Why is it that travellers across the globe end up listening to the same music?

"The first time that I heard Clandestino, by Manu Chao, was in French Polynesia - and I freaked out. I got up and asked the barman, 'Who is this? It's amazing!' He told me that it was the solo album by the singer from Mano Negra," says Pedro Torquemada, a 37-year-old restless traveller from Vitoria, who has visited more than 40 countries with his backpack. If a journey is the sum of all the experiences you have along the way, music is a fundamental part of that - but not just ethnic or local sounds.

"Everywhere I went, in all of the backpacker and beach bars that I visited, I heard the same Jack Johnson album. In the end it got into my head. It's music that you associate with a certain place - in my case Thailand - and a really great trip. When I got back I spent a good long time listening to the record and talking about it with my friends," says Jaume Rodríguez, from Barcelona.

It's a common phenomenon. When they get home, backpackers have brought with them a tan, photos and a couple of albums that they've heard time and again on their trip, songs that have got well and truly stuck in their heads. And those tunes often have a similarity or two - they're chilled out and acoustic.

The prime example of this is the aforementioned Jack Johnson, a Hawaiian singer born in Oahu. Right now, his third album, Sleep Through the Static, is number one in eight countries worldwide, including the United States. But his first fans were the surfers (he used to be a pretty handy surfer himself) catching waves in the Pacific. From there, his songs spread to Australia, where they took root with the backpackers and the tourists. Then, whether you were in Brazil, Goa or Thailand, it became hard to find a place where you didn't hear Jack Johnson.

"A lot of Germans and Brits have been to Australia on vacation and have heard my songs there. It's summer music for them," the musician said while promoting his last album.

As always, there's a route. The advance party is normally made up of the backpackers themselves, many of them spending months away from home. "The guitar-playing backpacker is an abundant species throughout the world, and would be even more so if it weren't for the fact that you just can't get a guitar into a backpack. This in turn creates endless covers of songs that can be played with just four chords. The dinosaurs - Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce, Van - aren't so popular, perhaps given the average age of the backpacker, which is almost always under 25," Torquemada says.

It won't be long before that music - Johnson, for example - can be heard anywhere where there are tourists. His album will appear in bazaars and markets even sooner. And just a few months later, someone will ask how it is possible that the album has sold so many copies, despite the fact that it has hardly got any radio play.

But if there is one musician - more than Hawaii's Johnson, or Franco-Spanish troubadour Manu Chao - who truly crosses all borders and fashions, it is Bob Marley. "You go to Thailand and you hear Bob Marley. You go to Latin America and you hear Bob Marley. I remember going to a concert of Marley covers in Kathmandu played by Nepalese musicians. If you want to play a song with a local guitarist, it's almost certain that he'll know one song by Bob Marley. He is completely universal," says Torquemada.

But of course, technology has taken some of the magic away. "Before, the iPod didn't exist in the world of the backpacker, and you had to think very carefully about whether you wanted to take music with you or not, given that those 15 CDs took up a lot of space and weighed a lot too. That meant that you wouldn't hear much music, and when you were in a club, a party or a beach bar that was playing a great song, it was really exciting - you'd enjoy it so much because you really missed it," he concludes.

[March 2008]

[Copyright El Pais / ÍÑIGO LÓPEZ PALACIOS 2008]