There are many great double acts in Rock’s Rich Tapestry, but the one I was reminded of most — as my husband and I made our daily sun-drenched stagger around the numerous bars and restaurants and from beach to saltwater lagoon to poolside day beds at the new Hard Rock Hotel in Tenerife, stopping occasionally to gawp with sotten incredulity at the guests knocking themselves out playing football, volleyball, tennis and water polo — was David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, of Spinal Tap fame. “What day is it?” was the most common morning greeting, the answer being just another glorious day at Playa Paraiso.
I’ve loved Tenerife for a long time; the unpretentiousness, the nearness and of course the astoundingly clement weather. I especially love the way that the place represents humankind’s heroic, lasting struggle against nature, carving a luscious and garish playpen out of the black volcanic rock. This latest Hard Rock hotel seems right at home there, having no modishly mealy-mouthed pretensions to low-rise gluten-free ecofriendliness, but being rather a huge slab of banging, slamming, old-fashioned fun palace, which at night was as lit up as we were.
The public spaces are crammed with a Joe Corré nightmare treasure trove of rock memorabilia: Beyoncé’s bra, Elvis’s tracksuit and Elton’s feathered dress particularly caught the eye. Above them all is the solitary splendour of the Sky Lounge, a rooftop bar that is one of the most extraordinary spaces I’ve ever had the pleasure of staggering into, featuring the most spectacular views anywhere on Tenerife, of the El Teide volcano and the island of La Gomera, Christopher Columbus’s last port of call en route to America. Above all the noise, here you really get a chance to experience the vertiginousness of history — and if that doesn’t make you think you deserve another drink, nothing will.
Our room featured a mirror on the ceiling, a hot tub, lots of black and red and that general air of begging one to perform deviant acts within its walls. Even the normally blameless laundry bag was as black as the cover of Smell the Glove and boasted “Dirty Deeds”.
Even though our welcome note was addressed to “Rocker Julie”, it’s fair to say that the brawling, booze-hounding spectacle we made of ourselves was a bit too rock’n’roll, even for a hotel so hardcore that you can order a Fender guitar up to your room from the front desk. Still, they bore it with a graciousness unparalleled in my long history of making a pest of myself at hotels.
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For all its brash arriviste flash, the Hard Rock brand is an old one (in rock-star years). It started in 1971, when two young Americans in London failed to find a decent burger and started up a cafe of their own. Within two years, Paul McCartney chose the Hard Rock Cafe for a warm-up show before Wings’ first tour, and Alan Aldridge had designed their iconic (for once not a woeful misuse of the word) logo. There are now more than 190 Hard Rock locations in 59 countries, including 24 hotels and 11 casinos.
You’ll have music wherever you go. It’s funny to take breakfast in the tropical December sunshine and hear Morrissey’s arch-miserabilist moan come over the speakers, but I knew how much he would hate being used as part of the soundtrack to such a temple to musical Mammon, and that gave me pleasure. A Noel Gallagher tribute act entertained us excellently in the tapas restaurant. A beautiful blonde girl served us breakfast martinis at the beach club and the fact that she wore a badge distractingly advertising “AC/DC” appealed to our dirty minds and made me fail to note her name on the smaller badge below every time.
Around 11am, the rival DJs kick in in earnest, and you can position yourself so you get lashings of creamy Swedish house in one ear and a grinding of American metal in the other — a nightmare for some, but meat and drink to a visceral vulgarian such as I. There are two towers, a quiet one for families and a loud one for the more relentless rockers such as ourselves; and three kids’ clubs, where instead of cramming in tots and teens together, they have three different ones so that tiny terrors may hang out with their peers — and hopefully pick up a few bad habits while still young enough to recover quickly.
Staying there was like being in a big, garish pinball machine for a week, bouncing repeatedly off the frankly amazing sound systems. We have become so used to listening to music on tiny little personal techs that once we stop going to clubs, we forget how great records sound when heard with other consenting adults and played really, really loud — how they can make you feel oceanic in a way very few commercial products can.
You can view the Hard Rock chain and all it stands for as personifying the worst facts of how rock music — created out of alienation and frustration — came to represent “turning rebellion into money”, as the Clash put it. But then I am not one to be dewy-eyed about the Clash, having seen them in their early days getting up to the usual rock-star shenanigans, which have been acted out since the year dot by young men giddy with being newly desired by a many-mouthed maw of screaming females.
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There is something so uncompromisingly commercial about the Hard Rock that it seems to come full circle back into a sort of innocence. And the raiments and relics of these secular saints (so precious that a chosen few from Hard Rock Central are sent out to clean them, some locals being judged not to be up to the job) have a touching humanity about them — goodness, I thought Christina Aguilera would wear a bigger cup-size corset! (“Everyone says that,” the manager laughed.) It reminds us that these people, built up and worshipped by so many, are merely life-size (“Isn’t so-and-so small?” is generally the first thing we think on meeting our heroes), and that the stature they acquire only comes about through something their fans need from them. When that desire is withdrawn, it can leave them forever hanging around in the wings, with no chance of grasping a life less ordinary.
The search for “authenticity” is often an annoyingly virtue-signalling one, doing down the struggle of modernism to move things forward; everything on show at the Hard Rock has been authenticated, the manager was keen to insist, and it was the one use of the word I’ve heard recently that didn’t make me want to go out and strangle a hipster.
Village People played the opening-night party, but I didn’t stick around; I live in Brighton, and can get enough of that sort of stuff in the ’hood. Next time, maybe they could ask Spinal Tap to reform? I’d go back to this monstrously gorgeous hotel in a backbeat — and at least then there would be somebody more confused than us.
Julie Burchill was a guest of Hard Rock Hotel Tenerife, where doubles start at £209, B&B, including tickets to all live shows (hrhtenerife.com). British Airways Holidays has a week from £629pp, B&B, including flights from Gatwick (0344 493 0125, ba.com/tenerife)