Adios, José 

My old friend José Padilla died of colon cancer on 18/10/20, at just 64.

He was primarily a DJ, and via his legendary Cafe Del Mar sunset sets and the compilations they spawned, was to all intents and purposes the originator of Ibiza Chill Out: that mixed bag of Balearic soulfulness that could pitch Underworld and The Sabres of Paradise next to The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Stan Getz and Dusty Springfield.

He’s often been cited as a maverick and in many ways he was. He was a conflicted and at times complex character; funny, generous, and self-effacing but never quite satisfied. The chilled-out blissfulness in his musical output belied a personal yearning that was forever leading him into dramas and collisions with those around him. So much of what he loved he also held in distain, and so much of what disgusted him was forever a temptation.

We hadn’t actually spoken since I’d seen him DJing in London back in Jan 2018, but I knew he was ill and had participated in a crowd funder to support him through his illness. It was still a shock to hear he’d died so young.

We met in early ’97. Like so many other DJs of the period he was venturing into remixes and recording his own material, but simply wasn’t a musician or producer himself, so needed to find people with these skills to work with. In his sets, José was playing a lot of tracks I’d mixed and had included one, D•Votion by D•Note, on the second Cafe Del Mar compilation. So one day I found myself on a train to Nottingham to work with José and a team of fresh-faced musicians and engineers to produce a Jhelisa Anderson remix and some tracks for his first album, Souvenir.

All smile with the extended family Oct 2010 (photo S. Podmore)

We hit it off immediately. Within minutes of meeting him, I was flexing my O level Spanish and he was telling stories of his erstwhile scouse girlfriend whose father had introduced himself by offering the young Padilla out for a fight. José had retained some scouse grit in his English; the common ground between us went further than simply the music. It was off-season in Ibiza where he lived, so for the duration of the recordings he’d rented a suburban semi in Nottingham near the studio, as a base for himself and the collection of UK musicians he’d put together. José’s links with the UK underground dance scene at the time were strong, largely through connections forged in Ibiza. Back then the entire UK music business seemed to decamp to the island for the summer. 

He’d just flown in from Barcelona (where he was born) the day he picked me up at the station and had a case full of olives and duty-free, which we tucked into when we got back to the house. I had a pre-release copy of Roni Size’s New Forms album, which triggered the first of many nights we spent together in a musical cross-reference, discussion, and outpouring. As the bottles emptied he shared with me, tears running down his face, his grief at his mother’s death, his pain that it took so long for him to be informed, and how he was made to feel an outsider and a black sheep in his own family.

Despite the continuing nightly indulgences, the studio sessions went really well and I was firmly cemented in José’s production team as co-producer and string arranger.

In the summer of the same year I played at the Sonar festival in Barcelona and strengthened my connection to Spain, and later went to live and work in the south of France, where I could regularly pop down to Barça on the train or catch a flight (once or twice even a ferry) to Ibiza. José’s friend Paco Fernandez, a superb flamenco guitarist and fellow Ibiza resident had built up a decent recording studio in his house and so Padilla’s studio life moved to the island.

So began a long period of regular trips to Ibiza to work with him at Paco’s place with the same relaxed (at times perilously close to non-existent) work ethic we had enjoyed in Nottingham. José was in equal parts proud and horrified by his home island and so was happy to have me as an enthusiastic and inquisitive side-kick to explore what the place had to offer and regale me of lurid tales from the past.

He’d been there since the ’70s, escaping the restrictions of Franco’s mainland Spain and his family’s farm in southern France to live a penniless but relatively free existence, scratching a meagre income from DJing and various bits of hustling. He told me how he and a group of friends were once driven by hunger to steal a pig; only to find out they had no idea how to butcher the poor beast. He was a fabulous pool player, among other bar games, skills which were honed in the long winter months before the return of the tourists. He could remember San Antonio (home of the Cafe Del Mar) and Ibiza town before they were redeveloped for the tourist trade and told me how developers had swindled farmers out of their land to build the hotels and tourist traps that now cover so much of the coast. The theme of the corrupting force of well-funded interests coming from beyond the shores of the island became a constant as the UK super clubs carried on where the developers had left off. 

José as night falls Sept 2007.

After work, we would crawl around the island in his 2CV (¡Dos Caballos!), as likely to end up drinking exquisite brandy from an unmarked bottle in a fluorescent-lit farmers’ bar arguing about football, as at a glitzy club checking mixes from behind the decks. 

At the time he lived in a beautiful, 2 bedroom, single-story house well hidden in the rural centre of the island: Las Cazuelas. Rented from a local farmer and surrounded by pomegranate trees, the house overlooked, at a distance, the main road from San Antonio to Ibiza town, almost completely empty in the winter months. We would retire here, surrounded by José’s ever-expanding record collection to further explore music, fine Spanish produce, and share stories, surrounded by his beloved but much-maligned cats. My more colourful Spanish I learned from José swearing at his cats, particularly in the morning. Although he was in many ways an open book and happy to share any aspect of his life with anyone who’d take the time to listen, it was here, at the fireplace in winter, that I saw the real Padilla behind the DJ bravura and poverty-hardened hustler shtick. An intelligent, sensitive connoisseur appeared with a profound but world-weary sense of justice. Music, food, wine, and art were appreciated with equal sensitivity (and gusto) despite the self-effacing “university of life” shrug. 

I also got to see his real gift: using music to unlock emotion by finding the right tune at the right time for maximum impact. Despite hours of playing music to each other, that talent was revealed to me with devastating impact one night at Las Cazuelas. We were a few bottles into the evening when out of the blue he put on a Beatles track I hadn’t heard for decades. I was immediately back in Liverpool as a tiny child with my mother. As the tears ran down my face, he looked at me with a mixture of compassion and triumph. Gotcha. It was a practised skill, consciously developed but still with the hint of a psychic “talent”. This was the skill that launched his career: at his sunset sets at the Cafe Del Mar, he’d play the right tune in sync with the last arc of the sun dipping beneath the Mediterranean. The tune didn’t have to be cool or even make a cursory nod to fashion; it just had to make that emotional connection.

José’s copy of Camarón Paris 1987, complete with Rioja stains.

He loved the “real” Ibiza, not the tourist and raver paradise it had become, despite the enormous, at times overlooked, a role he played in shaping it that way. His Ibiza was primal, archaic, rural, atavistic. He told me of people he met in the hills that had never seen the sea, of ancient herbal remedies, and of spying on a pair of old ladies playing naked in a stream one summer night like little girls. He devoured books on the Phoenician origins of Balearic culture and attended Saint’s Day celebrations that were thinly veiled pre-Christian fertility rituals held at the ancient wells on the island. Musically, this all crystallized in flamenco for him. It’s no surprise that his closest friend over all the tumultuous years was Paco, and I’d often find myself with the pair of them (and more) huddled around a table swaying and nodding to Camarón de la Isla. Once when he gave me a lift to the airport at the end of a stay José handed me his copy of Camarón Paris 1987, in the wine-stained CD liner that had accompanied so many late night discussions over the previous weeks.

All this came out on his 2nd album, Navigator, which we produced together at Paco’s studio and was later nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2001. His first album was a sentimental view of his own life, complete with dog-eared pictures of his family on the cover, but Navigator was always intended to have a broader scope, rooted in the culture and experience of the island: echoing the flamenco flavored hours we’d spent crisscrossing the island in his 2CV wearing farmer’s straw hats.

On the news of his death, I posted Navigator Part 2, a track from the album on Facebook, with the following text: 

This is one of the tracks I’m most proud of in my work with José. He’d somehow managed to entice an incredible young gypsy musician, Eva, into the studio – hours of politics, meeting the family, the whole thing. We’d organised a wooden floor in the studio for her Zapatos, she danced and sang and then was gone. We never saw her again but built this track around her feet and her energy. This is the Ibiza that no one at Pascha, or Space, or any other of those corrupt and corrupting nightclubs even knew existed. 

José flew over Steve Bennett, one of the original team from Nottingham to work on the album with us and rework Adios Ayer, a track they had written together that had become a minor hit. The version on the album ended up being graced with a vocal by Seal and a lush string arrangement I’d put together in London, although it’s now agreed the original is the one. Other musicians, mostly from the island, came and went as recordings continued with José constantly admonishing us to make sure it was “not too banging”. He had his chill-out niche to think of after all.

The opposite was the case with the remixes that came his way. Whilst remixing Chris Rea’s All Summer Long, we had the chance to check if the mix was banging enough on the system at Pascha. It was just at the beginning of the season so the dancefloor was sparsely populated. As we stood behind the DJ in the booth while he played the track, Padilla pointed out the girls on the dance floor, and that in the shadows behind each was a guy: prostitutes and their pimps. The sex industry had its claws well and truly into the club scene.

The author resting at Las Cazuelas after a night of research into flamenco 2006 (photo José Padilla).

José was not immune to this dark world. Ibiza, like so much of Spain, is littered with brothels and sex clubs, (as explained in Giles Tremlett‘s excellent Ghosts of Spain [Faber and Faber 2006]). The first time I flew to the island to stay with him he picked me up bleary-eyed from the airport excusing himself on the basis that he’d been up all night “talking to prostitutes”. At one point (although I never met her), he had a relationship with a young woman he took in, “saved”, from a brothel on the basis of the dreadful tales of exploitation she’d told him. Needless to say, it didn’t last. Sadly, none of his relationships did. There were a couple of girlfriends that I got to know, all substantially younger than him, who would eventually tire of his lifestyle and disappear when the summer was over. Life in entertainment on the edge of the tourist industry made it almost impossible to sustain a meaningful relationship. 

Alcohol and cocaine were other constant temptations he found hard to resist. Generous as ever, he once gave me a shirt that he’d bought that was far too big for him. It fit me perfectly, but he’d worn it long enough to secrete a deal of cocaine in the pocket, which I theatrically returned to him amid peals of laughter. I hardly ever saw him using, but these tiny deals wrapped up in a rizla seemed to constantly be around at one point in his life. 

The tension between the nocturnal DJ world of clubs, drugs, sex, and corruption, including his deep desire to be recognised (and paid!) for his part in it; and the world of the aesthete champion of culture that poured scorn on the idiocy of the superstar DJ, was ever-present. Once on a visit to the infamous Pike’s club on the island, he told me how he’d once been given the cold shoulder at a VIP reception there for calling Judge Jules (who was quite a name at the time), Julio Iglesias to his face. This was typical of him. There were plenty of times when invites would appear to VIP events in the summers when we were working together, and on the way there we’d take a detour and end up all night in the farmer’s bar, or simply disappearing altogether by jumping on the ferry to Formentera. At times he just couldn’t face the tasteless schmoozing necessary to give him the star status he felt he deserved. This is perhaps what earned him the status of a maverick.

Formentera was José’s release valve. Less than an hour away by ferry, the next island south had managed to escape the developers and the night clubs largely due to a strong communist local government. The island had a ring of purity about it, a place where a man could forget the music business and spend all day fishing and snoozing, and all night drinking. He had some great friends there who would happily indulge him.

The last work we did together was on remixes for Norah Jones in 2012, the most poignant in retrospect being Say Goodbye.

By this point, José had finally been paid what he was owed for the Cafe Del Mar compilations after a long and acrimonious legal battle with the owners of the venue over the use of the name. He’d moved into a much bigger house on the north of the island, with a pool and a separate flat that doubled as a studio, where I could stay with my family. He had a new manager (he’d been through many over the years and finally seemed to have found a fellow traveler in Enrique Domenech) and had even given up drinking on doctor’s advice. There was no sign of any other recreational drugs. He was still single but there was a constant stream of visitors to the house, with gigs and schemes to work on, some which bore fruit, others that lead to more rancor. The new home gave him a chance to spread a little too – the art collection came out including new pieces he’d bought in Cuba, a trip that, of course, involved a star-crossed love affair. 

It was in this state of relative comfort (notwithstanding a few more changes of manager) that disease finally caught up with him. He was still hatching plans when I saw him in 2018 and he was keen to spend more time in South America although he told me there was already a potentially serious health problem. 

Jose snaps the crowd, London Jan 2018.

One of the tracks on Souvenir is I Like Clowns. He did. He had a collection of quite tacky clown puppets with the ubiquitous tear drawn under one or even both eyes. This is how he liked to see himself at times: Pepe Pandilla, Little Pepito, el Vagabondo, the broken-hearted entertainer. It’s a suffocatingly sentimental image, especially for someone who could be extremely funny and brush off hardships with a flick of the wrist; but the image somehow fits. His work could be equally sentimental, even mawkish, but he was always aware of this and, despite all the conflicts, deeply empathetic in his search for the right tune at the right time.

José María Padilla Requena (4 December 1955 – 18 October 2020)

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Images Owned and copyright Jono Podmore