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.

They Won't Let It Grow: Spanish rock music

It is a thankless task being asked to come up with a list of the ten best. One man or one woman's ten best might well be another man or woman's ten worst. Lists of the ten bests provoke debate rather than being definitive, though there are doubtless selectors of ten bests who would argue that their choices are definitive.

Music offers a ripe breeding-ground for lists of the best. The ten best pop/rock singles of all time might, typically, include some of the worst crimes committed in the name of popular music. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", for example. Ghastly, pompous, self-indulgent and made all the worse by a video featuring some of the most unpleasant haircuts in musical history. "Hey Jude". When Macca stumbled into the intro to this at the Olympics, I thought oh God no, anything but that. A too-long song that would have benefited from serious editing: about six-and-a-half minutes of editing.

"Rolling Stone" magazine has come up with its ten best, nay greatest, Latin rock albums of all time. What this has done, apart from sparking the anticipated debate as to the merits of these ten greatest, is to highlight the almost total absence of efforts by Spanish rock acts. For the casual observer, a pertinent question might be: what Spanish rock acts?

The Rolling Stone ten have been drawn from what is a wide interpretation of "Latin": Spanish, Portuguese, central and southern American, plus a touch of US Latino. The all-time number one, it would appear, is the 1994 album "Re" by the Mexican band Café Tacvba. Only one of the ten is likely to register with most of you, Santana's "Abraxas" ("Oye Como Va", "Black Magic Woman" and others). Of the rest, there is only one by a Spanish artist, Manu Chao's "Clandestino", recorded in 1998.

Santana couldn't have been ignored. It was they, more than any other act, who popularised Latin rhythms within the rock genre. Though the singles are the best known tracks from "Abraxas", lesser known is "Incident At Neshabur", a startling instrumental which was to bring down the curtain, for the final time, at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore West theatre in 1971.

But if I'm right in thinking that Santana would be the only name that means anything, what does this say for the general popularity of Latin rock outside of a Latin music audience? Not very much, I suspect. Santana would register among a select group of acts that have acquired anything approaching global fame - Julio Iglesias and the boy Enrique, José Feliciano, Gloria Estefan, Sergio Mendes, Herb Alpert, Los Bravos, Ricky Martin - and none of these are exactly rock, while Los Bravos were brave for only as long as it took for everyone to forget their one and only big hit. Latin pop has given us Shakira, Thalía, Christina Aguilera and J-Lo, none of them Spanish. Pitbull, who is from Miami, divides opinion. If he's as bad as some argue that he is, then why is he so popular?

The anonymity of Spanish and Latin rock acts may be due to the fact that they aren't particularly good. But there may well be other explanations, such as a bias towards white Anglo-Saxon rock and a lack of obvious official promotion of music, as is pretty much the case in Spain. Or perhaps it is because Latin styles are better suited to other genres. Spain, and the Balearics in particular, have been to the fore in dance and club music over many years. Ibiza, in Europe at any rate, held the key to the explosion of various club styles from the mid-1980s onwards.

There are some efforts to lend a hand to Spanish rock. For example, Mallorcan and Catalonian bands were given financial assistance to cross the Atlantic last year by the Ramon Llull Institute. They took part in various festivals, such as South By South West in Austin, Texas. Of Spanish mainland acts, La Oreja de Van Gogh has cracked the international market better than most, but the group's success has nevertheless been confined primarily to foreign Latin markets. 

It isn't that there is a lack of talent or that language is an obstacle. If I had to nominate one Spanish group that deserves being heard by a wider audience, it would be the Madrid band HATEM (Hola A Todo El Mundo). A single released last year, "They Won't Let Me Grow", is a gem. The group was nominated by "Rolling Stone" as one of its emerging acts in 2011. Maybe the title of the song says much, though. Official indifference to Spanish popular music is preventing it from growing.

* For the ten greatest Latin rock albums, go to http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-10-greatest-latin-rock-albums-of-all-time-20121119






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