Walter Finch
THEY say everyone deserves a second chance.
And for one former narco-trafficker jailbird turned rocker, it comes 30 years after he nearly hit the big time with a band he formed while in a Spanish prison.
Former Costa del Sol resident Allan McCarthy, 61, once found minor fame as the front man for Berlin 90 (named after the wall which had just fallen), even playing live on national television from jail.
While performing shows for Spanish television and radio, the gregarious Scotsman penned the song Runaway from his cell.
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Now, McCarthy, who is back living in Spain in Mar Menor, is re-releasing the song with a slick new music video.
“My dream got taken away from me and my story ended abruptly when I was moved to Carabanchel [prison] and then deported,” the ageing rocker reflected to the Olive Press.
“I’m hoping that now, an old man might get the chance to rekindle the whole music thing, you know? A second bite at the cherry.”
Runaway surprised everyone by winning a national music competition organised by Spanish radio, which earned the band the opportunity to leave the prison under armed guard to visit a recording studio owned by legendary Spanish producer Pepe Moreno.
It went on to become a sleeper hit in Spain in the late 80s, making the charts and even propelling McCarthy’s five-piece band out beyond the prison walls to regularly perform live shows in public – something that the Glaswegian claims was against all the rules.
“Runaway”The musical talent landed himself in Sangonera prison in his mid-20s after a car he was riding in was busted with a consignment of hashish near Murcia in 1988.
“But what they never found was the half a kilo of coke underneath the seat!” McCarthy chortled. “That would’ve doubled my sentence.”
Unbelievably, a chequered stint behind bars started to miraculously transform itself into a platform to launch a musical career.
“It was a time when the guards could just slap us about if they wanted to, before reforms came in,” he explained. “The conditions were horrific.
“I listen to these podcasts nowadays of prisoners complaining that in Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways, British prisons like this, they only have a black and white telly. Or they don’t get halal food.
“You had a telly! We’d be lucky if we got any food! We had to use chamber pots.
But when McCarthy found himself languishing in Madrid’s infamous Carabanchel Prison towards the end of his stretch in the early 1990s, the dream appeared to be over.
Originally built in the 1930s for the political enemies of the Franco regime, 50 years later the prospect of being sent to Carabanchel made even Spain’s most hardened criminals quail.
“Carabanchel was like the bogeyman for these guys,” McCarthy told this newspaper. “It was like Spain’s Alcatraz.”
When he was suddenly released four years into his six-and-a-half sentence – something unheard of at the time – and promptly deported from Spain, it seemed to dash his musical ambitions.
But all that might be set to change.
As well as rekindling the flames of his musical career, McCarthy is also set to write a book on his journey as a reformed con.
He also plans to return to Sangonera, in Murcia, to perform one last time in the jail where he made his name.
