Majorca, an over-night ferry ride from mainland Spain, was always known as a cultural backwater where, happily, nothing ever happened. Although the Catalan language has been spoken here since the Moors were driven out eight centuries ago, there is no trace of the signs of mainland Catalonian cultural identity such as the circular sardana dance and the human towers known as castellers.
In the 50 years since I was born, agriculture has slipped from being the prime occupation (now less than 2% of the population and decreasing) while the tourist industry has led the economy since 1960. There are more hotels beds on the island than in the whole of Greece.
Discos, clubs, hotel bands, piano bars - in the early 1960s the call for DJs and musicians was almost as overwhelming as for waiters and chambermaids. Franco's dictatorship had to relax the rules to allow young three-chord musicians their union cards without having to be able to read a score. The pull of tourism also allowed culturally deprived islanders to enjoy concerts by the Animals, Kinks, Tom Jones or Ray Charles. Today there are more part-time musicians than farmers on the island.
Away from the tourist boom in the beach resorts, life in the villages carried on as usual when I was a child. Few foreigners were to be seen in the hinterland, except for two or three villages like Deià, where I lived and went to school. From the turn of the century certain mountain villages had attracted bohemians, artists and other "bearded ones".
But it was in the late-1950s that the first beatniks, later hippies, began to hang out in those places where the mass-tourist infrastructure had not yet taken hold. The village of Deià was the stronghold of the Canterbury scene that gave rise to British psychedelic jazz-rock. Soft Machine was actually gestated in Deià, where Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen met a zonked-out American industrialist who gave them money to start off the band. Robert Wyatt, a friend of our family, worked at the door of my brother-in-law's Indigo Jazz Club in Palma, jamming with musicians like Ronnie Scott.
It was places like the Indigo and later the Guitar Centre in Palma that created an unlikely interface between Majorcan musicians, tourists, travelling folkies and US sailors on shore leave. The Guitar Centre provided the fertile soil for Majorca's future as a garden of cultural cross-pollination: you could hear local musicians applying Eagles harmonies to a Galician folk song or watch a young Paco de Lucia on the tiny stage. One night my father stood up and, unaccompanied, belted out The Lambs on the Green Hills and Mister McKinley, an American ballad of presidential assassination.
He had first arrived on the island in 1928 and built our house years before Franco's uprising forced him to leave for his own safety. My birth in 1953 coincided with the lifting of the US embargo on Franco's dictatorship (in exchange for military bases) which in turn opened the door to mass tourism. By the time I was 10, the few thousand foreigners a year had increased to a million, easily outnumbering the islanders. And it kept on growing.
After I went abroad to boarding school, I soon lost contact with my Majorcan school friends and spent the holidays in the company of the hippies and wanderers who made Deià their temporary home. Allen, founder of the Soft Machine and Gong, signed a solo contract with the new Virgin label in 1973 and returned to Deià to set up a small home studio.
He was the first foreigner to work with progressive Spanish musicians, recording and producing albums for Catalan and Valencian longhairs and drawing from the Majorcan Guitar Centre stable to record his own Good Morning LP.
The language gap has kept the worlds of writers apart until today - we'll see what happens after this week's tri-lingual Hay Festival in the village - but every Majorcan musician has a grasp of phonetic "Popinglish" and many local bands now prefer to sing and compose in English or Catalan than in Spanish.
I play bass in the Pa amb Oli (Bread and Oil) Band and though we play 1950s and 1960s rock'n'roll, the Catalan name was enough to qualify us a rock català band. Many of the foreigners who (like myself) were born, brought up or schooled on the island are among the most fervent defenders of the Catalan language and Majorcan popular culture.
I wrote my first book in Spanish, my second in Catalan, the language in which all my teenage daughter's lessons are given, and which was still banned in schools when I was her age. It wasn't until my latest book, Tuning Up at Dawn, that I felt comfortable writing in, rather than translating into, my neglected mother tongue. Perhaps I first had to pay my dues.
· Tertulia@Deià runs from October 29 to November 1, in conjunction with the Hay Literary Festival. www.hayfestival.com/tertulia.
Tuning Up at Dawn, by Tomás Graves, is published by Fourth Estate next week, price £16.99.
