You simply won't believe just how many stars of popular music we have seen whilst on holiday, I know I still don't, I never knew just how popular the small but perfectly formed resort of Son Bou, Menorca was with holidaying superstars.
George Michael for one.
Yes really, George Michael performed in the Copacobana bar for no fee.
I think he may have been drinking actually because his words were very indistinct, I know his family are Cypriots but when I've seen him on TV he does speak with a very refined English accent so there really is no other excuse but the drink for the fact that he sang "Waaaa-me aap, beeefor-u-go-go, don't wanna (random elongated noise follows for second line) "
And we saw Anastacia, and Freddie Mercury (I thought he was dead, but maybe not), The Four Tops, The Temptations (I'd never noticed before just how much the Four Tops looked like The Temptations, they could have almost been the same people), we've seen The Bee Gees (all three of them), Robbie Williams, three random women who cold have been the Three Degrees or maybe The Supremes, and, wait for it, Abba.
Yes we've been watching an array of tribute acts.
What a fooking waste of time.
The only thing that made watching these jokers bearable was the fact that most of them were Spanish, spoke very little English and had learned their acts in the style of Pepe Hernandez.
Let me explain...
A long, long time ago my dad discovered Benidorm.
For those whose lack of European geography has denied them the undoubted pleasure of familiarity with Benidorm, think Las Vegas or Atlantic City without the casinos or the big star shows and then add a couple of thousand more bars - you've got a 24 hour drinkers paradise with sun and sand and some third rate entertainers perfoming in what they jokingly call "show bars".
My dad loved Benidorm, he loved it so much that he went on holiday there three or four times a year for ten years and then when my mother died he went and lived there until he eventually departed this world with a final encore of Sinatra's "Thats Life".
After one of his trips there he returned to England with a cassette tape of a singer that he had heard in some random "show bar", who, my dad promised, would be the next Tony Bennett. He gave the tape to my brother and I and we eagerly inserted into the hi-fi and switched it on.
What we heard next could have single handedly destroyed the entertainment industry within days if my brother and I had not worn out the tape by playing and replaying it whilst howling with laughter and pain from the cracked ribs, I walked around for days with blurred vision from the tears in my eyes, chuckling like a lunatic at bus stops every time the memory of Pepe Hernandez sprung to mind.
Pepe Hernandez was a keyboard player who toured the show bars of Benidorm with his Casio keyboard under one arm and its power transformer in the other, perfoming nightly for no fee other than tips from the appreciative British audiences.
Pepe Hernandez could not speak one word of English outside of his catalogue of learned songs.
Pepe Hernandez learned the English in his songs by listened to the original recordings of those songs and reciting the noises that he heard those singers making, with mixed results.
So for instance when Pepe Hernandez decide to add the recent number one hit "Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree" by Dawn, it came out as "Die a jello ribbo roun ze ooo-ooo-dree, its beeen dree ooong ears, do you steel wan me", and we had a C120 tape full of that sort of stuff.
I've recently checked the t'interweb and searched for Pepe Hernandez - he's still playing the show bars of Benidorm.
But he's spawned lots of pseudo-English singers in the otherwise cultured country of Espana, and we've seen some prime examples in Son Bou over the past two weeks.
Actually they were not all Spanish, The Bee Gees for example were German, very teutonic they were, quite frightening actually, especially when they tried to get us all to rise as one and invade the bar next door at the end of their act (tired old cliche acknowledgement, they didn't really).
Abba had two English girl singers and two German boys in the background, oh how we laughed at the tall blond-bewigged one at the back when he had to sing the line in the famous Abba hit "Waterloo", you know the line, the one that goes "Waterloo, how does it feel when you won the war ?" - boy did he have to grit his teeth when he sang that line, it was so good we made them sing it again as an encore.
George Michael was a fresh faced Spanish lad who had not yet started to shave and for some strange reason had chosen the George Micheal persona as seen on the album "Faith", the moustachio'ed one with four days beard growth and a leather jacket - painted on stubble and a Village People style false moustache certainly distracted us from the lisp that he sang with.
He had appeared on the same bill as Freddie Mercury who apparently borrowed the Village People style moustache for his over the top performance of phonetically pronounced Queen songs to a backing tape that leaned somewhat heavily on Pepe Hernadez's Casio keyboard and try as they might, the boffins at Casio have not yet perfected Brian May's guitar solos or the multi-tracking backing of "Bohemian Rhapsody" which the Freddie tribute attempted all on his own - poorly.
Robbie Williams was by far the worst for entertainment value though - an English lad who's large wingnut ears just attracted your attention throughout his performance, and he should really have been a Butlins redcoat for all the audience participation that he tried to engender.
By the time he had finished explaining exactly what it was that he wanted his audience to do during each of his tortured songs, they had long since lost the will to live and simply didn't join in, which led in turn to a more lengthy explanation for the next song, and so on - his first forty minute spot consisted of just five songs, still, we could laugh at his ears.
And no, I didn't bring any tapes home.
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