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60 years of rock
the charismatic Argentine rocker (who escaped compulsory military service due to an outbreak of madness - some say feigned, but others maintain it was not his last stay in a psychiatric hospital), and had no idea what would happen in that recital. They were the times that Argentina was moving out of the shadow of its military dictatorship. The island was home to many victims of the Diaspora provoked by the militaries in that country, between the democratic and the left-wing dissidents. For the colony of Argentines, García’s songs against the oppression and for the ‘disappeared’ were hymns and flags, and the hall filled to bursting. He started his gig several hours late, just when it seemed it could end in mutiny, but the public waited for their idol with amazing patience and no agitation. Estudios Mediterráneo’s fruitful relationship with the transatlantic artists had just started that year. Another unforgettable event was the performance of Moris, who sold thousands of copies of his cover of the Elvis song ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. That night, the performer was not at his best and appeared at three in the morning, when the organisers were about to start giving the audience their money back, though they had also enjoyed the music of Sandombe. Then, rather than existing in sealed compartments, island bands formed communicating vessels, in which members of some bands played in others, or performed in several groups with different styles without no worries, even playing with foreign musicians. This was how it worked for Blanco, another emblematic
their songs, a mix of folk and calypso, and with dozens of disks behind them. The Danish couple spent some years out of the spotlight in Ibiza (they divorced in 1975, although years before she had had a very public affair with Clifford Irving, author of the hoax biography of Howard Hughes. She even accompanied him to Mexico when he claimed to be travelling to the United States for interviews with supposed sources of his book, and he remarried a year after they separated, winning a star role in the film ‘F for Fake’, 1973, about Elmyr de Hory and his forgeries. Filmed on the island by Orson Welles, many years later these same events again formed the centre of the plot in ‘The Hoax’, 2006, starring Richard Gere, with whom she had acted in ‘American Gigolo’), but they - or certainly she could not keep away from the stage for long. This was the start of the Theatre Trust, an experience even today difficult to better both for the quality of the cast, mainly British residents, and the emotions they aroused in a public who had never before been able to see a show of that calibre, and who surrendered unconditionally to their musicals, booking out every session of these legendary pieces. The first show to be inaugurated in the old ballroom, turned for the occasion into a tiny theatre for 200 closely packed seats, was ‘Oliver Twist’. The ‘Sold Out’ sign was hung up for the whole two weeks, with two performances a day, which the first production lasted that December 1984. Later came ‘The Sound of Music’, translated into Spanish as ‘Sonrisas y lágrimas’ (Smiles and tears), the somewhat saccharine story of the Trapp family and Maria the postulant. Although all the takings of Theatre Trust’s musicals were sent to good causes, the company’s professionalism reached its peak in 2003, during the performance of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, when one of the actors died. “He died in the dressing rooms”, recalls Juanito, who recalled how a doctor tried in vain to revive him with a defibrillator. “We had to wait for the judge to come and authorise removal of the body. And all this happened behind the scenes, because on stage, the show went on, as the strictest theatrical tradition demands. The show finally ended, and there was the dead actor, still covered in a blanket”. Juanito alternated the business of groups coming to the island to record with the promotion of new bands from all over the place. One of these was Sobredosis, a heavy group from Madrid, a craze shared by Las Dalias and Mariskal Romero, the man in charge of the metal scene in the capital at the time as well as at Estudios Mediterráneo. Other visitors to Sant Carles that year included Coz, of ‘Las Chicas son Guerreras’ fame, another business venture, “one of those that generally end up losing money”, admits Juanito, who in spite of all, insisted on supporting live music. The genre was the last thing they worried about. There was the extraordinary case of ‘The Golden Old Days’, the London musical that Juanito brought to the island directly from the London stage in 1985. “It’s the maddest thing I’ve ever done”, he confesses. He had always been a fan of musicals. Influenced by the interest caused by Van Pallandt’s productions, on a trip to England he decided to bring this work back home with him. The plan was a good one. The idea was to attract the British tourists coming to the island with Thomson’s the travel agent, middle-aged people who would accept this cultural event as part of their stay on the island. “The problem was that the agencies didn’t support us”, and after a month the produc-
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island group, where as Juanito still recalls Kubero Díaz, former member of Los Abuelos de la Nada, played as their star guitarist, accompanied by several musicians and with a fantastic Dutch frontman. Their drummer was Pep Llucià, who Kubero called “El Catalan” in a recent interview. The Argentine, who today lives in Brazil, explained that he had to move to Ibiza because visa problems prevented him going back to London with Los Abuelos, the band that he’d formed on the island in 1977 for a festival in the Plaza de Toros, with Van der Graaf Generator. In the interview, Díaz said that the performance in Las Dalias coincided with his daughter’s birthday and by chance, Charly García was there on his first trip to Spain, and he invited him to join them in several songs. He recalls: “the Argentines cried with emotion”, among them GIT, the group for whom Charly had produced a disk that year (1984) in Estudios Mediterráneo. The curtain-raisers had been IBZ, one of the local groups made up of the usual members, in this case Dennis Herman (also a sound engineer and producer at the studios), José María Pubill, the famous jazz drummer, and Victor Gresely. The musicals But 1984 was a special year for more reasons than one. This was also the year of Ibiza’s first musical, with a mythical surname on stage: Van Pallandt. To go back to where it all began, Nina Van Pallandt and Frederick, the duo formed by Baron Von Pallandt and his first wife, had triumphed throughout the world with
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tion had to go back to London. Neither the draw of Sheila Burnette, the famous actress who directed the production, nor the fact of having the original cast, helped the show to stand the pace of two sessions a day. “It wasn’t properly organised”, he admits, “and the agencies let us down as regards promotion and collaboration in general”. Another failure was the performance of Video, a disaster in spite of the group’s catchy song ‘La noche no es para mí’. The so-called ‘movida Valenciana’ worked, in that they didn’t make bad music, in the style of Olé Olé or Mecano, but didn’t reach the heights of massive success beyond getting a few singles in the hit parade. By 1986 they were nearer splitting up than anything else. As part of the picturesque crowd of assorted personalities that Las Dalias welcomed, it also hosted concerts like that of Gato Pérez, organised by an active group of ‘sannyasins’ who loved in a commune in the town of Sant Joan, whose saffron clothes earned them the nickname of the Orange People, later linked to the sect of the followers of Osho who were thought to make their living from shady activities like arms traffic and sale of drugs in the States and Australia. Ibizan, national and international groups At the time it was normal to programme concerts in the venue by local groups like the Cas Vicari Blues Band, one of the first bands of Miquel Tur, ‘Botja’, experienced promoter and musician, always ready to take to the rhythms of the American South. They were so called because they rehearsed in the old vicar’s house in Sant Josep, where all its members came from: Botja, composer, voice and guitar; Josep Ribas, ‘Pep d’en Xic’, guitar; Francesc Ribas, ‘Serreta’, bass; Benjamí Ben, drummer, and Bartomeu Ferrer, ‘Sardina’, sound technician. Together in 1985 they formed one of the state-of-theart examples of Ibizan pop and rock. They shared the bill with Demo, formed around producer and musician Dennis Herman, who played in several bands under different names, also with blues and jazz as his genres of reference, as did the great Dave Jeff (Blues Dave), recently deceased. Over the years, Botja and Herman ended up coming together in Botja’s latest musical project: Sa Bluesmàfia. Also worth a mention are the curious delegation of musicians from Surinam, the ex-Dutch colony, who began to call in at Las Dalias in the mid-nineteen eighties, thanks to the resident Dutch colony already settled on the island. These included Captain Cocktail, Guily y sus Guilty, and PI Man and Membre Bocu, with an authentic rasta in charge of the group, who promised he’d never come back to Ibiza after having a hard time with the police. Juanito explains that they found a kilo of marihuana on the singer, obviously for his own consumption, and had to use all their contacts to get him out of custody. He managed it thanks to a couple of friends, but even so, the Surinamese seems to have kept his promise and has never come back to these parts, in spite of his talent on stage. The Las Dalias owner says that his relationship with these groups went beyond a mere occasional performance: he made friends with several, and has visited them in the ghettos where most of them lived when they moved to the metropolis after decolonisation. Their music left unforgettable traces on the island. “1985 to 1987 was an era of very good music here”, coinciding precisely with the first two years of what began as a couple of artists` stalls, and would become the major symbol of the establishment today: the street market.