New Year’s Eve 1988 and the destruction at Farah’s discotheque.
Before this story unfolds, I’ll present a brief picture of the coastal village of Cala d’Or as it was in the late nineteen-eighties, when we first settled in Mallorca. In those days, Cala d’Or was a different place than it is today. For one thing, it was a lot smaller, the marina had not been expanded and developed to the size it is today. Mass tourism was not a dominant feature of the place, there were some hotels, but in general, most of the guests returned year after year because of the underdeveloped charm of the area. The predominant population was Mallorcan, and there was a reasonably large and affluent foreign community of home and boat owners who either lived permanently or came for extended stays. There were other adventurers, drifters, and soldiers of fortune who had washed up on the shore and stayed in what was then a very unique and special pueblo. German, British, Spanish, Dutch, Belgium, French, Chilean, American, Irish, Chinese and more, they were all there. It was a tight community, everyone knew each other and integrated with little regard to nationality or financial worth.
Now on with the tale: I didn’t witness the events detailed in this drama first hand; however, I did observe the aftermath. The story was told to me the day following the incident by Pierre, the leading protagonist when I met him in a bar. On the evening of New Year’s Day, we came in from the isolation of the Mallorcan countryside to the Port Pub overlooking Cala d’Or Marina. Sandy and our daughter Tayrne, were playing a local at backgammon. There was nothing very exciting going on until Pierre, a French Canadian, came into the bar and proceeded to tell us what had happened at Farah’s discotheque on New Year’s Eve. Pierre, at the time, was working for a German man named Peter, who owned a bar in Cala d’Or. Pierre’s boss considered himself something of an entrepreneur, but he could only speak German.
Multilingual Pierre thus became Peter’s invaluable aide-de-camp in his business affairs. Peter bought Farah’s a failing discotheque on the outskirts of Cala d’Or and spent millions of Pesetas renovating it and giving it a new image. Farah’s was re-branded, and on New Year’s Eve, re-opened as Farah’s Music Hall, a name that seemed to me to be a little retrograde, but then I’m not qualified to argue with an entrepreneur. To commemorate the event, at the stroke of midnight for the New Year the recently installed crystal dome in the roof of the room on the top of the building was to be opened and firework rockets were to be let off. Peter was by all accounts a very ambitious man who liked to do things on a grand scale. Consequently, the projectiles were not the type that you stand in a bottle, but were the enormous ones that soar into the sky for over a one hundred and fifty metres before exploding in a burst of multicolours. Pierre was in charge of the pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, during liftoff there was a slight technical hitch, the rocket got stuck on the launch pad which resulted in the stand falling over with the rocket still attached, at this point Pierre prudently exited the room. It appears, although there was now no one there to see it, that the rocket once at full power shot off its stand across the floor and hit the box containing the rest of the fireworks. The box of fireworks exploded blowing off the newly installed crystal dome, the rocket then perforated the block wall of the building leaving a fifty-centimetre diameter hole in its wake. A car driven by a woman late on her way home was, unfortunately, passing at the instant the missile burst through the wall of the discotheque. In a downward trajectory it hit the car and became jammed into its front wheel arch; the internal fuse burned down, and its display canister exploded blowing off the front wing of the vehicle. The woman went into hysterics believing she had been caught in a crossfire between the Guardia Civil and Basque Terrorists.
Pierre was quickly on the scene, apologising and trying to pacify the poor woman. Peter followed telling Pierre he was a drunken idiot, and not to admit to anything, Peter then tried to convince the woman that she must have hit something, which wasn’t exactly the correct order of events. All that in itself would have been enough of a disaster, but the worst was yet to come. The woman turned out to be the sister of the local police commissioner. On this occasion no one went to jail, however, a few years later someone did, but that’s another story. I omitted to say at the beginning of this saga that the name of Peter’s bar in Cala d’Or was simply Bar NT. I don’t know what the NT stands for, but following the destruction at Farah’s discotheque the bar was referred to locally as, ‘Bar TNT’.