Llorenc for breakfast, and I loved how they played blues music, or David Bowie’s Station to Station, there in the calm middle of a Mediterranean island. Locals came there for Bar Costa’s famous boccadillo sandwiches – toasted and tomato-spread baguettes filled with manchego cheese or serrano ham, and above the bar whole legs of ham were hung up to mature before being taken down and sliced up. Inside, the white walls of Bar Costa are covered in a selection of highly eclectic paintings, relics from the days when the village was a centre for poor artists who’d pay off their ever-rising bar credit in art. Santa Gertrudis had changed a bit in recent years, and the village had expanded to include several new rows of houses, the island’s favourite bookshop, Libro Azul, the local vets and a few chichi restaurants. I took James and Rafa to one of those. If we’d had more time together I’d have loved them to experience one of Bar Costa’s traditional breakfasts.
After a hearty outdoor dinner surrounded by locals who had a bit of money, I decided to drive James and Rafa back to their hotel in Sant Antoni not by the main road via Ibiza Town, but through the quiet and magical country roads that took in the valley of Santa Agnès – where in early February the vast corona of almond trees in full bloom is arguably the most sensational sight (and scent) in the Mediterranean. Even now, in mid-July, the lingering scent of mead coming in through the car windows was a rare but comforting pleasure. Despite any changes to the size of Santa Gertrudis, and despite the fact that James and Rafa would be flying off to their real lives in the morning, the charm of driving through that beautiful timeless valley of Santa Agnes, with not a soul in sight anywhere, reminded us that our short lives were so insignificant compared to this virtually unchanging centuries-old landscape.
FOREWORD
Two movies that were really inspiring during the original planning phase of my ENTER.Ibiza event were Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, with their overall feelings of escapism and voyeurism. Both also dealt with the contrasting feelings of isolation and acceptance within groups of friends and acquaintances which reminded me of many experiences I’d had within the party culture on Ibiza. Ibiza is a place far away from most people’s ‘real’ day-to-day life, a place inviting people to escape, to isolate themselves from their own reality and to step into an alternate universe of make-believe experiences. A place far away from the norms of society where a type of freedom is suggested, if not fully guaranteed. All of these themes create the foundation of what ENTER. is. As you step off the plane on the island, you are leaving your reality behind and taking a step towards the fantasy that the island represents. Standing on that edge of what’s real and what’s not is where Ibiza lies. A black hole in the middle of the world where anything is possible…
– Richie Hawtin, February 2015
INTRODUCTION
Pirates is an anagram of parties. Nowhere is this connection more evident than in Ibiza. On an island where there have been pirates, outlaws and freewheeling individuals destroying or laying down procedures for living and partying for centuries, not much has ever really changed behind the scenes, even if party operators now live more or less within some kind of ‘civilized’ island society.
Ibiza parties are just different from parties elsewhere, as anyone who actually knows the island will attest. Centuries of outside influence, including Roman decadence and Moorish drum rituals, and later, religious Hindu and Buddhist iconography, have all played a part, when combined with the freebooting spirit of piracy, in creating the fundamental tenets for an Ibiza party or after-party. From trance parties in the forests, drummers bringing down the sunset on the beach, or freaks gathering outdoors with guitars and tape machines blasting jazz and rock ’n’ roll for two or three days on end, what happened on the island before the clubs is also the reason the clubs became necessary in the first place.
The first nightclubs on the island were created by hippies, and brought together rich and poor, international and local, gay and straight on dance floors infused with elements imported by well-travelled freaks who’d done the ‘hippie trail’ and come back with their brains front-loaded with esoteric and colourful ideals, and psychedelic drugs. Cushions were spread around, and open-air dance terraces were created under the stars, under the sunrise. As they evolved, the clubs grew to become the world famous establishments they are today, but behind the scenes Ibiza clubland has featured shadowy mafia connections, crooked politicians, backstabbing, outmanoeuvring skulduggery, specious drug busts, assassinations, suicides and huge fines.
It has also included tales of quixotic originality and futuristic vision, widely talented impresarios and impulsive brilliance, idealistic utopian contexts and new definitions of how to integrate time, space and human bodies. But the most important aspect remains the ambience: Ibiza is the world’s capital of chill-out culture, and when this goes hand in hand with the island’s inimitable club nights, the whole experience of the party makes perfect, euphoric sense.
I wrote this book because, after spending many a season end-to-end on the island myself (where, among other things, I worked as a clubland correspondent and party promoter) for nearly a decade, I felt it was time to bring together a detailed original narrative to tell the whole story. I wanted to make Shadows Across the Moon a tale which would, for the very first time, combine the story of the island’s clubs and their often chequered rise to glory, first-hand interviews conducted with some of the biggest DJs and other key players, and a contextual backdrop of centuries of history, including the vital sparks created by the 20th century’s dropout and freak communities which foreshadowed Ibiza clubland as we know it today.
– Helen Donlon, Spring 2015
CHAPTER ONE
You will experience every jolt … every jar of a Psychedelic Circus … The Beatniks … Sickniks … and Acid-Heads … and you will witness their ecstasies, their agonies and their bizarre sensualities … You will be hurled into their debauched dreams and frenzied fantasies!
This was the gauntlet thrown down on the poster for Hallucination Generation, a lurid drugsploitation film shot in Ibiza in 1966, mostly in black and white, except for the loaded sepia tones of the trip scenes. In the film the island is depicted as a crossroads for freewheeling beatniks and potheads, their days spent lingering in old fincas (countryside white farmhouses), or edging around the bars of the port area in black shades and jerseys, with a moribund Ibiza the backdrop to their proudly sybaritic lifestyles. A mostly forgotten, and often absurd LSD-geared version of the 1936 film Reefer Madness, Hallucination Generation is nonetheless manna to local historians, an early glimpse into the unique international bohemian port scene that augured the imminent hippie invasion.
The beatniks were the first real ‘freaks’ to arrive as individuals in any number, and while their coterie was relatively small, everyone in it knew each other. It was during this halcyon period that the famous bars around the ancient port of Ibiza Town staked out their reputation as a garrison for pathfinders and outlaws, characters for whom the release of a new jazz album was often a major event on the social calendar. The beatniks’ more colourful understudies, the hippies would be dropping anchor within a few years, and would harmonise with all the natural beauty the island had to offer.
The locals (Ibicencos) called the hippies peluts (Catalan for “hairies”) and generally maintained a serene if beguiled entente cordiale with them. After all, the peluts, like the beatniks, would just be the latest in a long line of aliens to alight on the island, in varying degrees of welcomeness. Tourism itself, the brainchild of Generalissimo Franco, was still a long way off its peak in Ibiza, although building work had started in Mallorca – another of the Balearic cluster of islands. But as is ever the case, when tourism did finally arrive it splattered its cheap and cheerful identity across several parts of the island at some velocity.
Today Ibiza tourism’s chief protagonist is
