Helen Donlon - Shadows Across The Moon

As we walked on past the giant elevated clock, which also serves as a barometer, at the top of Vara de Rey, we turned uphill into Via Punica, and stopped at the exact spot where Nico had fallen off her bicycle. We took photos in the shadows; in the urine-scented alleyway just off the main drag of Avenida Espanya where the blazing summer sun had by now turned the afternoon into an eternal siesta. The alleyway contained a dowdy and old looking flower shop and no other signs of life. James pointed out the sad irony of the florists being probably the last thing she saw before she fell off her bike: apparently she had been considering retiring from the world of touring and opening a florists shop herself.

We headed back to Sant Antoni and decided to take a quick swim in the hotel pool. As tempting as it was to fall asleep afterwards in the shade, I had to head over to Sa Molí and find Miquel. Leaving James to his pre-concert siesta, I swung the car round to the old mill next door, and soon spotted the busy figure of Miquel who was still bringing things together in the heat of the late afternoon. The graphic artists from Bloop who I’d met the day before had just arrived to help out too. They’d made us some Warhol pictures, and were busy hanging things. I helped Ubi, a local artist who was part of our team, to put together 50 fabric roses with welcome messages that she had made specially to commemorate the occasion, and that we’d be giving out to the exhibition visitors later on. Slowly the last elements of the show were all coming together. Until, a couple of hours of putting out chairs and testing electronics later, we realised at almost the very last minute that we didn’t have a suitably sized chair for James to use when he sat at his keyboard, and so various frantic phone calls were made, during which time microphones and stands were arriving and being tested, a chilled out Chilean artist friend of Anja’s bashed some staples into my broken sandal to make it work again (that makeshift fix has lasted me another three summers), people started slowly arriving in clouds of perfume and long gowns, and the mayor was pulling up in her car. She’d come to open the event, and pretty soon we were all lined up beside her in front of the seated outdoor audience.

The moment had arrived then, and on that evening of the concert at Sa Punta des Molí on July 18th, 2013, the warm evening winds blew around Sant Antoni bay as ghosts of Nico’s past (Clive Crocker and others dutifully turned up and shared stories) mingled with fans and, according to James Young, with her spirit: Chelsea Girl, muse, poet (Jim Morrison had given her the necessary encouragement to start writing songs in earnest), the enigma, the lost soul. Anja told me later she’d found the whole evening incredibly moving. People like island historian and publisher Martin Davies had turned up, as well as other faces such as the Swiss novelist and painter Jean Willi. During the course of the evening, Lutz Ulbrich told us more about the circumstances of what had happened after learning that Nico had died, with a talk he gave in German (following Rafa’s Spanish one) in which he described the days following her untimely death.

After Lutz’s talk, which covered ground similar to the interview he had given me, James Young performed some songs that he’d written especially for the event, and you could have heard a pin drop, despite the fact we were in the middle of Sant Antoni at the peak of the summer season. The event had been packed and Anja was right, it was very moving. Afterwards, at midnight, and after a quick photo session and a cooling off beer, we all headed down to the beach for an outdoor dinner at a nearby chiringuito, where we sat at a wooden table with paper tablecloths and our feet in the sand as we drank celebratory toasts in Nico’s honour, and dined on the plates of fresh fish that the owner prepared specially for us from his catch of the day.

Lutz and James are almost eternally young men, in the sense that they were both very young when they knew Nico, and being part of this event had brought them back face to face with the innocence they knew back when she was such a major part of their lives. They’d both been such willing and devoted participants in the event from the moment we’d first asked them if they were interested in joining us, and this was despite the fact Lutz had another concert the following night in Germany, and was going to be leaving the island at daybreak.

After saying our thanks and goodbyes to Lutz back at the hotel, we all scattered to our various parts for the night, which for me meant going back to Anja’s Can Felix where I found her already deeply engrossed in my copy of James’ book, Songs They Never Play on the Radio. She was very animated after the evening’s doings, and we sat up talking for a long time. I’d first met Anja through our mutual friend Martin Davies. Martin is probably the most authoritative figure on matters of Ibiza history – be it art, politics, the various periods of settlement from the Phoenicians and Moors to the Catalans and Castilians. He also publishes, as Barbary Press, some beautiful books about the island, including two renowned black and white coffee table books which feature many historical photographs of Ibiza and its people.

Martin knows most of the writers on the island, and he had known Harold and Anja for quite some time when he first took me to meet them about ten years ago (I hadn’t realised until I was at their front door that the man I was about to meet was the Harold who had written those columns at liveibiza.comthat had so enchanted me). And like Harold, Martin also wrote columns about life and traditions. We all shared a great love of literature, from the Mediterranean, from anywhere. Anja was already reading Songs They Never Play On The Radio when I woke up the next morning. By lunchtime though, we’d hooked up with Martin and were sitting at a table in the sand at the Bar Flotante in Talamanca, just outside of Ibiza town, past Pacha and the luxury yachts in Marina Botafoch, and we had a lunch of fresh fish and ice cold local rosé.

It was the last day with James and Rafa, so along with the German artist Ubi, who lived on the island, Miquel and I took them off that evening to experience Pike’s, the quiet hacienda style rural hotel set up in the 1980s by the famous Anthony Pike, friend to Freddie Mercury and Julio Iglesias, ex-boyfriend of Grace Jones and all-round Ibiza celebrity. He had recently passed on the hotel to the ex-Manumission couple Dawn Hindle and Andy Mackay, who had turned it into an extension of their Ibiza Rocks empire – an empire which revolved around the promotion of live rock music as a counterpoint to the ubiquity of electronic music on the island.

Liam Gallagher’s group Beady Eye were due to play a gig at Ibiza Rocks that night and now, in the early evening Liam had taken refuge at Pike’s, at a table next to ours. He looked worried, which was almost certainly down to his making headlines that week back in the UK for having been caught out cheating on his long term partner Nicole Appleton. But apart from the subdued Beady Eye group, Pike’s was empty, and we were given a table above the famous ‘Club Tropicana’ bar and pool where Wham! had filmed the video for their single of the same name, and in which Pike himself features, sporting pyjamas and an exaggerated moustache.

After a few drinks I took James and Rafa by car to Santa Gertrudis, a small but lively village in the centre of the island, for dinner. Santa Gertrudis has one main plaza, which for a very long time only featured an antiques auction and clearing house, a couple of humble but lovely cafés, an Ibicenco-run tobacconists and general store and, perhaps most famously, Bar Costa. Miquel Costa was actually born above Bar Costa and the establishment has been in his family for years. When I first moved to the island in 2003, I used to drive up there every other morning from my house in nearby Sant Llorenc for breakfast, and I loved how they played blues music, or David Bowie’s Station to Station, there in the calm middle of a Mediterranean island. Locals came there for Bar Costa’s famous boccadillo sandwiches – toasted and tomato-spread baguettes filled with manchego cheese or serrano ham, and above the bar whole legs of ham were hung up to mature before being taken down and sliced up. Inside, the white walls of Bar Costa are covered in a selection of highly eclectic paintings, relics from the days when the village was a centre for poor artists who’d pay off their ever-rising bar credit in art. Santa Gertrudis had changed a bit in recent years, and the village had expanded to include several new rows of houses, the island’s favourite bookshop, Libro Azul, the local vets and a few chichi restaurants. I took James and Rafa to one of those. If we’d had more time together I’d have loved them to experience one of Bar Costa’s traditional breakfasts.