The main reason is that this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ visit to Tenerife. Nicolás González Lemus dealt with the event in two interesting books but, honestly, I think it was the right time to analyze the event from another perspective. It was a historical fact, although some have not known how to value it…
And why did you build your idea from an epistolary scenario?
What did a traveler do before the Internet and technological advances applied to the world of telephony existed?
Write letters…
And travel postcards… In 1963, the Internet was something that was yet to be seen and people told their experiences through writing. The letters seemed to me to be a different method to address issues that happened during the Beatles’ visit that are perfectly documented.
But the letters are part of fiction, right?
I made up the letters, but the things that are told in them happened… There are two that are real. A postcard that Ringo writes to his friend Roy Trafford during those vacations on the Island and another that Harrison sends to Astrid Kirchherr, in August of that same year, in which he asks her for photos of the trip to Tenerife.
Was the fact that John Lennon didn’t come an omen of how things were going to end?
[ríe] They still got along well then; They were close friends although their personalities were strong and clashed. They lived together from the age of 16 and shared experiences the three or four years before the Beatles became the Beatles… The trip to Tenerife came after a year of non-stop giving concerts all over England and deciding that they were melted. They were not yet aware of what awaited them… It was the beginning of a global phenomenon.
Were they the (almost) Beatles?
It was a band that in January 1963 achieved its first big victory with Please Please Me and that had not yet had much travel outside British borders. In fact, they managed to go unnoticed in Tenerife. Despite the large English colony that was on the Island, their mini-vacation was pleasant… There were even doubts that they could be a band with a world tour but everything changed hours after leaving. Canary Islands. They became number one in sales again with From Me to You and, from then on, nothing was the same again… It was the last vacation before Beatlemania broke out.
Did they at least have a good time?
From what González Lemus has said in his books and the documentation work that I have done to shape this – Jorge Fonte had the alliance in different phases of this process of Cruz Delgado Sánchez and Federico Alba – they had a lot of fun. They ate, they drank, they didn’t stop going from one place to another and they even tried to give a concert…
The fact that they weren’t allowed to give a free concert was outrageous.
Yes it was, but then things worked differently and, surely, shortly afterwards the manager of the venue who rejected his request banged his head against the wall a few times… The Beatles’ non-concert in port de la Cruz became very surprising news.
Just as surprising as the historical silence surrounding this visit.
What is surprising is that in both Los Realejos and Puerto de la Cruz there is no plaque that refers to what happened in 1963, just before the crowds tried to kiss the Beatles.
Could anything more have been done?
Yes, for the simple reason that nothing has been done. In Puerto de la Cruz there is a cultural cycle dedicated to Agatha Christie as a tribute to her connection with the city. The Beatles’ 1963 trip has special treatment by the musicians in the Anthology edition (1980), but since then not much has been done. This, like the Guanche legacy, has value in the history of this Island, right?
