About two years ago, Klaus Voormann, the musician son of an eminent German doctor, travelled to Tenerife with his wife and two children. It was not the first time. In 1963, on 29 April, three members of The Beatles came to the island, stayed in Dr. Voormann's unlit villa in Tenerife and drove around in an Austin Healey sports car, today a jewel owned by Joaquín Sieper. They and their friend Klaus, bassist of the band at times and of some of its members when they later performed solo.
When I ask Mara Martínez, now 78 years old, if Voormann (84) fell in love with her, she replies that this is nonsense. All of Mara's friends say that he did, but that they never told each other. There are photographs attesting to their friendship, and I witnessed a very affectionate and evocative telephone conversation between Klaus and Mara. When the illustrator and musician visited the island again two years ago, they were together. Mara, Klaus, his wife and their two children.
Three Beatles came to the island, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul MacCartney. John Lennon preferred the Costa del Sol. In Tenerife, Voormann lost his girlfriend, the photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who died in May 2020 at the age of 81. She was the muse of The Beatles and Voormann was picked up by one of them - Harrison, they say, in his Tenerife days. They remained friends, because in those days nothing was the same as it is now. Astrid took the photographs of the three Beatles on the island, which appear in the big book dedicated to the group. Nicolás González Lemus has also written about it, in an excellent contribution to this story.
Klaus Voormann's friendship with the British band was born in Germany, when the quartet was playing in a Berlin pub. They passed in the street, heard them playing and singing, he and Astrid, it is said, went down to the pub, sat down to listen to them and a relationship began that has never been broken. Klaus painted Mara Martínez, made several portraits of her, but an untimely move put an end to them. He lost them.
Harrison spent too much time sunbathing on the beach of Martiánez and almost drowned in La Barranquera, the treacherous edge of that beach, where so many people have died, struggling against the current. On other days they preferred the tranquillity of the Lido San Telmo swimming pool, now part of the Lago de Martiánez complex.
It is recorded in history that David Gilbert, one of the concessionaires of the Lido San Telmo, would not let them play "because they were mongrels". Gilbert, a great person, was a Jew who had been in the RAF in World War II. An aviation hero. His other partner was José Manuel Sotomayor, who preferred the chords of the Orquesta San Telmo, made up of Falo, Foronda and Fariña. They played and sang a song called "Potaje de berros".
Returning to Klaus Voormann, his cover of Revolver, The Beatles' last studio production, I think the seventh, released in 1966, won a Grammy award for best design. Today, these original vinyls are highly prized.
The other day I had dinner with Mara in the popular Dinámico, now so different from that bar in Plaza del Charco - in the same place as the current one -, remembering old times. We managed to get a photo of Voormann with Mara, her sister Pili and a friend. Mara Martínez, married to Manuel Yanes and with a daughter, Vanessa, and several grandchildren, is still a beautiful woman with a great sense of humour, but she doesn't let on. "Those were different times", she tells me, "back then, when I was 19, if you went for a walk with a boy they made you his girlfriend; what is true is that we got on very well".
The house where The Beatles stayed, in La Montañeta de Los Realejos, is still there, but very much changed. There was no light, civilisation didn't reach there. Dr. Voormann's Austin Healey took them to the Teide and to places on the island from which the four musicians, including bassist Klaus, were delighted. When the three members of the group arrived in England, their first album was already topping the charts, but here in Tenerife, a remote island in the Atlantic, they complained that nobody knew them. So much so that they were not allowed to play in San Telmo. Other versions of the story say that the three of them did perform in a bar called Flamingo, in Doctor Ingram street, but this is not confirmed.
Puerto de la Cruz has been ungrateful to the group. I gave an idea, which I now repeat. A monument to The Beatles in the roundabout next to the Las Vegas hotel, today occupied by a dolphin, representing the three members of the group who came to the island and a fourth, John Lennon, who preferred Torremolinos. It would be a major tourist attraction, so far unexploited. Or perhaps the location could be the esplanade of Martiánez, now a horrendous wasteland, close to where George Harrison nearly drowned.
Mara tells me that Klaus had a band called Klaus, Mel and Gibson and that she met the bass player at her aunt's hairdresser's, where her father, Dr Voormann, had his nails done. Mara went on to see the band members in Wimbledon, "where I lived for a while with my aunt Maruchi, because I went to England to learn English". She even drove around in an Austin Mini that one of them, Paul I think, had bought as a big deal. It was the fashionable car then.
Two years ago, Voorman, who is 84, his wife and children returned to the island and Mara Martínez was with them. "They have two children, a boy and a girl, very beautiful; Klaus asked me if I kept his drawings. I don't remember if I said yes or no, but the truth is that I lost them in a move and they haven't turned up, I think my sister Pili threw a lot of things away, including those drawings, which I remember were very similar in style to the cover of the Revolver album, which I also had and also lost".
We are often unaware of the people who have come here and the relationship of people from the island with such famous people as the author of the cover of Revolver. Klaus Voorman never lost his love for the island and his memories are very much in his heart. Now he is all over the world's media, because beatlemania has been revived, no one is quite sure why. The Spanish newspaper El País has just dedicated an extensive report to him. So we will once again walk down Abbey Road with a revolver in our hand, or maybe we will have to sail aboard a yellow submarine singing Eleonor Rigby. Who knows?
