Soundscapes

Our journeys have soundtracks. When we visited California in 2008, I conspired to 'drive west on Sunset to the sea' simply because it happened to be the opening line of 'Babylon Sisters', my favourite track from Steely Dan's album 'Gaucho'. On the same trip I also made sure the 'mix CD' I'd packed featured songs from Joni Mitchell's 'Hejira' so I could play 'Amelia' and' Refuge  the Roads'  as we drove south through Death Valley on our way from Las Vegas to LA.  Atlantic City - would we ever have visited the place had we not listened to the song by Bruce Springsteen?

Not all the soundtracks to our travels were preplanned, some happened by coincidence. Well before we visited Brittany for the first time in 1976, in fact even before we met, Gill and I  both happened to buy  Alan Stivel's legendary album  'Renaissance of the Celtic harp. As we travelled around Brittany without a plan, simply catching local buses here and there, in our minds Stivel's soulful harp became synonymous with the wild, rocky shores of Finisterre's far west. There was something about the pallid, silvery light, the cloud scruffed sky and endless ocean that conjured up Ys, the album's hauntingly beautiful opening track

This pairing does make sense, others are more haphazard.  After we got married we  took a short holiday, we never referred to it as our honeymoon because we had lived together for a couple of years beforehand. Making it official was probably a relief to our parents but it less of a milestone for us at the time. Anyway, we hired a banana yellow Deux Chevaux and wandered around the Cotswolds and Chilterns staying in pubs. At that time anything south of Manchester seemed like foreign territory. Citroen 2CV6s were not equipped with anything so hi-tech as a radio so we took a small portable cassette player and a few tapes with us for in-car entertainment. The remote villages of the Cotswolds - Upper Slaughter, Guiting Power, Adlestrop - were much less frequented in the 1970s and very lovely in the golden light of early autumn. We played Van Morrison's 'Veedon Fleece' album a lot. Whenever I listen to it I immediately think of the Cotswolds, which, given the gnomic lyrics, the loose jazzy instrumentation and generally hippyish SoCal vibe is not the first place that would ordinarily spring to mind.

So it goes on, the videos we took of family holidays capture what we were listening to at the time. Antibes 1994 conjured up by Madonna's 'Holiday'. Then some years later the title track from her 'Ray of Light' album happened to be playing as Gill recorded the moment we glimpsed the sea as we bombed along l'Autoroute de Mediterranean towards Roussillon in our overladen Ford Galaxy. The pine forests of Les Landes - its soundtrack will always be a mash-up of Simply Red's 'Stars' and 'Espresso Logic' by Chris Rea because that's what the cam-corder happened to capture at the time.

Sometime in the mid noughties our elder two now in their mid teens, point blank refused to go camping anymore, so we began to rent houses and villas instead. Their choice of music started to predominate too - Tuscany with 'Death Camp for Cutie' and finally, on the last Easter trip to Garda we made together as a family in 2010 we came to a compromise with our youngest. Magnanimously she set aside her enthusiasm for Jpop and listened to  Lady Gaga instead. Now whenever we drive across the Po valley I am assailed by a Fame Monster earworm. 

Which brings me somewhat circuitously to where we are right now - Barbate, a medium sized town on the Costa de Luz about halfway between the Sherry Triangle and Gibraltar. 

We stopped at the Lidl here back in November 2016, I am able to recount this, not because I have excellent recall. In fact my memory is somewhat haphazard these days. Our previous visit to Barbate Lidl haunts me still because I had a bit of an altercation with one of the locals. I inadvertently blocked the disabled parking bay in the shop's crowded car park. I only realised my mistake when a scooter driver with a prosthetic leg drew  alongside and harangued me for about five minutes. He was in the right of course. I felt a tad traumatised, which is a shame since Gill had just observed a few minutes earlier how beautiful the umbrella pine woods were that cover the coastal hills to the south of the town. We agreed we must come back  sometime.

It did take some time, six years in fact but here we are. I keep glancing over my shoulder in case Long John Scooterman still holds a grudge, but I think we're ok because we've changed moho since the incident. Barbate is a mundane looking place. However its surroundings are very beautiful and the town itself, though not particularly pretty has an interesting history.

Until 1996 the town appeared on maps as Barbate de la Franco. The Generalissimo spent many summer vacations here and the place benefited from the connection. It does look like a newish town, the streets full of low rise white concrete blocks built from the mid Fifties onwards.

Unsurprisingly the authorities have made an effort to distance themselves from the place's fascist connections. In the mid-nineties the Junta of Andalusia legislated to change the town's name, dropping the 'de Franco'. In 2008 the town council went a step further, renaming 32 of the place's streets and squares which had been called after various politicians and military figures associated with the Franco era.

The town arcs around a crescent bay of pale pristine sand. The mountains of Morocco seem almost within touching distance. 'Las Playas de Barbate' is somewhere else that has acquired a particular soundtrack, this time an eponymous one.

How this came about is associated with our arrangements for Christmas. Left to our own devices when we retired and started wandering about for months at a time we probably would have opted to spend Christmas in warmer climes - somewhere with a Med view where we could grill a couple of tuna steaks on the Cadac and share a bottle of Rueda Verdejo. Our kids were not having any of it. For them a proper family Christmas was non-negotiable 

Despite the youngest heading towards her thirties next year and our eldest only eighteen months short of forty, our habitual family Christmas has to stay the same. Proper turkey dinner, presents under the tree, stockings in the morning - this is not to please the grandchildren as we have none, just a granddog - a handsome but somewhat feisty dachshund called Ralfi.

What we did was is to purloin Christmas Eve as a version of the meal we might have had if parked 1500 miles further south under a palm tree with a Med view. If we've just been to the eastern Med Gill might choose something delicious from a cookbook by Claudia Roden or Yotam Ottolenghi. If we've just returned from  autumn in Italy then we have many options, a whole shelf of Italian cookbooks, and since Sarah and Rob's Ooni pizza oven is semi-permanently lodged in our garage we also have the option to cook outdoors and go totally Neapolitan, given a brief interlude in the usual Pennine downpour. 

The occasion is a nice way to welcome in the festive season and celebrate us all being together, which is quite a rare occurrence these days. It was a visit to Spain that sparked the whole thing off - perhaps December 2018 was the first one, after we had flown home from Málaga, leaving the moho in secure parking. The joys of pre-Brexit travel! 

So our first festive feast kicked of with a noble attempt at a pinxtos tapas mash-up. I decided the event needed a soundtrack and proceeded to raid YouTube music for tracks with a vaguely Hispanic vibe. Knowing nothing about Spanish pop music meant the play list ended up being loosely Latino - Jorge Ben (samba), Carrie Rodriguez (Texmex), Camila Cabello (salsa), and more authentically, Jenny and the Mexicats (Spanish, Mexican, British fusion), Chambao (flamenco chill).

The last two bands have definitely been absorbed into our travel soundscape.When grey days in Buxton get me down then playing few songs by Jenny and the Mexicats or Chambao is guaranteed to lift my spirits. 'Sunshine music' Gill calls it.

So far as Jenny and the Mexicats is concerned somewhere along the line we morphed from avid listeners into fans ending up in the audience when the band played a small venue in Manchester in September 2019. We were the oldest in the audience which also must have included every Mexican citizen in Northwest England. They were not there to listen but to dance.

It was all very joyful, but that in itself did not qualify the band to inhabit our travel soundscape. As well as fabulous places our journeys are full of small pleasures we never tire of. Some are predictable, like the empty motorway south from Santander to Salamanca as we head south in the winter, or in autumn, the first sight of the Med on the way to Corsica or the Peloponnese. Other stuff is idiosyncratic, silly even, such as the way we look forward to our first shopping trip in a Mercadona - for us it signals  'Espagna' just as much as the road side effigy of an Osborne black bull or a high speed train line that actually made it off the drawing board. So imagine our delight when in February 2022, after months of COVID restrictions we were back in Spain. We were shopping in Isla Cristina Mercadona, our first visit to the shop for two years. The place usually plays bland but jolly europop. This time as we walked in 'Boulevard' by Jenny and the Mexicats greeted us. It felt like an omen for better times to come and inspired me to perform a momentary, awkward  shimmy by the Iberico ham counter. This moment in itself was enough too guarantee 'Boulevard' soundscape status.

Which brings us, in rambling, shaggy dog story style back to the Playas de Barbate.

As a well as being a beautiful place it's the title of one of my favourite tracks by Chambao, a band from Málaga who pioneered 'flamenco chill' in the early years of this century. It mixes the rythmns of flamenco guitar with elements of Ibiza trance and electonica - a very alluring mélange, made unforgettable by the haunting vocals of 'La Mari' 

So parked on quayside in Barbate marina, overlooking the Playas de Barbate there is only one thing you could possibly listen to. Chambao will always be the soundscape of Andalusia for us, particularly the unique culture and the varied coast and countryside of Cadiz Province.