This article was written in Spanish as a contribution to the Periódico de Ibiza, following a short article they published in the first week of December 2024 recording the death of Clive Crocker the founder of the Bar Domino and Clive’s Bar in the 1960s.
When I read of the death of Clive Crocker in this newspaper (3/12/2024) I was immediately transported back sixty years in time to the Ibiza port of the 1960s to the first music bar on an island that would later become world famous for its music venues. The Bar Domino, a jazz bar founded by Clive, was situated opposite the fisherman’s warehouse and you reached it by walking around the long nets stretched across the road, drying in the sun.
The Bar Domino was a sleepy place during the day. It was the focal point for a bohemian
clientele of writers and artists, hippies and a few young American drifters dodging the military draft for the Vietnam war. At night it became Ibiza’s jazz venue. There were no other music venues. In fact, people did not come to the island looking for music venues! That would begin much later. The ‘writers’ and ‘artists’ who hung about in the Bar Domino were mostly non-productive fantasists who talked about their projected novel or their hope of an exhibition in a Paris gallery, but hardly possessed a typewriter or a pot of paint brushes. My father was a writer but he was a real writer, and he was not to be seen in the Bar Domino talking about writing: he spent all day at home in Casas Baratas (Ca’n Escandell) writing television scripts for the BBC while I was meant to be at school.
When I say “meant to be at school”, I mean I was sometimes in the IES Santa Maria and sometimes not. After listening to Capitan Nuñez our history teacher droning on for the tenth time about his favourite story of the Civil War, the relief of the Alcázar of Toledo, I didn’t go to morning break with my classmates. Instead I slipped out of the school gate, got on my bicycle, which had my fishing rod strapped to the frame ready for action, and I cycled the five minute ride to the port of Ibiza. In the harbour, a short distance in front of the Mar y Sol cafe, was an old decommissioned tug boat from Salinas on which the retired crew spent the day fishing in the harbour and making lunch for themselves in the boat’s galley. They taught me how to fish, but they also taught me there were better parts of the harbour in which to fish, and that is how I found myself one day fishing in front of the Bar Domino at the other end of Ibiza port.
An American friend of my father was sitting at a table outside the Bar Domino and he saw me packing up my fishing equipment. He was drinking a tall glass of whisky on ice and his blue Mini Cooper car was parked near to the tables.
“Hey kid!” he shouted to me. “No luck fishing? Come and wash my car and I’ll give you fifty pesetas!”
Fifty pesetas was all I got from my father for pocket money every week, so this was a good deal. I borrowed a bucket and got some soapy water in the bar. During the day there were various people behind the bar, but they soon got to know me and I bought my own buckets and sponges and cloths, and I washed E-type Jaguars, MG sports cars, a vintage Morris Cowley owned by a writer, and all the everyday Seats and Citroëns that the customers parked outside.
The Bar Domino became my secret alternative school. For nearly a year I would wash cars every other day, sometimes earning 500 pesetas a week, and drink Coca Cola while waiting for my next car wash job. Sometimes I would be offered a joint of marijuana when it was passed around the tables, and receive the outpourings of bohemian wisdom from writers and painters who had done no writing or painting for quite a long time, and usually left the Bar Domino in a poor state to drive safely, let alone write or paint.
My bohemian lifestyle in the Bar Domino came to a rather abrupt end one day when I arrived home “from school” in a state which my parents found very concerning. I had washed two cars in the Bar Domino, shared a joint of marijuana, and someone had thought it a good idea to put some whisky in my Coca Cola. At first, my parents put my condition down to sun stroke, but could not quite understand how sun stroke could result from sitting in a classroom at school. The horrible truth of my bohemian lifestyle in the Bar Domino began to emerge and my father paid a visit to the bar to make it clear that I should never be allowed there on my own again, on pain of legal action against the establishment!
I don’t know if I was the only customer of Clive Crocker’s Bar Domino to be banned for life, but hearing of his departing this life last week (D.E.P.), I couldn’t help but pausing to give thanks for that experience. Some might think this was a dangerous situation for a teenager to experience. Far from it. The benign bohemian world of Ibiza’s waterfront and the island’s first music bar was a much safer place than anything teenagers experience today. To begin with, we had no mobile phones…
