Con Ustedes, Los Beatles: 50 years ago

This was the set list. 1. "Twist And Shout". 2. "She's A Woman". 3. "I'm A Loser". 4. "Can't Buy Me Love". 5. "Baby's In Black". 6. "I Wanna Be Your Man". 7. "A Hard Day's Night". 8. "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby". 9. "Rock And Roll Music". 10. "I Feel Fine". 11. "Ticket To Ride". 12. "Long Tall Sally".

When this set list had been played in other European cities, the songs would not have been heard above the screams. This was the set list for the first performance of The Beatles in Spain. The day was 2 July, 1965. The place was the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas in Madrid. There was to be only one other concert in Spain, the next day at the bullring in Barcelona.

It is said that the atmosphere and the sound were better in Barcelona, but neither concert was like it would have been in cities in countries that were not living under the repressive instincts of the Franco regime. At 10pm on the night of 2 July, the introduction was made - "señoras y señores con ustedes, Los Beatles". "Ustedes" summed it up: the formal form of you. The arena was only half full. Potential attendees had been deterred by concerns of police surveillance and bans by their parents. There was another reason for the low attendance: The Beatles weren't anything like as well known as they were in, say, Germany, France or Sweden. For a kick-off, their records couldn't be openly bought. Radio disc jockeys of the time had to go to London to acquire them.

Before the concerts, it was reckoned that, at most, 3,500 copies of Beatles' albums were owned across Spain. A Beatles' album in the UK would clear one million copies. This was one reason why Brian Epstein was reluctant to have the "boys" play Spain. He couldn't see there was any business advantage. Yet, of those 3,500 copies, some 2,000 were acquired by people who probably didn't even have a record-player; there were only 1,500 registered sales at that time. It was this fact that promoter Francisco Bermúdez used in persuading Epstein. If people would buy records even if they didn't have the means to play them indicated a demand, to which could be added the "underground" of listening to what were meant to have been forbidden foreign radio stations. 

Bermúdez had stuck his neck out in bringing The Beatles to Spain, and the promotion was certainly not plain sailing: not anything like it. A further reason for low sales was that tickets and posters were seized by the authorities which had sought to prevent the concerts going ahead. They were only released a week ahead of the Madrid concert, the regime having had a change of heart and the interior ministry having finally given permission. To have banned the concerts, the regime concluded, could have provoked a diplomatic row with Britain: the members of The Beatles had just been named in The Queen's birthday honours list.

Bermúdez also had to contend with fierce criticism from the Catholic Church and almost all the press. Threats to morality, threats of revolutionary thought, threats of "riots", threats to the regime and to "Spanishness". It is remarkable, given all the background, that the concerts ever went ahead.

John, Paul, George and Ringo arrived at Madrid airport at twenty to six on the afternoon of 1 July. Wild scenes of their arrival at other airports were not replicated, though somehow some 200 fans had managed to congregate to greet them, despite the heavy police presence. They stayed at the Hotel Fénix - now the Gran Mellá Fénix - in suites 123, 223, 323 and 423. There were no parties, no real going out, though it is said that Brian went to the Bourbon club, one of the few with a "gay" ambience. They did receive one notable visitor, though: the bullfighter El Cordobés, who wanted his photo taken with them. There were other photos to pose for. One that seems amazing now was with two officers from the Guardia Civil: John and Paul are saluting them.

The press coverage featured one double-page spread under the headline: "Los Beatles, Inhibición". There is a photo of two or three girls running with a banner which says "love you", another of five or six people dancing, a further one of The Beatles performing, John with the Cordoban hat that he wore throughout the concert. It lasted barely an hour and that was pretty much that, save for moving on to Barcelona for the second performance. It was, except for three concerts during a mini-tour of Germany the next summer, the last time The Beatles performed in Europe.

Last night at the Gran Mellá Fénix a special fiftieth anniversary occasion would have cost up to 1,425 euros. In 1965, the concert cost as little as 75 pesetas.

How The Beatles Changed Mallorca

The early history of rock and pop music in Britain was one characterised by fears of degeneracy (Elvis, the lip and the hip), by the import of a totally alien sound, by discs brought over by Americans and by crackles on Radio Luxembourg, by the creation of teenage and youth culture, and by imitation, copying and the cover version. But amidst the search for the British Elvis (Cliff!), an indigenous music was born. First there came the improvised washboard of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan's legacy to the world of music, a type of proto-punk that required little or no actual musical ability. And then, of course, came The Beatles.

All the while, there was the discourse as to the social impact of this musical revolution. How could young girls (and occasionally young boys) be so infatuated with long-haired layabouts or an American who sounded as though he was a negro? National Service would have to be restored to drum discipline into the youth cadres of teds then later mods and rockers whose heads were turned to violence by this music. It was a discourse that very few people over the age of thirty could take part in with any sense of impartiality or understanding. They were bystanders witnessing a wholesale and fundamental shift in a society in which the teenager and the young person had been expected to copy only the fashions and tastes of their parents and not those of this strange breed of pop star. 

It is easy, at the distance of 50 or more years, to forget just how much changed as a consequence of the emergence of pop culture and also how much society was further changed in the few years after it emerged thanks to the pill, the Abortion Act and the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. It is also easy to style this change as the product of a progressive, liberated society, when in truth it wasn't. As an example, it should be remembered that where pop music was concerned, the bastion of the establishment, the BBC, held out until 1967 before it launched Radio One.

Nevertheless, pop music and culture played a crucial role in transforming Britain from its post-war austere and staid conservatism into the Britain of the Swinging Sixties, and The Beatles, more so perhaps than Elvis (or certainly Cliff), were the popular flag-bearers of this transformation. But their influence went much further than Britain. Their music and the culture that went with it was felt in repressive regimes, and one of these was Spain's and, in particular, parts of Spain that had opened up to tourism. Which meant Mallorca.

Francesc Vicens is a Mallorcan musicologist about whom I have written on a number of occasions. A couple of years ago, Vicens put out a book entitled "Paradise of Love", which considered how pop music and tourism collided in the Mallorca of the 1960s. He has now, along with fellow researcher Tomeu Canyelles, had a book published which is called "Beatles Made in Mallorca". Its theme is similar to the previous one in that it looks at the social impact of pop music on the island, but it homes in on the impact of one group, The Beatles.

In certain ways, 1960s Mallorca wasn't so different to the conservative Britain of the 1950s. It was ruled by a repressive regime of course, but there was no such thing as a youth culture and very little access to contemporary music. Whereas it was American sailors who were often the means of supply of discs to aspirant musicians in Liverpool, so flight crews and tourists were the ones who supplied the discs for local musicians. Once the musical cat was out of the tourist or flight attendant bag, there was little that the regime could do to put it back in again. Though they never played Mallorca, The Beatles did play Madrid and Barcelona in early July, 1965. Their performances were greeted, as Canyelles has pointed out, with disbelief by the regime. They were hugely successful but, and just had been the case in Britain, there was incredulity as to how young people could be so taken with these longhaired individuals and their music and huge concerns as to the effects on morals and society as a whole.

In Mallorca, though The Beatles were copied and imitated, a discernible style emerged: The Beatles with a Mallorcan flavour, local musicians having found themselves liberated. Suddenly, a conservative music characterised by patriotic melodies and French and Italian crooning was replaced by the guitar, the drums, the bass and the pop song. Vicens and Canyelles, in researching their book, have considered the output of the likes of Los Javaloyas, Los Pops and Los 5 del Este, and how these groups got hold of discs brought to the island and how they would have listened, using long-wave transmitters, to radio stations that were banned in Spain (echoes of those early years of access in Britain to music from Luxembourg and then the pirates). They would note down all the notes, either do their own versions or use the songs as the basis for their own originals. And having developed their own "sound", courtesy of records brought by tourists, they ended up selling their own records to these same tourists, who would take them home as souvenirs.

The Mallorcan Beatles may have been a peculiar phenomenon but they were a perfectly understandable phenomenon. It was mass tourism which truly altered Mallorcan society in the 1960s, and this was a tourism buoyed by its own social change, one in which The Beatles had been crucial.