Who gets Benidorm? Dividing up the territory after a break-up

“And you’d better not set foot in Benidorm, because everyone’s waiting for you with open arms.”

Some lines sound like an invitation and are really a restraining order. This is one of them. The open arms of Benidorm in «¡Que no pienso decir que mis trajes son de Zara!» (“I’m Not Going to Say My Suits Are from Zara!”) aren’t there to hug anyone. They’re the arms of an entire city that has already picked a side.

When I reread this song, what strikes me most isn’t the SHEIN suits, or the villain’s Canary Islands nickname, or the Excel lesson that rounds off the lyric. It’s that line about Benidorm. Because it says something almost nobody says out loud after a break-up: places get divided too. Not just the furniture and the friends. Whole cities.

This post is about that division. About who keeps which beach, which bar, which neighbourhood, when a couple splits. And about why, in my song, the narrator keeps Benidorm without asking anyone’s permission.

The usual note before we start: the villain of the song, with his nickname and his bargain-bin job title, is a fictional character. What’s being divided here is an imaginary territory, even if it has names you can find on a map.

I’m not going to

Before we get to the map, a note on the grammar of the title, because it has to do with everything else.

In Spanish the title opens with a little “que”, roughly “I said I’m not going to”. It’s very spoken, very argument-in-the-kitchen. It isn’t a sentence starting from scratch: it’s a reply. Somebody said something first, somebody insisted, somebody asked, in that tone, where that jacket came from. And the narrator answers with a “no” that already has three rows inside it.

I love writing titles that sound like half a conversation. They make you imagine the other half. Here the other half is easy: the villain showing off his labels, pushing the narrator to do the same, to look the part, to tell a little lie so as not to stand out in the photo. And the narrator, fed up, digging his heels in.

A refusal as a chorus is an odd thing. Choruses usually affirm: I love you, I’m leaving, let’s dance. This one refuses. And repeating a refusal over and over has a curious effect: it turns into an affirmation. By saying so many times that he won’t lie, the narrator ends up saying who he is.

That’s the first territory won in the song. Before Benidorm, before the friends. His own word.

The inventory nobody makes

When a couple separates, some lists get made and some don’t.

The ones that get made are lists of things. The sofa, the telly, the good coffee machine, the books, custody of the cat. Some people do it with a lawyer and some with a cardboard box and a marker pen, but it gets done.

The ones that don’t get made are lists of places. And yet they exist. Anyone who has broken up with someone knows there’s a bar they can no longer go back to, a street they walk around, a city that suddenly belongs to the other person. Nobody signs anything, but the division happens. Sometimes by tacit agreement, sometimes by pure trench warfare.

In the song, the division happens in the chorus, at full volume, with all the delicacy of a town crier. Benidorm is mine. Don’t you dare come near.

Why Benidorm

It could have been any city. But it had to be Benidorm.

In the Spanish imagination, Benidorm is a place that has everything and a bit too much. Skyscrapers on the seafront, set-menu paella, hen and stag parties, British pensioners, drag queens in the bars of the old town, karaoke till dawn. A city ashamed of nothing, wearing its glitter on the outside. That’s why it turns up so often in my catalogue.

It’s in «Madrid to Benidorm», which is a journey. It’s in «La primera drag de Benidorm» (“The First Drag Queen of Benidorm”), which is almost a founding legend. And it’s here, in this song, as disputed territory.

What I like about using Benidorm in a settling of scores is that it’s a city with a vocation for the stage. It isn’t a quiet village where you can hide. It’s a place where everyone sees you. If the villain sets foot in Benidorm, he won’t go unnoticed. There’ll be an audience. And the audience, according to the song, already knows who he is.

Open arms

The line has a double meaning that amuses me no end: everyone’s waiting for you with open arms.

Literally, it’s what you say about a welcoming place. Benidorm awaits you with open arms, as a tourist brochure would put it. Sun, beach, hospitality.

But in the song, right after that line, comes a string of exclamations that leaves no doubt about the kind of welcome in store for the character. There the open arms become something else. The gesture of a crowd getting ready to point.

It’s a device I use a lot: take a friendly stock phrase and flip it through context. The phrase doesn’t change. What surrounds it does. And the listener, who has known the phrase forever, feels the twist like the flick of a whip.

I love that kind of humour because it doesn’t need to insult anyone directly. It insults politely. With a hotel receptionist’s smile.

Your Médano, my Benidorm

If you look at the song’s map, there are two poles. One is El Médano, in the Canary Islands, where the villain’s nickname comes from. The other is Benidorm, where the villain mustn’t set foot.

Without quite meaning to, the lyric draws a border. The character is assigned his home turf, nickname included. The narrator keeps his own, audience included. And between them lie an ocean and half the peninsula.

It seems to me a very graphic way to tell a break-up. You go back to your island. I stay on my coast. Each with our own beaches, our own bars, our own people. And may the maps never overlap.

There’s something almost childish about that division, like two kids squabbling who draw a line on the playground floor. From here to there is yours, from here to here is mine. But there’s something very adult too: the need to know where you can be at peace. Where you won’t bump into the person who hurt you.

The friends get divided too

It isn’t in the lyric, but anyone who listens closely senses it: if “everyone” in Benidorm is waiting for the villain, the narrator has kept the people.

That’s the most delicate division of all. The friends. Because friends can’t be split down the middle like a dinner service. Some choose, some try to stay in no man’s land, some vanish. And anyone leaving a long relationship with someone manipulative often discovers, painfully, that part of their circle was more on the other side than they’d thought.

In the song that doesn’t happen. In the song, all of Benidorm has taken sides. It’s a fantasy, of course. A fantasy of justice: that people see what you saw, that you don’t need to convince anyone, that the whole town knows the truth without having to be told.

Songs are for that too. For giving us the ending life doesn’t always give.

From thief to emotional con man

Between the Benidorm warning and the rest of the lyric there’s a string of exclamations that works like a staircase. Abuser! Thief! And, of course, con man. And the second time around, the word stretches: con man, emotional, and for real.

I love that expansion. The first time, con man sounds like a textbook crime: someone who swindles you out of money. The second time, the adjective shifts the weight. Emotional con man. Someone who swindles with feelings, who asks for trust and spends it, who signs promises with no funds behind them.

And then the clincher, “and for real”, which is the most propping-up-the-bar part of the whole sentence. Like saying “and I’m not just saying that”. Like someone who has already seen the listener’s raised eyebrow and gets in first.

In terms of territory, that staircase is the charge sheet read out in the square before someone is run out of town. In the old villages they did it with a crier. In my song it’s done with a chorus.

A message for the next victim

At one point in the lyric the narrator stops addressing the villain and turns to someone else: the next partner. “Message for the next victim,” he says, and delivers a very specific warning about what will happen after the first few months.

That change of addressee matters in a song about territory. Because the next victim is someone who doesn’t know anything yet, who is entering the map through the front door, full of beginnings. And the narrator, from his conquered Benidorm, sends a warning postcard.

It isn’t the first time I’ve done it. In «Carta de recomendación» the whole text is exactly that, a warning to whoever comes next. Here it’s just a moment, a bracket between choruses. But the intention is the same: that the next person shouldn’t have to learn alone what you learned the hard way.

The label as a flag

Right, let’s talk about the suits, since the title demands it.

The narrator refuses to say his clothes are from Zara. He bought them on SHEIN and says so. That refusal, which looks trivial, is actually a declaration of independence. Because in the story of the song the villain is someone who shows off, who lies about what he has, who needs to keep up appearances. Refusing to lie about a label means refusing to play his game.

I’m very interested in how that connects with territory. Anyone who keeps up appearances needs a stage to do it on: a circle, a place, people in front of whom to shine. When the narrator keeps Benidorm, he takes one of those stages away from the villain. And when he wears his SHEIN suits without shame, he takes the dress code away too. No more pretending. Not in the clothes, not in the place.

There’s a lot of freedom in that. In saying where what you’re wearing came from and not caring what anyone thinks. In walking round your own city in your cheap clothes with your head held high.

The white BMW

There’s another object in the lyric very much tied to territory: a white BMW.

The narrator accuses the character of being capable of selling out his own parents just to claim the white BMW is his. In other words, the car isn’t his, but he presents it as his own.

A car is, among other things, a way of occupying space. Of arriving places. Of parking at the door and being seen getting out. A white BMW in particular is a car that wants to be noticed. It isn’t the grey runabout nobody clocks in the supermarket car park. It’s a car for cruising the seafront.

Which is why it seems so telling that it’s borrowed. The character moves through these territories in a vehicle that isn’t his, in clothes he lies about, with a story that isn’t true. It’s all props. And the narrator, in Benidorm, in his SHEIN suits with his memory intact, is the only one wearing his own things.

Coffee, swimming trunks and wedding rings

If the division of territory has an appendix, it’s in a line that flies past: the narrator warns someone to keep hold of their cash, because the character doesn’t care whether he pinches coffee, swimming trunks or even old wedding rings.

It’s a wonderful list for how uneven it is. Coffee, the cheapest and most everyday thing in the world. Swimming trunks, summer clothes, beach clothes, Benidorm clothes, in fact. And wedding rings, the object most loaded with meaning a couple can own. All in the same bag, as if for the character there were no difference between a packet of supermarket coffee and a wedding band.

The swimming trunks, by the way, have a song of their own in my catalogue: «Un falso amore se ha llevado mis bañadores de marca» (“A Fake Amore Has Run Off with My Designer Swimwear”). There they’re the heart of the drama. Here they’re one more line in the inventory. But the fact that they appear in both says a lot about how my universe works: objects travel from song to song, just like the characters, just like the cities.

And it says something else. That in a break-up, what the other person takes isn’t always the most valuable thing. Sometimes it’s the thing most yours. The trunks you were happy in one summer. The coffee for your breakfast. The ring you no longer wear but didn’t want anyone to touch.

Remember who taught you Excel

Near the end of the lyric there’s a line I think is one of the tenderest and cruellest I’ve ever written, both at once: the narrator reminds the character who taught him Excel.

That line is about another kind of territory: work. The narrator didn’t just give him his time, his home and his clothes. He taught him how to get by at work. He gave him tools. And the other one walked off with them, like someone taking a table when they move out.

I love that the final revenge isn’t a big insult but a spreadsheet. It’s the kind of detail only an insider knows. The formulas, the cells, the pivot tables. The patience of explaining the same thing twice. And then the knockout: the other one can barely write, and with any luck can read a little.

Here the division is final. Benidorm for me. And Excel too. Learn it again on your own.

Songs that talk to each other

The lyric ends with a wink I love: the narrator tells the character he already told him in another song that he has the memory of a goldfish.

That line turns the whole catalogue into shared territory. The songs aren’t isolated. They know each other, quote each other, answer each other. This song’s villain was already in others. His goldfish memory had already been diagnosed. And anyone who listens to a lot of my music starts recognising the characters, the way you recognise the neighbours in a TV series.

It happens with several characters in my universe. The market-stall supervisor, for instance, appears in «Carta de recomendación» and in «Doña Rogelia», in other tones and other scenes. Like a supporting actor who returns season after season, always playing the same part, always coming off worst.

That shared universe is, deep down, another territory. Mine. The territory of Planeta Gayfolk. A planet where villains have nicknames, cities take sides and clothing labels are said out loud.

Benidorm as a fantasy

I want to say something about Benidorm that goes beyond the joke.

For many LGBTQ+ people in Spain, Benidorm has for decades been one of those places where you could breathe. A tourist city, open-minded, where nobody looked at you funny for holding another man’s hand or getting up on a stage in a wig. It isn’t the only one, of course. But it has that aura of a city where the rules from home stay in the suitcase.

That’s why, in the song, Benidorm is more than disputed territory. It’s a refuge. The place where the narrator can be who he is, with his cheap suits and his flamboyance, surrounded by people who love him. What he bars the villain from isn’t a beach: it’s entry to that refuge.

That’s the real victory of the division. Not keeping more things. Keeping the place where you’re happy, and not having to share it with the person who spoiled it.

How it was made

A note on how I work, which shows a lot in this song.

I write the lyrics, without AI. The music and vocals I make with artificial intelligence tools, which I direct, choosing and discarding until the song sounds the way I imagine it. I talk about it at more length on my About page.

A lyric like this, full of repeated choruses and exclamations to shout with your arms in the air, is begging for a dance floor. It wants the Benidorm warning to sound like a party anthem, a fiesta proclamation, a song of the summer with a mean streak.

It’s on «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of the trilogy. If you want to see it next to its neighbours, it’s in the full discography, and the complete lyric, with every exclamation mark, is in my lyrics.

The map afterwards

There’s one thing that consoles me about dividing territory after a break-up: it isn’t forever.

One day you go back to the bar you’d written off and find it no longer hurts. That it’s just a bar. The waiter has changed, and so has the menu. One day you walk down the street you used to avoid and don’t notice until you reach the end. One day, who knows, you might not even care if the other one sets foot in Benidorm, because Benidorm is so big and so loud you’d never spot him.

But meanwhile, while it hurts, it’s fine to divide things up. It’s fine to say: this is mine. It’s fine to keep the city, the friends and the beach, and leave the other one his island and his nickname.

And above all, it’s fine to walk around your territory in whatever clothes you please. Even if they’re from SHEIN. Especially if they’re from SHEIN.

Frequently asked questions

What is «¡Que no pienso decir que mis trajes son de Zara!» about?

A narrator who refuses to lie about his cheap clothes to impress an ex who lives on appearances. It mixes very specific reproaches, like a white BMW that isn’t his or the Excel lessons he gave him, with a warning in the chorus: he’d better not set foot in Benidorm. The full lyrics are at gayfolkplanet.com/letras/que-no-pienso-decir-que-mis-trajes-son-de-zara.

Are the characters real?

No. The ex, his nickname and the other characters in the song are fiction.

Which album is it on?

«Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of the GAYFOLK trilogy.

Who made the song?

The lyrics are by Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid. The music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools.