Today, at sixty-five and wearing it well, it is inevitable that the past sometimes jolts the memory with the force of an old chord. I close my eyes and, for a moment, return to that end-of-year EGB school trip. I was fifteen, innocence close to the surface and the whole world waiting to be discovered aboard a coach packed with pre-adolescent laughter, shared secrets and the watchful eyes of a few teachers trying to bring order to the chaos of youth.
Our destination took us to Madrid and the surrounding area, forcing us to devour mile after mile through endless nights on the road—or at least that was how it felt. While the driver went about his work at the wheel, the coach sank into an atmosphere that was drowsy and magical in equal measure.
We dozed against the windows, whispered secrets with our best friend or tried, with more hope than skill, to flirt shyly with the girls in our class.
To enliven those dark hours, the driver soundtracked the journey with cassette tapes by Antonio Molina and Lola Flores. At our age, with all the restless energy of adolescence, it was a repertoire we endured with resigned patience. Then, during a rest stop, one classmate's boldness worked a miracle: he dared to approach the driver and ask for something closer to our tastes.
There was no “modern music” anywhere in that mountain of tapes, but then a case appeared. Four lads with hair slightly longer than usual stared back at us with curiosity. It was “Beatles For Sale”. Although the album had been released many years earlier, in the Spain of the seventies we travelled with an endearing delay compared with the rest of Europe, which only gave the find the aura of an initiation.
One listen was enough to leave us completely spellbound. With no other musical alternatives on the horizon—apart from returning to Antonio Molina's falsetto—the driver's generosity did the rest: he turned the tape over. Side A, side B; then side A again and back to side B, in a hypnotic loop that accompanied us through hours of darkness and tarmac.
With those songs playing in the background, life on the coach followed its natural course. We slept through the longest stretches, laughed with our inseparable friend and formed bonds with the girls who, in more than a few cases, ended up becoming our first proper girlfriends.
That spark, lit on the road, left a permanent mark on my musical foundations. Over the years, life's paths have led me to explore many other styles, and the Beatles have not been part of my daily listening for a long time. Yet I understand that they were the foundation of everything, the seed from which I learned to understand and truly feel music.
Today, time has erased from my memory the details of Madrid's museums or the stones of Segovia that we were supposedly there to study. And yet all it takes is for a song such as «No Reply» or «I'm a Loser» to come on by chance and the present fades away. Suddenly I can see the half-forgotten faces of those friends—some of whom have already set out on their final journey—and the face of my first teenage love. I understand then that monuments erode and cities change, as we do, but true music remains untouched, becoming forever the soundtrack of a life.