Ibiza 1983
(2)
Coming back to my dawn arrival back at the finca, four hours later, I began Nina's job, which I did for a couple of weeks until she managed to get back to the island. It consisted of operating a studding machine to put poppers on cotton jackets and trousers, and ironing said jackets and trousers. Aside from Collette, Nina's other colleague was a Dutch girl called Geri, who was the pattern cutter, and extremely talented in that department; the following year she branched out on her own, sourcing fabric from South-East Asia and designing and making a collection of her own.
In addition to Collette and her son Pablo growing plants and trees in Canada, more testament to the creative inspiration of growing up on the island is that Jenny and Rod's two children, Jake and Gypsy, have both followed their father and become successful photographers and film makers, whereas Geri's son Joshua is a renowned classical guitarist, and her daughter Esther a best selling author in Holland, who lunched with Margaret Atwood the other year. Geri still lives in the same little house on the Agua Blanca road she was in then where, joy of joys, sixteen years ago she had electricity installed. All these children were schooled at the local Morna Valley School for children of various ex-pats. When I'd only been on the island a few days, Jenny and Rod had to go off to a parents' evening, and I learned there was a Morna Valley PTA — I have never since heard Jeannie C. Riley without singing along with the revised lyric! The then chair of said Morna Valley PTA was a big Englishman with a big character called Colin Casbolt. He is a fellow poet and has become a good friend over the years; he used to run a little bar called The Bolthole in Santa Eulalia which sold drink over the counter, poetry next to it, and a little something to fumar underneath it.
Working with Collette and Geri was a joy. They were super sensitive to how I must be feeling having made the effort to get all the way out there to see Nina, whilst obviously unaware quite how much effort re the forged passport and imminent withdrawals, and equally worried about what Nina was going through with her bereavement. Just before I'd left, and while Nina was already in Ibiza, I had made some shows for a pirate radio station my friend Danny Brunton was trying to launch, with the help of Joly Macfie from Better Badges, a good man to have involved if you want to subvert the system using technology. [He is still doing just that — I have just this minute seen a link to him doing it in the Big Apple, whence he fled from the VAT man in 1984, never to return as yet.] These were cassette mixes of rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, Chicago blues, etc., off my own 78s and 45s — same records I'm still spinning on the decks when I DJ now. I'd brought a couple of the cassette mixes with me, and we had a radio and cassette player in the workshop, where my selections went down a treat with the two girls. I lost touch with Danny Brunton, but looking at the rules etc. for a writing contest last year, there was one of those links you get to a video from last year's winner, and it turned out to be Danny. Here's hoping for a bit of osmosis!
One evening the three of us: Collette, Geri and I, went for dinner together in what is now also a restaurant, but was then just a local shop, called Josefina's tienda, but where Josefina or one of her family would cook for you if you were local and knew them. The eponymous Josefina was a traditional Ibisenc widow, dressed entirely in black — back then if widowed women toiled in the fields in the heat, they were still always in black from head to toe. Collette told us, over dinner, that she had recently been looking for somewhere to live, and that Josefina had said she might have somewhere, as there were other properties in her family. Having turned up at the appointed time, Collette found two Americans Josefina was hoping to let a large finca to, there as well. After all four of them piling into the Americans' car — presumably the better option compared to Collette's Renault with the door hanging off — getting lost a few times, finding and viewing the large finca, there was no further mention of the property Josefina had in mind for Collette. It gradually dawned on Collette that, Josefina being a Catholic widow and old-fashioned, all she'd wanted was a chaperone so she could go out at night with two men, do some business, and make some money off them.
After the clothes had been manufactured in white cotton, Jenny sent them off to various local women she employed to launder and dye them. This necessitated various trips to 'the washing lady' and 'the dyeing lady', a source of continual amusement as, when Nina had first arrived and Jenny announced they had to go to the dyeing lady, she had thought she was going with Jenny on a mission of mercy, unrelated to work. On one of the first days I was there, I went with Jenny on a trip to the dyeing lady, with the two kids in the car, and we got a puncture, which was a steep learning curve for me, Mr. Impractical who didn't drive. Jen' just said could I change the wheel and, whilst being hopelessly impractical, I'd like to think I could turn my hand to gallantry if needed. There I was on a country road in a strange country, with a woman, two children and a car full of clobber. Not only did I rise to the occasion with Jenny's guidance, but the wheel stayed on. There is now a by-pass or ronda that cuts out the centre of Santa Eulalia, but then it was still necessary to go over the narrow curving bridge, which has just a thin barrier at waist height between you, your car, and the fifty foot drop to the long dried up river bed beneath. There were multiple accidents at night, usually lunatic drunken turista standing up in jeeps, and there usually wrecks visible from the bridge. As we crossed the bridge that day, cliché or not, my heart was in my mouth.
Whilst we had been driving along we saw a guy of about fifty in an immaculate white suit and hat tapping his way along the hedgerow with a stick. Jenny turned to me and said: 'That's Blind George, a famous island character.' A bit like when I first saw Bill Major from my parents' car standing in the afternoon outside the Junction Tavern in Raynes Park — aside from the fact that my mother had stupidly warned me against ever talking to people like that, not the case here — I immediately wanted to meet this man, which I did a few days later. William Burroughs says that, if you visit a strange city or country, what he terms your 'junk receptors' will kick in and alert you to possible scoring areas, or people. He's right. Lo and behold, it didn't take me long chatting to Blind George — whose sight was deteriorating, though he could still get by as long as he took care — to find out he had some very nice opium. From then on, if I met Blind George, not at a party surrounded by other people, in George's case generally beautiful girls, at least one on each knee, a quick glance would be enough for him to reach in one pocket for his ball of opium, and in the other pocket for his knife. There is nothing untoward in my relating this as, if you look on the website his children set up to commemorate him after he died the other year, his having long since retired to Mexico, the sample page of his autobiography displayed there talks about his penchant for opium.
On the subject of junk receptors, a couple of weeks after that, just as things were starting to get pretty rough on the withdrawal front, necessitating an even more copious intake of alcohol, I was sitting one afternoon drinking a beer outside the public lavatories by the kiosko in the centre of Santa Eulalia, when I saw a guy come up the steps with a giveaway trail of blood running down the back of his leg. He was with another fella and a girl; they were from Madrid and dodgy as they come, and were probably on the island to rob tourists. However, despite being a bit taken aback by the size of the razor sharp knife the one that held the gear used to dole out the appropriate amount, they were alright to me. I used to run into them after that in late night bars and clubs down our end of the island, and they always sorted me out.
A couple of days after Nina left for London, Jenny also took the kids back to England for about ten days, to see family and sort out some business affairs. In the evenings, there would just be Rod & I, and there was quite a bit of while the cat's away scenario, bar crawling, cocaine ingestion and the like, most nights after we'd been out to dinner. It was before the Euro, and although my wages were only 400 pesetas an hour — about £2 — I did seven hours or so most days, and you could get an espagueti bolognese in Anita's bar for an hour's wages, plus all the local bars would let you run a tab. Tres Carabelas cigarettes, which I liked —untipped, with toasted blonde tobacco like American cigarettes, not black tobacco like Ducados — cost about 40 pesetas a packet. The packet was dark red with a picture of the three carabelas, or sailing galleons, on it.
In addition to Collette and her son Pablo growing plants and trees in Canada, more testament to the creative inspiration of growing up on the island is that Jenny and Rod's two children, Jake and Gypsy, have both followed their father and become successful photographers and film makers, whereas Geri's son Joshua is a renowned classical guitarist, and her daughter Esther a best selling author in Holland, who lunched with Margaret Atwood the other year. Geri still lives in the same little house on the Agua Blanca road she was in then where, joy of joys, sixteen years ago she had electricity installed. All these children were schooled at the local Morna Valley School for children of various ex-pats. When I'd only been on the island a few days, Jenny and Rod had to go off to a parents' evening, and I learned there was a Morna Valley PTA — I have never since heard Jeannie C. Riley without singing along with the revised lyric! The then chair of said Morna Valley PTA was a big Englishman with a big character called Colin Casbolt. He is a fellow poet and has become a good friend over the years; he used to run a little bar called The Bolthole in Santa Eulalia which sold drink over the counter, poetry next to it, and a little something to fumar underneath it.
Working with Collette and Geri was a joy. They were super sensitive to how I must be feeling having made the effort to get all the way out there to see Nina, whilst obviously unaware quite how much effort re the forged passport and imminent withdrawals, and equally worried about what Nina was going through with her bereavement. Just before I'd left, and while Nina was already in Ibiza, I had made some shows for a pirate radio station my friend Danny Brunton was trying to launch, with the help of Joly Macfie from Better Badges, a good man to have involved if you want to subvert the system using technology. [He is still doing just that — I have just this minute seen a link to him doing it in the Big Apple, whence he fled from the VAT man in 1984, never to return as yet.] These were cassette mixes of rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, Chicago blues, etc., off my own 78s and 45s — same records I'm still spinning on the decks when I DJ now. I'd brought a couple of the cassette mixes with me, and we had a radio and cassette player in the workshop, where my selections went down a treat with the two girls. I lost touch with Danny Brunton, but looking at the rules etc. for a writing contest last year, there was one of those links you get to a video from last year's winner, and it turned out to be Danny. Here's hoping for a bit of osmosis!
One evening the three of us: Collette, Geri and I, went for dinner together in what is now also a restaurant, but was then just a local shop, called Josefina's tienda, but where Josefina or one of her family would cook for you if you were local and knew them. The eponymous Josefina was a traditional Ibisenc widow, dressed entirely in black — back then if widowed women toiled in the fields in the heat, they were still always in black from head to toe. Collette told us, over dinner, that she had recently been looking for somewhere to live, and that Josefina had said she might have somewhere, as there were other properties in her family. Having turned up at the appointed time, Collette found two Americans Josefina was hoping to let a large finca to, there as well. After all four of them piling into the Americans' car — presumably the better option compared to Collette's Renault with the door hanging off — getting lost a few times, finding and viewing the large finca, there was no further mention of the property Josefina had in mind for Collette. It gradually dawned on Collette that, Josefina being a Catholic widow and old-fashioned, all she'd wanted was a chaperone so she could go out at night with two men, do some business, and make some money off them.
After the clothes had been manufactured in white cotton, Jenny sent them off to various local women she employed to launder and dye them. This necessitated various trips to 'the washing lady' and 'the dyeing lady', a source of continual amusement as, when Nina had first arrived and Jenny announced they had to go to the dyeing lady, she had thought she was going with Jenny on a mission of mercy, unrelated to work. On one of the first days I was there, I went with Jenny on a trip to the dyeing lady, with the two kids in the car, and we got a puncture, which was a steep learning curve for me, Mr. Impractical who didn't drive. Jen' just said could I change the wheel and, whilst being hopelessly impractical, I'd like to think I could turn my hand to gallantry if needed. There I was on a country road in a strange country, with a woman, two children and a car full of clobber. Not only did I rise to the occasion with Jenny's guidance, but the wheel stayed on. There is now a by-pass or ronda that cuts out the centre of Santa Eulalia, but then it was still necessary to go over the narrow curving bridge, which has just a thin barrier at waist height between you, your car, and the fifty foot drop to the long dried up river bed beneath. There were multiple accidents at night, usually lunatic drunken turista standing up in jeeps, and there usually wrecks visible from the bridge. As we crossed the bridge that day, cliché or not, my heart was in my mouth.
Whilst we had been driving along we saw a guy of about fifty in an immaculate white suit and hat tapping his way along the hedgerow with a stick. Jenny turned to me and said: 'That's Blind George, a famous island character.' A bit like when I first saw Bill Major from my parents' car standing in the afternoon outside the Junction Tavern in Raynes Park — aside from the fact that my mother had stupidly warned me against ever talking to people like that, not the case here — I immediately wanted to meet this man, which I did a few days later. William Burroughs says that, if you visit a strange city or country, what he terms your 'junk receptors' will kick in and alert you to possible scoring areas, or people. He's right. Lo and behold, it didn't take me long chatting to Blind George — whose sight was deteriorating, though he could still get by as long as he took care — to find out he had some very nice opium. From then on, if I met Blind George, not at a party surrounded by other people, in George's case generally beautiful girls, at least one on each knee, a quick glance would be enough for him to reach in one pocket for his ball of opium, and in the other pocket for his knife. There is nothing untoward in my relating this as, if you look on the website his children set up to commemorate him after he died the other year, his having long since retired to Mexico, the sample page of his autobiography displayed there talks about his penchant for opium.
On the subject of junk receptors, a couple of weeks after that, just as things were starting to get pretty rough on the withdrawal front, necessitating an even more copious intake of alcohol, I was sitting one afternoon drinking a beer outside the public lavatories by the kiosko in the centre of Santa Eulalia, when I saw a guy come up the steps with a giveaway trail of blood running down the back of his leg. He was with another fella and a girl; they were from Madrid and dodgy as they come, and were probably on the island to rob tourists. However, despite being a bit taken aback by the size of the razor sharp knife the one that held the gear used to dole out the appropriate amount, they were alright to me. I used to run into them after that in late night bars and clubs down our end of the island, and they always sorted me out.
A couple of days after Nina left for London, Jenny also took the kids back to England for about ten days, to see family and sort out some business affairs. In the evenings, there would just be Rod & I, and there was quite a bit of while the cat's away scenario, bar crawling, cocaine ingestion and the like, most nights after we'd been out to dinner. It was before the Euro, and although my wages were only 400 pesetas an hour — about £2 — I did seven hours or so most days, and you could get an espagueti bolognese in Anita's bar for an hour's wages, plus all the local bars would let you run a tab. Tres Carabelas cigarettes, which I liked —untipped, with toasted blonde tobacco like American cigarettes, not black tobacco like Ducados — cost about 40 pesetas a packet. The packet was dark red with a picture of the three carabelas, or sailing galleons, on it.
Meanwhile Nina was having a hard time back home. Apart from having to help her sister with her mum's funeral arrangements, she had to keep an eye on her dad who liked a bloody drink at the best of times. Coincidentally he was a linguist like my dad, though of Russian heritage, and his father in turn had hung out in Tehran with the poet Basil Bunting and his renowned ménage de goodness knows how many. Anyway, on top of all that, Wee Johnny was losing the plot a tad, chasing the dragon into every corner of his room, and drinking loads. Slightly concerning was that he'd gone to Richmond Post Office to send a parcel of hashish home to Belfast, illegibly addressed due to the condition in which he wrote the address. He had also, I don't know why, left a contact number, and he'd had a call at the flat, asking if he could come down and re-address the package. Obviously, this wasn't a good idea, so Johnny was hundreds of pounds down, and both him and Nina were a bit paranoid. Thankfully nothing came of it.
Fortuitously, Jenny being also in London, put Nina in touch with Bobby Schuck, a friend of hers who lived in Stafford Court in High Street Kensington — the block with the blue plaque for the singer Alma Cogan — who was due to come out to the island with a party, one of whom had dropped out, so he had a spare ticket that he gave to Nina. Like David Scott, my first manager in the music business, Bobby was a millionaire when I first met him. Also, like David, he's lost it and made it all back more than once, finally hanging on to enough to be going on with comfortably. Rod kindly took me to the airport, where I met Bobby and thanked him for his generosity to Nina, who had come through customs looking like the drug smuggler she once was, in a fetching floral frock, with her sunglasses in what was left of the Boy George style extensions she had, having hacked them to a manageable length in the heat, shortly after first arriving on the island.
We got Rod to drop us in Santa Eulalia. It was about 9.30pm, just getting dusk, the time the locals walk their dogs, the shops have just closed, the main drag is winding down and the clubs and late night bars are gearing up to go. We went in a little bar we always liked called the Stop Bar, got a vodka limon, and Nina gently asked, as one might ask a bear its lavatorial habits, if I fancied a line of coke, as Bobby'd given her a gram to welcome her back to Ibiza, and because she'd been having a rough time. We went in a few bars in Santa, having more vodka and a line in each, then hitched a ride to Las Dalias, two thirds of the way back to San Carlos, where the famous hippy market was and still is. The bar on non-market weekday evenings, even now, is often a quiet bar for locals, and the measures of drink then were enormous in there. Somehow we managed to stagger safely to the last port of call, Anita's in San Carlos. When we left there, we rounded the corner and then stopped for would have been a lingering kiss and cuddle after being apart, had we not fallen into the ditch at the roadside. I landed, like a chalk drawing of where the corpse was, full on top of Nina; thankfully no serious injury was sustained, probably the age old thing of not bracing yourself for a fall if you're drunk. The doorways in old fincas are very low, and I already had a few healthy bumps on my head from walking into them, usually not so much drunk as hungover going to the bathroom. when I got up the next morning, I had an even bigger lump, and quite a large gash. I remember Jenny saying: 'You need some alcohol on that Auntie,' and my replying: 'Jen' it's got alcohol coming out of it!'
The week following my arrival was Midsummer night, and there was a gig at Las Dalias organised, with a big stage in their beautiful garden, which has coloured lights and a brook with a little bridge running through it. One of the first people I had met on the island was a great German girl called Helga. Her and her husband had run a bookshop in Tangiers in the 1960s and William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin were at their wedding, but more of that later. At that time, she was selling antiques and paintings out of her gallery in Las Dalias, and she kindly helped me blag a slot on the bill. I had my Gibson, but no amplifier, but was told there was PA, back line, etc. Indeed there was, but the main band, all jokes about not mentioning the war aside, were both German and definitely small 'n' nazis. 'You vill plug in zere,' they said, in proper Rover and Wizard WW2 German. I did as I was told, did a twenty minute or so solo set, and lots of people I'd never met came up to me afterwards and said how much they'd enjoyed it, despite the bizarre subject matter and my far from pitch perfect singing, including a fairly famous artist called James Taylor. No, not that James Taylor, nor the other one, but this one was also a fantastic talent. Lastly, regarding Germans, I was staying about fifteen years ago with Helga in her lovely house in the Morna Valley. One evening, I was just getting in my hire car to go to the village for an aperitif, and I asked Helga idly if she ever went in Anita's these days. She replied that it was rare, it was 'always full of bloody German.' I said: 'But Helga, you're German.' She raised her eyebrows and I got in the car.
Fortuitously, Jenny being also in London, put Nina in touch with Bobby Schuck, a friend of hers who lived in Stafford Court in High Street Kensington — the block with the blue plaque for the singer Alma Cogan — who was due to come out to the island with a party, one of whom had dropped out, so he had a spare ticket that he gave to Nina. Like David Scott, my first manager in the music business, Bobby was a millionaire when I first met him. Also, like David, he's lost it and made it all back more than once, finally hanging on to enough to be going on with comfortably. Rod kindly took me to the airport, where I met Bobby and thanked him for his generosity to Nina, who had come through customs looking like the drug smuggler she once was, in a fetching floral frock, with her sunglasses in what was left of the Boy George style extensions she had, having hacked them to a manageable length in the heat, shortly after first arriving on the island.
We got Rod to drop us in Santa Eulalia. It was about 9.30pm, just getting dusk, the time the locals walk their dogs, the shops have just closed, the main drag is winding down and the clubs and late night bars are gearing up to go. We went in a little bar we always liked called the Stop Bar, got a vodka limon, and Nina gently asked, as one might ask a bear its lavatorial habits, if I fancied a line of coke, as Bobby'd given her a gram to welcome her back to Ibiza, and because she'd been having a rough time. We went in a few bars in Santa, having more vodka and a line in each, then hitched a ride to Las Dalias, two thirds of the way back to San Carlos, where the famous hippy market was and still is. The bar on non-market weekday evenings, even now, is often a quiet bar for locals, and the measures of drink then were enormous in there. Somehow we managed to stagger safely to the last port of call, Anita's in San Carlos. When we left there, we rounded the corner and then stopped for would have been a lingering kiss and cuddle after being apart, had we not fallen into the ditch at the roadside. I landed, like a chalk drawing of where the corpse was, full on top of Nina; thankfully no serious injury was sustained, probably the age old thing of not bracing yourself for a fall if you're drunk. The doorways in old fincas are very low, and I already had a few healthy bumps on my head from walking into them, usually not so much drunk as hungover going to the bathroom. when I got up the next morning, I had an even bigger lump, and quite a large gash. I remember Jenny saying: 'You need some alcohol on that Auntie,' and my replying: 'Jen' it's got alcohol coming out of it!'
The week following my arrival was Midsummer night, and there was a gig at Las Dalias organised, with a big stage in their beautiful garden, which has coloured lights and a brook with a little bridge running through it. One of the first people I had met on the island was a great German girl called Helga. Her and her husband had run a bookshop in Tangiers in the 1960s and William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin were at their wedding, but more of that later. At that time, she was selling antiques and paintings out of her gallery in Las Dalias, and she kindly helped me blag a slot on the bill. I had my Gibson, but no amplifier, but was told there was PA, back line, etc. Indeed there was, but the main band, all jokes about not mentioning the war aside, were both German and definitely small 'n' nazis. 'You vill plug in zere,' they said, in proper Rover and Wizard WW2 German. I did as I was told, did a twenty minute or so solo set, and lots of people I'd never met came up to me afterwards and said how much they'd enjoyed it, despite the bizarre subject matter and my far from pitch perfect singing, including a fairly famous artist called James Taylor. No, not that James Taylor, nor the other one, but this one was also a fantastic talent. Lastly, regarding Germans, I was staying about fifteen years ago with Helga in her lovely house in the Morna Valley. One evening, I was just getting in my hire car to go to the village for an aperitif, and I asked Helga idly if she ever went in Anita's these days. She replied that it was rare, it was 'always full of bloody German.' I said: 'But Helga, you're German.' She raised her eyebrows and I got in the car.
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