Sloppy Joe’s Bar stands on the corner of Greene and Duval, Key West’s main drag, where much of the Florida island city’s commotion takes place. On an early Saturday evening in April, the mayhem was already well under way: barefoot bachelorette parties, zigzagging golf carts, all of the boisterousness, board shorts and muscular calves so particular to the American vacation spirit.
In the former fisher’s bar, once beloved by Ernest Hemingway, the crowd was in holiday mode – sun-pinkened and half-dressed, ordering more pitchers of beer to buffer their fried pickle chips and conch fritters. At 5.30pm, Gerd Rube took to the stage – as he does most Saturdays at Sloppy Joe’s. He had a look that recalled the soft rock scene of the 1980s: hair bleached and long, skin deeply tanned, T-shirt consummately faded.
Over the course of four hours he moved through a set that included Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, Bryan Adams’s Summer of 69, a few of his own compositions, and a sprinkling of numbers from the Zac Brown and Jimmy Buffett songbook that seemed to speak directly to the voluptuous mood. The crowd sang along, applauded, whooped. A couple got up to dance. Occasionally, the effect was stirred by drunken bickering or the whiplashed shrieks of tequila shots. But Gerd Rube played on, and the warm night air drifted in from the street, filled with plumeria and liquor and the paling scent of suntan lotion.
The art of playing music to holiday crowds is distinctly different to any other: a careful calibration of pleasure and crowd control. One might assume that there is something dispiriting about performing night after night to audiences for whom music is a mere backdrop to recreation, forgoing the chance to focus on your own songwriting in favour of covering singalong hits to a party crowd. But in a music industry that is increasingly precarious, particularly in an era of economic uncertainty, Brexit and streaming, an established residency in a holiday resort can offer artists a degree of financial and emotional stability. A prosperous summer can allow a musician to devote the quieter out-of-season months to working on their own material, or to have some semblance of a normal family life.
Still, it is true that very few artists set out on their musical careers believing they will find their place covering Donna Summer songs in the beach hotels of Portugal, or providing soft reggae dinner sets on Caribbean cruises. But the trajectory of a music career can be surprising.
Rube started out, somewhat improbably, as an accordion player in south-west Germany, but when he hit his teens he realised that playing the guitar might be more impressive to girls. For a while he juggled band life with a toolmaking apprenticeship, but gradually music began to take precedence.
When he was 20, he played a show for a travel agent who offered to pay him with a free holiday to Florida. As soon as Rube stepped off the plane, he felt a connection with the land. “You know, everything is so bright, everything’s so colourful, everything’s green and blue.”
Over the months and years that followed, Rube found himself spending increasing amounts of time in Florida, sleeping on friends’ sofas and blow-up mattresses. When precisely he moved over seems fuzzy, but he remembers the feeling always of landing back in Germany in the midst of winter, “going through the clouds, and underneath everything was grey, grey, grey”. One evening in Key West, another musician turned to him and said: “Your English sucks, but you’re pretty good. We got to work on the stuff you’re saying, because whatever you’re singing, I don’t even understand it.”
In those days, Rube concedes his approach might be to take, say, a Bruce Springsteen song and deliver an approximation of its lyrics. “Some of the words I was just like, guessing what they were saying,” he laughs. “I guess I was too lazy to really sit down and translate each and every one.”
It took a few more years for Rube to get his own shows. Today the Stuttgart-born rock guitarist’s repertoire extends to 300 songs, and he has been playing to the hazy bar crowds of this Florida beach town for 30 years.
Compared to Rube, south London-born Gemma Mewse is a relative newcomer, but her story is just as winding. In 2015, she appeared on the Swedish electronic producer Tobtok’s 2015 cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car; its Spotify streams are currently pushing 38m. Once upon a time, that kind of success might have offered some professional and financial security. “I could have bought a house,” she says, and rolls her eyes. “But now it’s like … no.”
Mewse always wanted to be a performer. All through her childhood she studied singing, dance, musical theatre, and in her teens she began writing and recording her own material. She dreamed of being Lily Allen or Adele: she wrote songs about cheating boyfriends and gave them titles like Numpty; any minute, it seemed, she might get her big break. But as the years rolled on, Mewse experienced all the disappointments the music industry so often has to offer – relationships with producers that turned sour, albums that almost happened, then flatly did not. By her early 20s, she was still living at home with her parents, playing gigs for little return. “I was coasting,” she says. “I was perhaps a bit depressed.”
When Mewse was 22, she decided to do something new: she accepted a month-long residency as a singer on a booze cruise between Newcastle and Amsterdam. “You can imagine – Jesus Christ,” she laughs. “It was just no frills, they were there for a good time.” She sang everything from Bruno Mars’s Locked Out of Heaven to Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer. “It gave me this whole new insight into this world,” she recalls. “I’m getting paid better than I’m getting paid to play my original stuff?”
Not long afterwards, a friend asked Mewse to stand in as a vocalist for a new London-based function band named Gatsby. They were a small enterprise then – a five-piece, playing bars around the city. But over time they grew into something prestigious; a high-end party band of up to 16 members, hired for corporate functions, luxury weddings and destination holidays all over the world.
In the years since, Mewse has spent most summer weekends boarding flights to Lake Como, or Provence, or Croatia to play at opulent weddings, earning anywhere between £300 and £1,000 a performance. The band will play two spots: a dinner set, filled with tracks such as Simply Red’s Stars, or the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows, and then the big party set, in which she will storm through Crazy in Love, Bohemian Rhapsody and Club Tropicana.In the winter months, the band recalibrates itself to perform residencies at resorts in locations such as the Maldives, playing to guests of unimaginable affluence. They stay on site, occupying a strange space between staff member and guest. “You’re in paradise, but you have to be full pro the whole time,” Mewse says. “It could be so exclusive you’re performing to two people, or it could be 200 people. But it doesn’t matter, these people have paid a lot of money.”
That early booze cruise experience introduced Mewse to a new way of performing that she still calls on today, whether she is dealing with the demands of guests in a luxury resort, or stewarding a drunken wedding guest trying to climb up on stage and grab the microphone. “I found an attention to detail,” is how she explains it. “It’s watching people’s body language and reading the room.” She runs through the kind of rapid thought-process you sometimes have to harness when playing to these types of crowds: “‘They didn’t like that one. Change it up. Drop that next one, because R&B ain’t the one here …’ I feel like it’s a superpower now, because I’ve had years of watching, watching, watching.”It is a funny dynamic. To be a musician in a holiday destination is to tether your performance to providing a particular kind of pleasure for your clientele; as if music can be measured and rated on a par with the quality of the seafood paella or the availability of deckchairs.
Occasionally, this expectation can grow tiresome. On the Instagram account of Destry Spigner, the singer has posted a Tripadvisor review that casually criticises his performance at a bar in Benidorm this past March. “Please feel free at anytime to come show me how to sing and perform,” Spigner writes wearily in his response. “I’m sure I could learn a lot from your expertise.”
Spigner, 59, has been in the business for something close to four decades. Born in Chicago, he rose through the city’s house music scene in the late 80s as a guest vocalist, and by the early 90s, success seemed assured. He shared a manager with the Cure, moved to London, signed to Acid Jazz – then home to Jamiroquai and the Brand New Heavies, and featured on numerous club hits, including Zoo Experience’s Love’s Got a Hold on Me. He has a voice that you might recognise from a thousand DJ sets: rich and honeyed, filled with dusky pleasure.
Spigner was about to appear on Top of the Pops when he learned that his son had been hit by a police car and killed. “And it all went pear-shaped,” he says slowly, “because I had issues I had to deal with. I was trying to deal with the tragedy of my son’s death. At one point I ended up homeless in New York.” He found something like level ground again, but those same issues rose up some years later with the birth of his second son. “His mother and I didn’t get along,” Spigner says. “I ended up in Spain thinking I would be close to my son, but far enough away from the issues. But you can’t run from yourself.”
For a time he settled in Mallorca, finding work with a few agencies. Then the years carried him to Benidorm, where he evolved a live set drawing on all of the soul music he had grown up listening to back in Illinois: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, McFadden and Whitehead. “And 20 years later, I’m still doing it.”
Since last November, Spigner has been performing at Voraz Gastro Music in Quesada, southern Spain, where the capacity averages 150 to 200 people a night, and he feels the bar has the “style and finesse” to match his repertoire. The crowds are a mixture of French, Norwegian, British and are older these days – although this tends to mean they treat him with respect. “I get a few requests, but I say: ‘My set is my set.’”
He laughs when I mention how Spain must have changed over the past 20 years. “Covid had a lot to do with the most recent change,” he says. “But I’ve seen it go down year after year after year. When I first arrived at Benidorm I was a headliner at Stardust, and at that time it was 100 Euros an hour, and I worked seven days a week. Now you would be happy if you could get 30 Euros an hour.”
New talent arriving on the holiday circuit will often try to undercut the established artists. “I don’t hate them for it, it’s the way that it’s always been done, and it’s up to the venues to decide where the quality is,” says Spigner. “People always call me difficult because I’m experienced. I try to be as diplomatic as possible, even when people are shouting in my face. But some restaurants don’t understand that when you’re hearing dishes crashing or you’re performing outside and a motorcycle is passing, and then you have about 150 people who are speaking all at the same time, it’s pretty difficult.”
Spigner still devotes three days a week to writing and recording his own material; last year he released a new track, Lucky in Love, on an Italian label. “The business starts to forget about you after a certain age, so you have to carry the weight yourself,” he says. “But I think I’ve found a way of doing that and satisfying my soul’s desire to perform. And it’s not for the glory or the percentages, it’s because I think I need music, and I think other people need it as well.”
Speak to many holiday destination musicians and this idea of satisfaction will often rise up. Mewse talks of the pleasure of consistently working in music but still having anonymity. And of the realisation that “I can do both: I can have a fulfilling and varied music career, it doesn’t all have to be original material. I suppose my whole mindset shifted to go: ‘Oh, I don’t have to struggle.’”
That sense of fulfilment has been the navigating factor in the career of Rube, the German guitarist in Florida. It is enough for him, this life in the Keys, playing the music he loves to an appreciative crowd. The island itself has changed, of course. Once, it carried more of a “hippy 70s San Francisco kind of style”, he says, that over the years has given way to something more commercialised; the rents rising, and the artist-run stores replaced by branches of Starbucks and Sandal Factory.
Still, there is something in his set that taps into the laid-back air of those early days; as if audiences head down to the Keys still searching for that feeling; for songs of freedom and perpetual summer; for something so bright, so colourful, so green and so blue.
