fatted calf: a savage circus of music, dance, stimulants, overpaid DJs, superclubs gorged with tourists, and prodigious merchandising spinoff opportunities. As close to Algiers as it is to Catalonia’s capital city of Barcelona, few outside of the party scene are even aware that Ibiza is in fact the bantam of the Mediterranean at less than 45km long and 25km wide, or of the fact that the club season is just that: a summer-only period lasting a mere few months, its peak coinciding with Sirius’s ‘dog days’ of early July to mid-August. Or that, even at this busiest point, the loudest continual sound on the island is the sizzling chorus of cicadas.
The most eulogised Ibiza clubs have for several years been Pacha, Privilege (originally Ku, it is the biggest nightclub in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records), Amnesia, Space, DC10, Eden (now Gatecrasher) and Es Paradis. Others come and go, and there is a hallowed pre-party scene at beach bars, which sees local and international DJs warm up for the evening’s festivities, usually accompanied by a carefully programmed set to synchronise with the sunset. For those whose partying culture also, or only involves locations where the streets have no name, there are the often intriguingly off-piste after-parties, held in private villas or on sequestered beaches, and a colourful culture (less prevalent now, but still in existence) of trance parties held far from the superclubs, in the more sylvan corners of the island, especially in the north.
In order to fathom what ultimately defines this fecund party scene, which at its best and more than any other clubbing epicentre in the world remains equally scandalous and magnetic to this day, it’s crucial to look behind the curtain in time as well as space, and understand how the thousands of years of this unique island’s history have given a very particular background context to its clubland. Making ecstatic island whoopee did not set in only with the onset of mass tourism. There is something about this charismatic Mediterranean rock which has long ensnared a distinguishable type of character: receptive, curious, fiercely independent, hedonistic, tolerant and feminine are the descriptions you hear over and over in narratives of the island’s past and present. Equally it can often feel like a place with no centre, and its foreign residents can and do attract adjectives such as vain, aimless, violent, greedy, shallow, charlatan.
Feelings towards the island by foreigners who have lived there can swing to great extremes, but one thing everybody agrees on is that beneath the human element the island itself has a unique energy. Vibe, if you prefer. Visitors with their antennae primed can sense it very quickly under the touristic veneer that foreign tabloid newspapers have never quite been tempted to pierce. Ibiza has been ‘ruled’ many times throughout its checkered history, but the essence of the island’s resilient and alluring character has always remained. Some historians claim that reports of this unique ‘energy’ stretch as far back as Homer. Many people still believe that it was the mysterious and commanding rock of Es Vedrà which lies off the south coast at Cala d’Hort opposite the enigmatic Atlantis Beach which was being described by Ulysses in The Odyssey when he reported,
“I had hardly finished telling everything to the men before we reached the island of the two Sirens, for the wind had been very favourable. Then all of a sudden it fell dead calm; there was not a breath of wind nor a ripple upon the water, so the men furled the sails and stowed them; then taking to their oars they whitened the water with the foam they raised in rowing. Meanwhile I took a large wheel of wax and cut it up small with my sword. Then I kneaded the wax in my strong hands till it became soft, which it soon did between the kneading and the rays of the sun-god son of Hyperion. Then I stopped the ears of all my men, and they bound me hands and feet to the mast as I stood upright on the cross piece; but they went on rowing themselves. When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate, the Sirens saw that we were getting close in shore and began with their singing.” (Homer’s Odyssey, circa 800 BC).
Woven endlessly into repeated stories of the island’s power, the Es Vedrà connection here is a stunning and fabulous myth. In both senses apparently, since according to Martin Davies, a local historian whose company Barbary Press has published several beautifully designed and well-researched books about the island, it is just that – a myth. “We don’t really know a lot about the Sirens, but that rock was probably in the straits of Messina,” he says. “That’s one of the points in the Ulysses story which most experts agree about. It would be between Sicily and the toe of Italy, so in fact Es Vedrà has nothing to do with the Odyssey!”
In any case, the myth has always been a popular one. One night during London’s Swinging Sixties the guitarist Eric Clapton (who would play at the Plaza de Toros in Ibiza Town in 1977) ran into underground artist, film-maker and illustrator Martin Sharp at London’s Speakeasy club. Just back himself from a trip to Ibiza, Sharp had written a poem that was inspired by both Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and the Es Vedrà legend of the Homer sirens, and he gave it to Clapton to turn into a song. ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ was to appear on Cream’s album, Disraeli Gears, for which Sharp also designed the psychedelic cover image.
Es Vedrà has basically always remained free of human habitation, with the notable exception of the Catalan friar Francisco Palau. “Ibiza, that beautiful, rich and fertile possession of Spain,” he wrote in the 1860s, after having been arrested and exiled to the island by a group of mercurial Spanish Carmelites. Palau then spent six years in deep and gratifying solitude and prayer, living the life of a hermit on the imposing rock that would later appear on the cover of British musician Mike Oldfield’s 1996 album, Voyager. Other than Palau though, Es Vedrà’s only long-term inhabitants have been the wild goats, and a colony of the endangered Eleanora's falcons.
Many musicians and artists have been drawn to return again and again to the island whose golden light is also continually remarked upon. Ibiza light is noticeably different from that further across the sea in Sicily, for example. Ibiza is affected by more shadows, as a result of the many low hills that are spread around the landscape. Clean winds blow away most traces of pollution, and the rich sunset is enhanced by its advantageous position in the Mediterranean.
The remarkable artists Hipgnosis (who designed dozens of commanding album sleeves for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and others) started to bring this light into their work a long time ago. Aubrey Powell, one of the founder partners of Hipgnosis has had a house in Formentera, Ibiza’s small neighbouring island, for many years. He told me, “The light here in Formentera was very influential for me in terms of what we did with Hipgnosis. It was something I saw very early on; the particular vistas and landscapes that you get here which are very Dalíesque. You could see why Dalí painted in Cadaqués because it has the same kind of vibe, and that incredible light that you get is very like what you see in Hipgnosis works, those particular types of landscape. Take Elegy for The Nice with the desert and the beautiful sky, or the diver on the back of the Pink Floyd album cover Wish You Were Here, the still water with this incredible blue sky. Hipgnosis were very into landscapes, it would give the impression of an atmosphere as it happened. For me as the main photographer for Hipgnosis I was definitely influenced by what I saw here.”
Once upon a time, archaeologists and historians claim, Ibiza was inhabited only by bats (in terms of resident mammals). In 1994, the bones of sheep and goats, dug up at Es Pouàs near Santa Agnès revealed that the island would later have been inhabited by a Neolithic group who had made their way across the sea from the Spanish mainland. Further remains of horseshoe-shaped houses were also found at Cap de Barbaria over in Formentera.
The Greeks passed through and took note of Ibiza in the 9th century BC, but it was the Phoenicians of the Levant, the masters and commanders of the Mediterranean sea, who are traditionally recognised as the first settlers to establish a culture on the island. These maritime sovereigns (who were originally based on the coast of today’s Lebanon and Syria and became known as the Carthaginians after the founding of Carthage) were drawn to the Balearic Islands, and perhaps especially the tiny Ibiza, as it provided for them a very handy recess between the active port of Sardinia and the Spanish mainland. They arrived on the island around 650 BC, and brought the first alphabet that was used in Ibiza with them.
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