History of clubbing in Ibiza: from Flower Power to mega-clubs
A refuge. The emergence of Ibiza's monumental parties, drumming to the sound of electronic rhythms, can certainly be explained, at least in part, by the arrival of the hippies in the Pityuse Islands during the 1960s. If since the 1930s intellectuals, artists, marginal people and other exiles fleeing the rigors of Franco's regime had already found in Ibiza a refuge with simple customs and unspoiled landscapes, it is only with the beatnik wave - mutineers of consumer society and bourgeois conformism - that the limitless hedonism emblematic of the Pityuses Islands will really flourish. Going back to ancient times, there are indications that Ibiza was already a province of pleasure. For example, at the beginning of Homer'sOdyssey, there is the episode of the island of Calypso (which tradition places between Tangier and Ibiza), an island that Odysseus struggles to leave, numbed by the "sweet and amorous words" of a nymph. Also, a Phoenician legend would have it that Ishtar, goddess of love, after having lived a disappointed passion on the most magical island of the Balearic Islands, would have, out of anger, cursed him eternally, striking the lovers of the island with a state of perpetual ecstasy... It is thus rather naturally that in the years 1960-1970, the souls enamored of enjoyments without hindrances saw in Ibiza a promised land which would allow them to live in communion with nature, to build a cosmopolitan society and emancipated from the heavy traditions.
Emergence of the clubs. Peace & Love and Flower Power - a slogan advocating a non-violent ideology, born during the Summer of Love, a gathering in San Francisco (1967) at which hippies wore flowers in their hair - were emulated. Soon parties were organized in the fincas (traditional Balearic farms) made available to owners who had joined the movement. This is the case of the Pacha, today the most emblematic club in Ibiza, which opened the doors of its typical casa de campo in 1973 (after the opening in 1967 of the establishment in Sitges, south of Barcelona), advocating the free expression of the hippie movement and hedonists of all kinds. In 1975, Sant Antoni saw a spectacular club blossom: Es Paradis. Originally an open-air club, the dancefloor of Es Paradis seriously shook up what was then an indolent fishing village, so much so that it was later topped with its iconic pyramid roof. In May 1976, a Madrilenian man bought an 18th century finca and founded a discotheque that he named The Workshop of Forgetfulness, seeking to offer the public an escape from the everyday. He would later rename it Amnesia. In 1978, the Pikes Hotel was also built within the walls of a fifteenth-century finca by the British socialite Anthony Pike, a celebrity from Ibiza who died recently, who managed to turn his establishment into a real institution, a glamorous playground for rich and famous personalities who visited the island, where Freddy Mercury celebrated his 41st birthday. In fact, from the 1980s onwards, Ibiza attracted what came to be known as the beautiful people: attracted by the climate and the trendy side of the island, international personalities from the artistic world (actors, singers), the business world (major industrialists and financiers), politics, sports and the media, made a habit of coming to Ibiza to spend a few days resting. A phenomenon that continues to this day. Finally, it is worth mentioning the birth of the Privilege, classified in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest nightclub... in the galaxy and the universe! A simple restaurant in the 1970s, the place was bought by a soccer player in 1979 who soon transformed it into a club: the KU, a real institution known in the 1980s as a place of sexual debauchery, with an essentially gay audience, but also of musicalentertainment: Freddie Mercury, Gloria Gaynor, Grace Jones and James Brown performed there. The place was compared at the time to an open-air version of the famous Studio 54 in New York
English DJs and the birth of the Balearic Beat. The success is such that nightclubs will soon flourish on the island and with them, in the years 1980/90, the great experiments of the techno movement and electronic beat. It was at this time that three British DJs discovered a new style in Ibiza: the Balearic beat. It turns out that Ibiza had a greater influence on the British club and music scene than the other way around, causing the birth of Acid House wave in 1988. If in the 1980s, the Warehouse of Chicago and the Paradise Garage of New York revolutionize the music, in Ibiza, it is at the Amnesia that the magic operated. In 1987, a group of young DJs and producers from London - Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway - visiting the island, decided to venture into this club that was so much talked about, open from 3am to noon. They discovered that night, at L'Amnesia, the music of Alfredo Fiorito, an Argentinian DJ (DJ Alfredo) who had fled the dictatorship and audaciously mixed George Michael's hits with house sounds, but also a new and euphoric drug that seemed to have been conceived for the electronic dancefloors: ecstasy.
The liberated atmosphere - fancy clothes, alcohol and drug consumption without measure, unbridled sexuality - seduced the British who, on their return to London, introduced Chicago House and Balearic sounds in their tracklist which usually only played soulful Atlanta hits. The sauce does not take immediately: the house is too new for the public, reserved then to some gay clubs of the capital. Convinced of the future success of these emerging sounds, they organized their first parties called Shoom, proposing a mixture of European electronic music and American house music that they named Balearic Beat. Despite their early beginnings, they ended up attracting more and more neophyte music lovers dancing until the early hours of the morning. Throughout the 1990's, house music productions reached the top of the British charts. In addition to the London clubs (Shoom, Spectrum and The Trip), those of Sheffield and Manchester (Hacienda) were born, facilitating in their wake the development of raves, quickly declared illegal, in particular because of the drugs they carry.
The hidden face of hedonism in Ibiza
Industrialization of pleasure.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the party was in full swing in Ibiza, and tourism, which was becoming more and more widespread, fed it. Other mega-clubs were born, such as Eden, Ushuïa or Space (recently transformed into Hï Ibiza), which the resident DJ Carl Cox made famous thanks to his Music is Revolution evenings, programmed 15 years in a row. Today, the electro scene on the White Island is worth a trip for clubbers from all over the world. Nightclubs promoting the world's best DJs, trendy bars and beach huts selling out their days to the sound of subwoofers have become machines for producing entertainment and fun on an almost industrial level. The promoters of the parties have a well-tuned communication system to seduce the clientele: sexy shows in the public space, model parades and parsimonious distribution of free or reduced tickets. Low-cost trips are even organized from European capitals, whose price includes low-cost flights, cheap hotels, club entries and mediocre food that is quickly swallowed.On this subject, the investigation of the French philosopher and sociologist Yves Michaud Ibiza mon amour: Enquête sur l'industrialisation du plaisir (2012) deserves to be quoted. In it, he describes Ibiza as a veritable laboratory for analyzing what he believes is one of the main cogs in our liberal societies, namely the search for pleasure, hedonism. And indeed, from the hippie wave of the 1960s to the monumental techno parties of the 2000s, Ibiza, the true capital of the party, has seen and continues to see individuals from all social classes - from the most prominent international stars to the most ordinary families - but sharing the same desire for vacation. In the manner of a journalist, combining solid academic references with a thorough field investigation, Michaud offers a subtle and slightly mischievous reading of this machine for creating pleasure that is, among other things, Ibiza.
From More to Amnesia. Ibiza puts the bodies of some of its clubbers to a severe test: sleepless nights, endless party seeking, frenzied and up to no good, sometimes to the point of an alcohol coma. A few films released at the end of the 1960s already explored the subject, notably Hallucination Generation (1966), by the prolific American filmmaker Edward Mann, which was subtitled "the psychedelic circus of beatniks, deranged people and acid addicts". If this film went unnoticed, More
(1969), a feature film made in Ibiza by Barbet Schroeder, was a hit. In the middle of the hippie period, it stages, on a Pink Floyd soundtrack, the adventure of a young German who discovers the pleasures, but also the hell of drugs, at the initiative of an American woman with whom he falls in love. We discover the island of Ibiza still untouched by urbanization at the same time as the end of the myth of the sixties, slipping from Flower Power to the heroin trap. In 2015, Shroeder does it again with Amnesia, placing his plot in the 1990s. He brings together two characters: Martha, a German woman living in Ibiza for a long time, in denial about her own culture, and Max, a young techno DJ, also German. Although the film focuses on the relationship between the two characters and the renewed vision that each has of his own country, it also allows us to measure the changes that time has brought to the white island. And among these changes, one of the most notable, beyond the massification of night tourism, is that of the drugs consumed, namely Ketamine (used as an anaesthetic for horses) and GHB (the famous "rapist's drug"), much less festive and much more dangerous than ecstasy. And when you say drugs, you say organized crime. In recent years, while it had been spared, individuals linked to the Neapolitan mafia are frequently arrested on the archipelago. The party, a real financial manna, continues despite everything, with an aftertaste of artificial paradise.
