he had to have had royal blood. You can't blame a historian for persistence.

So, these are the BAFMAs. No science behind them, no text voting, purely my own choice. But if you have your own nominations or suggestions, please feel free ... .


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Free For All: Mallorca and the arts

If you caught Kenny Garrett and his quartet in Sa Pobla earlier this week or will be rocking up at Pollensa's Sant Domingo cloister to get a bit of the Chamber Orchestra of the National Theatre of Prague tomorrow, then I hope you have made and will make the most of them. Both the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival and the Pollensa International Music Festival could become dodos of Mallorca's arts world. Extinct.

The Pollensa festival very nearly didn't happen this year. It did thanks to a sofa-thon at the tourism ministry. Carlos Delgado had his people scrambling around on the ministry settees, hunting for any loose euros that had fallen down the backs, and they came up with a couple of hundred thousand in the nick of time. The mountain of coins duly deposited in the Sant Domingo cloister, the sound of their jangling competed with an ominous bass, the noise of the ministry saying we've helped you out this time, but don't expect us to in future.

The ministry will announce next week which events have passed a test that will guarantee funding from a reserve pot that isn't exactly overflowing. 600 grand is up for grabs for various arts festivals, but not all might qualify. As important is what happens to them down the line. For some the end of the line may well have been reached, and this includes the Sa Pobla Jazz and Pollensa festivals.

Arts funding is often at the bottom of the public spending food chain, though in Mallorca it has seemed to occupy a rather higher level. In part, this has been because the arts are seen as a "good thing" rather than there being any real attempt to quantify benefits. But this is the nature of the beast. Arts contribute to a general welfare, a general quality of life; they shouldn't always be the target of bean-counters. The attitude has not been wrong, far from it, but current circumstances have exposed the vulnerable sustainability of the arts, Mallorcan style.

Certain judgements do occasionally have to be made. In the case of the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival, it hasn't simply been a case of putting on some free concerts. There are also the workshops that take place each year, so there is a music educational element to the festival as well. But to come to the free concerts, for whose benefit really are they?

The concerts attract a "nice" Jazz Club crowd (of the type satirised by John Thomson's Louis Balfour character in "The Fast Show"), but they also attract the locals. Nothing wrong with this, the concerts are after all taking place in their town. However, a thing with jazz is that it is an acquired taste. Some of it can be a dreadful racket. Jazz is most certainly not Mallorcan folk music or the direness of the "orchestras" that get dragged onto the stages of Mallorca's fiestas and churn out kitsch cabaret versions of sixties' tunes; the sort of act that might once have been on the under card at Bournemouth's Winter Gardens below Norman Vaughan, the Rockin' Berries and Mrs. Mills. They're rubbish, but the Mallorcan oldsters seem to like them.

Put a McCoy Tyner thumping a piano, a Kenny Garrett wailing on a sax in front of an old Sa Pobla farmer who has pitched up with his missus along with their picnic of potato fritters, trempó and vino, and what exactly does the old farmer make of them? Not a lot probably, but it's free.

I might be doing old Sa Pobla farmers a disservice. Perhaps they are all avid jazz enthusiasts who have vast collections of Blue Note and ECM discs stashed in an outhouse, but I somewhat doubt it.

Free bring free, and free having been free for several years in Sa Pobla creates an expectation that free it will always be. Free is wonderful, and the provision of free entertainment in Mallorca has been laudable. It has enhanced the general quality of life. It would be sad for it to no longer be free, but the alternative has to be considered.

The problem is that charging probably wouldn't cover costs. It doesn't in Pollensa. You can fork out up to 45 euros for a concert during the music festival, but the festival still needs huge amounts of state funding. The Sant Domingo cloister is not exactly Wembley Stadium; it's tiny in terms of what it can generate through ticket sales.

We are, I'm afraid, going to have to accept that some of the cherished and sometimes superb free arts in Mallorca are likely to disappear. Unless, that is, they sell their soul to the corporate shilling of sponsorship. Were it available.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Pollensa Patrona party under threat

The night party of 1 August into 2 August during the Patrona fiestas in Pollensa may not happen. The town hall is considering dropping the party on account of its cost and the problems it brings (excessive drinking, for instance). The party usually comprises rock and other bands playing on stages in different squares in the town.

Limited Appeal?: The Pollensa Music Festival

Better late than never. Used as one is to the tardiness with which fiesta and fair information is given out, the lateness with which that for this year's Pollensa Music Festival was officially announced takes some beating.

The music festival isn't like the fiestas. It is an international event, supposedly. It attracts international artists at any rate. And booking international artists and arranging for their appearance doesn't happen with the same minimal preparation as that required for, for example, fiesta "sardinadas" that occur every year, on the same day and with the same musical accompaniment.

The programme should have been released weeks ago. It finally emerged, on a scrappy PDF on Pollensa town hall's website on 29 June, three days before the first concert. No fanfare. Nothing. Not even a poster, and the website link still the same as that for 2010. To describe the pre-publicity as rubbish would be an insult to garbage the world over. It is very poor.

A mystery with the lateness with which the programme has been published is that it was already known. On 14 June, the line-up was announced on the website of a Spanish newspaper. It bears no difference to that which now appears on the town hall's website.

Yet, the day after the 29 June announcement, we learned that the programme had to be put together in a short period of three weeks. Given the previous press announcement, this doesn't quite chime, but to be fair the lateness of the official announcement may have more to do with finalising contracts rather than finding performers.

There are mitigating circumstances for the delay and for the reduction in the number of concerts. In 2009 there were twelve, last year there were eleven. This year there will be eight. (A later concert in September by the National Orchestra of Spain might yet be added.)

The circumstances are financial and political. As far as the latter is concerned, the previous Pollensa town hall administration is being blamed for having not done anything. But the funding of the festival is shrouded in some confusion. One report suggests that the budget is only 30,000 euros lower than 2010; previous ones had suggested it would be just over a half and that the primary cause of the shortfall was the non-receipt of a grant of 180,000 euros from the tourism ministry.

Whatever the financial or political reasons, the fact is that this year's festival, which did seem at one point to be in doubt, is the fiftieth. For such a celebration the organisation has, at best, been disappointing.

Despite the reduction in the number of concerts, quality, we are also told, has not been lost. While quality doesn't mean that you might have heard of the performers (and as one who is hardly a classical music aficionado, I haven't heard of most of them), there is none of previous years' quirkiness, insofar as you can describe Supertramp's Roger Hodgson or Spandau Ballet's Tony Hadley as quirky. Of this year's performers only the flamenco singer José Mercé registers with me.

Mercé and the Israeli singer Noa are identified as two acts with appeal to a wider public. Possibly so, but perhaps the fiftieth anniversary is a time to take stock and assess what the music festival should all be about. While the setting of the concerts in the cloister of Sant Domingo is unquestionably fine, the programme and the atmosphere of the festival are too elitist.

The festival is described as being the Balearics' most prestigious. But prestige doesn't necessarily mean appeal. What does it really do for Pollensa or for Mallorca? Does it, in itself, attract much tourism? No one has probably ever sought to find out. Carlos Delgado, the new tourism minister, has said the festival will continue to get support, but in Delgado we trust to take a good look at some sacred cows.

The festival would benefit from a broader programme, a sort of fringe if you like. There might also be sense in integrating it with what goes on in Sa Pobla at its jazz festival where genuinely international artists such as McCoy Tyner have appeared, and for free.

If the festival is so prestigious and if financing is such an issue, then why not find major sponsors? Thomas Cook can sponsor an Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia, so why not a sponsor of such size on board for the music festival? Despite the prestige, it isn't perhaps that interesting an event for sponsors. And you come back to the whole issue of tourism with a cultural bent. Sports tourism yes, but some stuffy concerts for a small minority?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Future Sound Of Mallorca

Twenty years ago an astonishing noise was released. It was one of the defining tracks of acid house, trip-hop, ambient - all of these things. In the same year as London's Ministry Of Sound opened, the club's name was partially echoed by the name of a group whose music was central to what was now an established dance scene. In 1991, The Future Sound Of London issued "Papua New Guinea". It signalled, along with the music of acts such as KLF and The Orb, the arrival of club dance and rave into the mainstream.

In the same year, the American music impresario, Bill Graham, was killed in a helicopter crash. Twenty years before his death, Graham had closed his Fillmore venues in New York and San Francisco. His final introduction at the Fillmore West went: "What better way to end it, than with the sounds of the streets - Santana". What followed was another astonishing noise: a frenetic and soulful combination of "Incident At Neshabur" and Joe Zawinul and Miles Davis's "In A Silent Way".

Bill Graham was something of a mentor to Carlos Santana, encouraging a collision between rock, blues and Latin rhythms that helped to place those rhythms into a music environment of the time in a far more contemporary and dynamic fashion than artists such as Sergio Mendes had achieved.

There is a continuum from 1971 and Santana's appearance as the act which closed Fillmore West, through The Future Sound Of London in 1991 and up to today. It is one that came to forge and still does forge the amalgamation of Latin rhythm with club dance. In Mallorca, Latin, be it salsa, flamenco or other genres, joins with techno, ambient and other forms, to make its own astonishing noise.

Yet, for all that Mallorca has a club scene, one which musically ranges from conventional dance and retro nights (of the 80s and 90s) to harder-core techno and the Latin-oriented fusion, the island has never meant music. Certainly not in the way that Ibiza has and still does.

Balearic house originated in Ibiza in the mid-1980s and was the one of the main forces, arguably the main force, behind the dance and rave scene that emerged in Britain. It was picked up by clubs like Manchester's Haçienda and by the club's co-owners, New Order, and its various derivatives were formed by the likes of Jimmy Cauty of The Orb, later the KLF, and The Future Sound Of London.

Ibiza has, ever since, been synonymous with clubbing. While it does of course have its regular family tourism, and while it has also taken measures to try and eradicate more extreme aspects of its club scene, it has an image of dance and clubbing; an altogether more youthful image than Mallorca has.

The islands have their different images, and it is only right that they should. Ibiza, though, is dabbling with some danger if it tries too hard to dilute its club scene. The drugs and crime that inevitably go along with it (and from which Mallorca is also not immune) are understandable reasons for it wishing to do so, but the island should appreciate the business that is brought in and which, from the 1980s, has fallen into the laps of tourism officialdom which hasn't had to lift a finger because the club scene happened organically without its direct involvement.

While Ibiza has sought to distance itself from one of its core brand attributes, Mallorca has never sought to embrace the club scene or music in general. There is a reluctance, a suspicion, a lack of appreciation within tourism circles when it comes to music that isn't stuffy or strictly traditional. Because it tends to imply a youthful market, it doesn't quite chime with the mainstream conservatism of the "family" market. And for Mallorca, the youthful market tends to mean Magalluf and the periodic bad publicity it attracts, and one, therefore, that the island's tourism officials would prefer didn't exist.

Music, however, as much as the sun and the beach is symbolic of holidays. Who doesn't have their memories of certain songs and certain holidays? And be the music the holiday-camp campness of "Agadoo", the karaoke, the live act at a fiesta or the dance club, it is part of the whole holiday experience. Rather than suspicion of the club and youth market, the mindset should be one of placing music, in all its varieties, at the centre of tourism thinking. Were this to be the case, you would hope that an altogether more relaxed and proactive attitude would take hold, one in which different types of music could co-exist in a way that might attract new business, as witnessed by what Mallorca Rocks is attempting.

A genuine music festival, for example; letting the parties go back to the beaches, rather than locking them away in sports arenas, as now happens in Can Picafort; more concert seasons and more international acts. The future sounds of Mallorca and the future sound of music as part of holidays. Over to you, Mr. Delgado.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Fatboy Slim heads Mallorca Rocks 2011 programme

The Mallorca Rocks hotel in Magalluf, which opened last year, has announced its programme of concerts for the coming summer. The headlining names include Fatboy Slim, together with Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, on 21 June, Madness on 13 September and, kicking off the season on 31 May, Plan B.