80s party people

By Alfredo Bloy-Dawson

Next La Nogalera the main town centre square – where the dark, grotty, and stinky subterranean train station is located – was once a hub of young summer tourists from Britain, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia.

In the late 50s it was arty, in the late 60s it was wilde, in the late 70s it was free, and in the late 80s it was manic; less Sinatra and more Sinita.

I was a teenager in the second half of the 80s and in the summer months the main road Avenida Palma de Mallorca which cuts through Torremolinos would be gridlocked with traffic at 3am.

Katya Bauval, Gigi Ganzoni and Fiona Bauval in Dynamite c.1987 ish

Local expat kids like us would rub shoulders with locals, sailors from passing American aircraft carriers, and the stereotypical British Union-Jack-wearing young yobbos (it was the Magalluf or Ibiza of the day).

Our favourite drinking spot in the town centre was a rock bar called Danish Dynamite, a place where beer was cheap (100 pesetas, about 45 pence at the time), music was good (ACDC) and nobody considered the need for ID (we were 15).

Diego in Danish Dynamite, our favourite high school hang-out.

It was run by two big body builder guys in the late 20s early 30s with long heavy metal style hair, one of them I remember was called Diego (pictured).

Here my friends and I would knock down shots of cheap tequila singing along to Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, thinking we were the shit. Chicks dug us, we thought.

It wasn’t until the 90s any of us realized Tainted Love was a song about homosexual love.Oh well.

What made us go to DD in the first place is a mystery to me, I don't know if our older school mates used it before us or if it was a chance occasion for a school event which grew from there.

Hard Rock Torremolinos

Kenneth Engstrom at Hard Rock Torremolinos

In our last year of high school we could hardly believe our luck when we heard that the world-famous Hard Rock Cafe had chosen Torremolinos to open their latest venture.

This was 1989, a couple of decades before the Hard Rock Marbella in Puerto Banus would open for business (I've got a cap).

Being American school kids (albeit in Spain, and not American mostly) we had seen the t-shirts: Hard Rock Cafe New York, Hard Rock Cafe Tokyo, etc and could hardly wait to get our Hard Rock Torremolinos t-shirts.

To be truthful when the dark den of iniquity which was the Hard Rock Torremolinos opened we only knew something was not quite legit when we saw the dodgy imitation Hard Rock Cafe Torremolinos logo.

The venue's founder, the charismatic Norwegian Kenneth Engstrom, explains that he and friend came to Spain with the objective of opening a bar
"We found this closed down 'club',it has formerly been discobar and likes...striptease I think, as well as other things," he said.

"We came to an agreement with the owner and then started to paint [it]  black!"
They knew that it would not be easy to get people to walki down a narrow staircase down to a dingy basement so they would need a 'catchy' name.

When thinking about a name Kenneth and his friend - ardent Hard Rock fans - thought 'wouldn't it be cool to do a Hard Rock Cafe how it should be made.  "...and there was also the t-shirt issue.." he recalls.

"We were big hard rock fans so we basically created a place which we would to to hang out in ourselves," he said.

Meanwhile, my friends and I had never actually been to a real Hard Rock so thought we were safe to assume it was some dark cavern painted black with, erm... hard rock music blaring out which happened to make cool t-shirts.

So when we walked into Hard Rock Torremolinos into the dark cellar with heavy metal music we didn't realise it was a far cry from the sticky ribs-over-priced-rock-memorabilia-commercial shit-holes that - in my opinion - they really are.

In retrospect our Torremolinos was in many ways the only Hard Rock which deserved then name it carried.

In total, Hard Rock Cafe Torremolinos was open for about 8 years until the crowds shifted to Malaga City or the then hip Puerto Marina and Plaza Sol y Mar in Benalmadena gradually sucked the life out of the Torremolinos bars scene, without punters to feed the club.

"We couldnt live only on [the trade of] Saturdays," said Kenneth, "which were going down as well since Malaga was getting better bars and a lot of our cutomers were staying there."

Although my friends and I had mostly left Spain after finising high school, only being able to enjoy Hard Rock's first year hear, the club became a legendary hangout from younger generations from my school (Sunny View) as well many Spanish youngsters, many of whom can still be spotted on a Saturday night at La Posada de Torremolinos, one of the few decent  bars in town today.

Kenneth has left Torremolinos with a rich rock legacy of which he can be proud, and as the tumble weeds roll down the  once thriving town centre on anu given Saturday night, he and everyone who made it theirs for those 8 years can boast, if nothing else, to having created the most real fake Hard Rock Cafe in the world, ever.

Kenneth (left) behind the bar at Hard Rock Cafe Torremolinos

Reidar (left) and Kenneth in Hard Rock Torremolinos

(top two Hard Rock photos courtesy of Eliza Irina Jimenez Phillips / other 3 photos from Hard Rock facebook page)


 

  Welcome with 'Open Arms'

El Open Arms as always. Danish Dynamite was below it.

Today on that train station square are three 'pillars' of Torremolinos nightlife still standing from what I remember from that era.

Unfortunately for me now, we never particularly liked any of them, although in two of the cases, I'm not sure why.

The always awful Open Arms – a crap British pub located above our beloved Danish Dynamite ( closed for a while) - closed just a couple of years ago in 2012ish.

This one I know we didn't like, and

Garfields on the corner of calle del vicio as locals called it, or vice street. 

perhaps it is unfair to criticise an establishment which has outlived so many others. I hear they're the place to go for Karaoke.

Lee Mardle worked at the El Open Arms in 1988.

"It was indeed a bit of a cheesy/tacky place but it was also a bit of a community hub for the workers out there," he says.
"It was run by Steve and owned by Mario at the time. I was a prop for the summer with Wolfy, Steve, Yahtzek, Spence and a girl from Manchester called Karen I think.

"The main benefit was that the bar supported a nightclub, Picasso's which you got free drinks in every night after work! My girlfriend, a swedish girl called Madeleine worked for Traffic Lights Bar, which was situated next to Four Aces Bar just off the main road through Torremolinos," says Lee.
"Her bar was affiliated to the Venya nightclub around the corner which meant we could get hammered in both places for free!! I drank at Jax bar quite a lot, the only other clubs I can remember where Pipers, which was too expensive for most of the workers, and Borsalino Palace in Benalmedena.".
"Picassos was located below a shopping mall which had escalators going everywhere, across the road from the top of San Miguel street. There was another bar called the Zebra Bar just to the left of this..I lived with Maddy, Wolfie and Pernilla in Congresso 6 for a while and on the La Colina complex before that.. Crazy Days!!"

Diagonally across the square stands the half decent but worst-named rock bar in the world ‘Garfields’

(as in the lasagne-eating cat), and across from there Bar Amsterdam (Est 1968), a narrow rock bar with a large terrace, run by a couple of expat brothers around my age, which I think I used to know from somewhere.

Aside from the busy gay bars in La Nogalera and a few bars dotted about Garfields has been one of the few which continues to attract a crowd on a weekend except for perhaps La Posada mentioned earlier.

Pueblo Blanco

The other nightlife area where we used to hang out in was Pueblo Blanco (White village), a maze of pedestrianized narrow alleyways below flats built in 1975 between Calle Skal and Calle Casablanca and which since I can remember have been at odds with the bars below over noise.

What was once a lively area for nightlife is now a more civilized dozen or so restaurants.

Some say the beginning of the end occurred in November 1994 when following a flood of complaints from local residents, police took action. Of the 48 bars in Pueblo Blanco, 12 did not have opening licenses.

 Now it seems local residents finally won the war on fun. For years even before our time a hip bar called Gypsy was the place to be [do you remember the original Gypsy?], this later became Black Gypsy when taken over by three Italians.

One of them, an ex theatre woman called Lorena Valentini, eventually married one of my best friends, Chendo and they now live in Singapore with their son Victor.

Lorena recalls the 1994 clampdown on fun: "the police started randomly to 'visit' the bars at the peak of the season and, like in the case of the Black Gipsy that had all the permissions and payments in order, would find the excuse of tolerating the consumption of light drugs in order to shut the bar down for over two months."

"The loss of most of the annual income and the decision to sell come as the result," Lorena remembers. "Each bar was having different issues but on top of it there was the pressure of the new home owners that coming from all over Europe had invested in what they expected to be the paradise of Pueblo Blanco."

In the mid-late 80s, before Black Gypsy, the was our high school hangout: Cheers.

It was owned by Gerry, the father of one of our classmates at the local American school we all went to, Sunny View, a British chap by the name of Glenn Davies (or Dangerous Davies as we called him for some reason, I think it was because he knocked out some English prat outside Splash one time).

When he opened it we deserted Danish Dynamite as our weekend bar and moved on to Cheers in a show of support to Glenn.

Although Cheers was one of the smallest bars in the planet, Glenn’s dad Gerry let us decide what music to play.

A new LA rock bank, Guns’n’Roses, had released their first album so Sweet Child of Mine became one of our anthems at Cheers. As before, beer was cheap, ID was flexible (we were almost adults by this point).

Shawarma Simon, Pueblo Blanco: Best shawarma's in town...

One survivor of this era is the kebab shop or shawarma as they are known here, which was a few doors down from Cheers and has since expanded into three or four units, ironically including Cheers.

But it would be unfair to mention Pueblo Blanco and not remind us that in 1991, next door to Black Gypsy opened a very small bar which had a cool logo.

The nervous owners were two young chaps: a German called Frank and a Spanish guy called Lorenzo who had decided to open ZZ Pub a tiny bar which devoted its last hour to heavy metal music like AC/DC.

Lorenzo was dating Carina Welsh a girl from our school (Sunny View), who I once dated, and whose parents owned the legendary Second Hand Book Shop on Calle San Miguel. We had previously played basketball against Frank, Lorenzo and their boys, and as far as I remember they were damned good too.
Small world this Torremolinos of ours...

Although ZZ Pub would follow the same fate as Black Gypsy, moving to new bigger premises in Malaga in 1994 with a third business partner Enrique, the one there has been going strong ever since.

The ZZ chaps also opened one in Puerto Marina, but being ahead of their time as Puerto Marina was still releatively new, it eventually closed or was sold on [anyone know why and when?].

Torremolinos has not been a major party destination for young people for decades, nevertheless there is a buzzing nightlife for the under 20s by the beach between Playamar and Los Alamos.

Again the ZZ Pub boys can claim to be the first in setting up a trendy chiringuito in Los Alamos, which although once stood alone, and people doubted anyone would dress up to go out on the beach, has been a massive success and led to numerous imitations.


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 I would be very keen to hear from you which places in Torremolon is were your hang-outs of choice during this period or any others.

There are many names that come to mind: Pipers (we we went to the under 18s night on a Friday until 10 when we were kids - there is a blog about it in Spain - click here); Hard Rock Cafe; Splash; Paladium; some club in la Nogalera which I think was called Purple something or other.
Any others?
 Leave a comment or email me, the address is on the sidebar on the right... Alfredo