Villa Bianca

Villa Bianca were four people from Southend-on-Sea who made the most convincing record about the Mediterranean that anybody made in 1985.

Southend has a sea. It is brown, and at low tide it goes out a mile and a half and leaves grey mud that smells of diesel. The town has the longest pleasure pier in the world, which locals say with a straight face. They grew up looking at water every day of their lives. It was the wrong water, and that turned out to be the most useful thing that ever happened to them.

Marco Doné sang. He was born Mark Doney in Leigh-on-Sea, son of a boatyard engineer, and he put the accent on the surname at nineteen and has never once been asked to explain it by anyone who knew him. He tells interviewers the song came out of a summer in Antibes in 1983 — the marble floor, the speedboat, the woman in the silver dress — and he tells it the same way every time, which is the mark of either an excellent memory or a very good song.

Lyn Fairhead played the DX7, arranged everything, and wrote most of the words. She had come from three years in a Chelmsford jingle house and was the only one of the four who understood on day one that they were making a product, a fact she has never been embarrassed by and never mentioned unless asked. She wrote Monaco, Marrakesh, lipstick on a borrowed dress at a kitchen table in Rochford at half past eleven at night, and borrowed is the most honest word on the record.

Russ Cammell played the bass, got the fan mail, and wore espadrilles in weather that did not justify them, every single time, for eleven years. Dev Sanghera played the drums, hated the gate on his snare for the whole of 1985, and had been to more countries than the other three put together — his family went back to Punjab most other summers, so while four boys from Essex sang about crossing continents, the one at the back who had actually done it was playing a drum sound he didn't like.

They were called Pageant first, and they were terrible. The name came off a card in a travel agent's window on the High Street in the spring of 1984 — sun-bleached, curling at the corners, a hotel in Sorrento, half board, ten nights, £129 per person. Lyn wrote it on a cigarette packet because it looked like a band. None of them has ever stayed there. None of them has checked whether it exists.

Vic Danvers signed them in a car park after a talent night he was booking anyway, and in June 1985 "Riviera" went to number six and stayed on the chart for fourteen weeks. It did better in Japan than it did at home. For one summer they were on television twice and everything anyone had ever wanted was arriving at speed and slightly ahead of the beat, the way Marco sings the verses.

On the seventeenth of July, ten days after it peaked, Vic Danvers did the one extravagant thing he ever did with money and flew all four of them to Nice for a photo session. They landed just after seven in the morning and were home the same night. A villa terrace above Villefranche before lunch, a hired speedboat in the harbour after it, pastel linen bought on the label's account three days earlier — better clothes than any of them owned. Dev was sick on the boat. Lyn did the crossword in the shade and had to be fetched for every set-up. Russ swam. Marco would not take his jacket off in thirty-one degrees and spent the gaps standing at the balustrade looking at the water, long enough that the photographer shot half a roll of it without being asked, which is why those are the pictures everyone has seen.

They were back at Heathrow by midnight. It is the only time the four of them were ever there together, and it happened after the record, not before.

Listen to what the song is actually made of. Sunglasses, a marble floor, a silver dress, a speedboat, champagne, a last cigarette. Objects, every one of them, and not a single experience anywhere in it. It is a list of things seen in photographs, sung by someone who wants them so precisely that he can tell you what they look like from across a room. That is why it works. That is also why they only did it once — the following year they made a record about having arrived, and it turns out nobody wants to hear about arriving.

Lyn left in 1986 for a jingle contract and a mortgage, and went on to write a building-society advert that has out-earned "Riviera" several times over, which she finds funny. Dev left in 1988 and teaches people to drive in Rayleigh, and owns nine cars, and is the happiest of the four by every account including his own. Marco and Russ kept the name and the song and took it to holiday parks, package tours, ferries and, in 1993, a summer residency in Benidorm — the first full summer any of them ever spent on the Mediterranean, eight years after the record.

Nobody fell out. Nobody was destroyed. There was no year in which it stopped; the rooms simply got smaller by degrees too small to notice, which is what actually happens and is almost never the story anyone tells. They still send each other things. All four played together on the pier a few years ago, Lyn on a hired DX7, and by every report it was lovely.

The song is about wanting to go somewhere. It was written by people who hadn't been. That is not the flaw in it. That is the whole of it.