Deafening music, dance-floor divas and me (aged 46)

ON THE TUBE to Liverpool Street to the train to the plane, two 30-something City surveyors in suits chatted about Ibiza Uncovered, the recent Channel Four fly-on-the-wall documentary series.‘Why don’t those kids get themselves an education instead of wasting their lives away in those clubs?’, they murmured. They thought the loutishness, the beer and the general excess sad.

For myself, I was going to Ibiza with no prejudices. I’d caught neither Ibiza Uncovered, nor tabloid accounts of misbehaviour on the island. I was there simply because Ibiza is a unique laboratory in which to scrutinise British youth. All the income groups and consumer types that characterise British 18-30 year-olds are there in one place. I’m wearing shorts, not a scientist’s white coat; but now, at 9pm inside an empty, gleaming Stansted airport, I can’t wait to get out and observe this excellent research sample.

I am off in my capacity as a greying, 46-year-old Professor of Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, and as a commercial forecaster of future trends for big companies. It would be a good idea, I had decided, to spend a night, a day and another night among young British clubbers. What they thought and did in 1999 would be a useful pointer to what mass British consumer behaviour would be like in 2009.

I am travelling with a research team from the marketing company Hicklin Slade. The idea is to gather together representatives from Hicklin Slade’s clients in youth-orientated sectors (beer, spirits, perfumes) and bring them right up close to their target markets. This year, after all, a record-breaking 1.4 million clubbers spent about ₤330 million on the island. Methodology: watch, listen, photograph and talk to kids while they strut their stuff.

A GAGGLE of young managers from a major international leisure corporation runs into us. Bashfully, they carry a guide to the island put out by the governor of British clubs, Ministry of Sound. They also carry an MoS compilation CD, wrapped in cellophane.

A second faux pas. Later, on Ibiza itself, Martin Vincent, the big, dreadlocked manager of El Divino club-restaurant, refers to it with contempt that radiates through impenetrable sunglasses. ‘Nobody here buys that compilation crap, and no DJ plays it’.

For now, everyone piles on to the plane. At £120 return, there are 148 passengers and no spare seats. Strapped in, it feels for a moment like the Michael Crichton movie Westworld (1973), in which another, fictional leisure corporation arranges for you to be in fantasy Westerns populated by androids. In Westworld, like Ibiza, it’s always sunny; but the software goes wrong and the androids, led by Yul Brynner, run amok. What fate awaits me, an alien tourist out of my depth among throbbing throngs of teenagers?

Landing at midnight, it gets worse. Despite the pleasant smell of the vanilla trees at the airport, I catch more than a whiff of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The vegetation is lush and the heat considerable. In a jungle atmosphere, the feeling grows that anything could lie further up the brackish night. Very possibly, I’ll encounter seething bodies of sweat, pools of vomit, the cleavages of transvestites and the dark looks, moustaches and uniforms of the Guardia Civile.

IF WE weren’t so late, the form would be simple. Around 7 or 8pm, you go to a bar-restaurant in the harbour of Ibiza Town, which is on the south-east of the island. Or you clap the sunset at a bar in plebeian, busy and more British San Antonio, on the north-west coast. Then you take a £7 cab or a £25-a-day hired car to London’s Ministry of Sound, Nottingham’s Renaissance, Derby’s Progress. Each club switches venues from night to night, from Pacha or El Divino near the port, to Privilege and Amnesia in the middle of the island, and then to Es Paradis or Eden, back in San Antonio. Crossing the island by road takes only 20 minutes, so everything is on hand.

The clubs from Britain’s regions beat their London rivals in logos, sounds and general ambience. So, at about 2am, we pass by a big white ‘R’ projected on a shadowy block of flats, and enter Renaissance at Pacha.

Filing in is like going to a football match. The main floor is enormous and decorated like a southern European restaurant. DJ Danny Rampling plays House music that’s danceable, but, as I had feared, totally deafening.

I take to the dance-floor. There 18-year-olds from Blackpool dress up, while 50-year-old, wizened Spaniards, who own yachts in the harbour, dress down. Dance-floor divas in Prada and Chanel pirouette alongside flailing A-level nerds. In the dark, you might find Peter Stringfellow, but he’d be in flip-flops. Although I don’t spot many, I’m assured that the place is ‘transvestite-friendly’. Certainly there’s an extravagance of brocade, sequins and make-up, and the dancing itself is showy. On Ibiza, only Space, a daytime rave with the atmosphere of a Barcelona evening, insists you wear a shirt. Nevertheless, at Pacha the 30-somethings with mortgages want to see and be seen.

The girls look almost as pretty as models and therefore smile but don’t flirt. The boys display V-shaped torsos and also play it cool. There’s no foreplay, and no drugs are furtively exchanged. Beer sells at £5, and spirits at £10. Nobody looks very drunk, so I try to hold my liquor.

To a monotonous beat, two young black women dance rather complacently on platforms above the melée. Elsewhere, vendors sell temporary tattoos, and the talk is about which DJ has ‘sold out’. For clubbers, I learn to my horror, the big aspiration is to be a DJ.

In Pacha the main floor is surrounded by an endless, intriguing labyrinth of rich rooms, each of which has computer-controlled lighting (if a room gets too crowded, Pacha’s managers turn the lights up very high or very low, so as to clear the clubbers). Corridors are like long caves, and the general effect is that of a Moroccan souk. In a little, funky, air-conditioned room, the fashions are painfully trendy, as dancers move to the beat of 1970s disco, carefully not sweating a drop. In another, side room, they are playing a kind of Euro version of House music that is harder, faster and younger than the stuff on the main floor.

I’m feeling OK, but  find it more listless than sociable. There’s some conversation, but you have to be in the know really to join it. Altogether the atmosphere is, as Tony Blair might let slip, ‘well chilled’.

JACK IS A diminutive 25-year-old DJ. We meet at 4am in Clockwork Orange, a Nottingham club that has taken over Es Paradis, a fairly proletarian venue in San Antonio. Es Paradis is quite different from Pacha: its bright, high, dome-like ceilings domes remind you of a Moorish mosque. It’s all white marble, mirrors, palm trees and glass floors. Jack confides that lesser clubs have tight budgets for interior design: ‘they could do the light-shows much better, and the décor is frankly embarrassing’.

In Es Paradis there are lots of quite sumptuous rooms, but they are not hidden away, as at Pacha.  That way, a younger crowd enjoys a lighter, less cool atmosphere. The music consists of accessible club singles drawn from the pop charts, although by contrast with Pacha, DJ Jeremy Healy turns up thumping crescendos every two minutes rather than every 30. Thus the dancing is of the hands-in-the-air variety rather than the thespian sort, and a lot of clubbers are off their faces with drugs.

Again in contrast to Pacha, where people keep their possessions in special backpacks, girls here seem to hold them in their hands, while boys’ trousers — combat fatigues, baggy numbers — have pockets which fairly bulge with stuff.

I am feeling bleary. On the dance-floor before me, a couple of young pretty blondes in black dresses fondle each other just to see how a thin, mawkish 19-year-old lad reacts: his eyes bulge, his knees go weak, he can do nothing. Other, not-quite-pimply types mix walking to the bar with a kind of desultory dancing. There is more beer here than at Pacha, but I still don’t see much of it.

By 7am people are still dancing as girls re-wash their hair in the loos, dry it on hand-blowers and enter the men’s loos instead of queueing at the ladies. For the clubbers, night blurs seamlessly into day. At 8am we go back to Pacha to watch the sunrise on its roof.

Oddly, Iam recovering, as we slump on a kind of stone sofa next to four young British girls. With white foundation and white music, they seem doped out but friendly, and pleasantly bemused by my age rather than aghast at it. Not for the first time, I feel a smidgeon of desire coming on, but know that nothing will happen. Iona, one of our research group, lays her exhausted head on my lap and says that I don’t look too bad after this all-nighter. I feel energised. It’s time for our team to take pastries at the Mezzanine bar.

NOW WE are among washed-out, jet-set cognoscenti with mobile phones, Marlboro Lights and capuccinos. Astonished when I buy fruit from across the street, these people form the richest of the four segments into which, according to Hicklin Slade, the island market divides. They are Ibiza Veterans.

Veterans come in convertible cars and stay in friends’ villas (Mike Oldfield, Maradonna, DJ Judge Jules). They sport tattoos, and don’t so much go clubbing as handle the guest lists to private parties and hang out, as languidly as possible. There are about 5000 of them, and they spend £1500 a week, much of it on drugs.

Half a million Committed Clubbers form Ibiza’s the second segment. They tend to go around in single-sex groups, use cabs, and drink bottled water. They take hotel rooms in Ibiza Town, where, each night, they pick their nightwear from their Samsonite suitcases, all full of fluffy bras and adapted second-hand clothes.

Ibiza’s 600,000 Occasional Partakers are different again. They come in couples, and wear surfing fashions, Nike sandals and tops by Gap or Next. Sometimes they use a camera, and they often dance on British time, not Ibizan time. Lawyers, professionals, dilettantes, they spread the word about the island back home. They book a villa by Thomas Cook, and can afford to hire a car.

Last and least, there are the Beer Boys and Girls on their hired mopeds, in their Bri-Nylon football shirts and in their pink sunburn. There are only 150,000 of them on Ibiza over the season, because they can barely afford the £700 that it costs to have any fun there over a week. They go to the notorious Carrer de Santa Agnès in San Antonio, with its greasy burgers, gassy beer and its Highlander pub.

At Mezzanine, the gossip is Euro-Latin chic. After my breakfast of fruit I ought to feel light but instead begin to flag. My younger colleagues have more clubbing stamina. Abashed, I retire to our team’s villa for a kip.

Waking, I take one of Ibiza’s famously rude and late taxis to Bora Bora, for mid-morning, open-air clubbing by the beach. Bora Bora opens at 7am and boasts one of the meanest sound systems on the island: it blasts past the dance-floor, right on to the tanned bodies in the sand. Before lunch, the music is funky; around 4pm, the volume and the crescendos are epic House, and foam is sprayed on to everyone to cool them down. This is where Committed Clubbers are in the majority.

Here people have become couples overnight and are entwined — none too erotically — on towels they rent from the club. A topless dancer worries her way round the music: I’ve seen her at 5am, out of it at Es Paradis. There are no beachtime novels, no books, nor even any Playstations or Nintendo machines. There are just men’s magazines. A Guardia Civile sign says ‘No Drugs’, and an English wag has added the graffitti ‘Sorry, sold out’.

Next, we stagger on to Liverpool’s Cream, which today holds court at Amnesia, an old bullring turned into a glassed-over garden reminiscent of Centre Parcs. Floors slope, and there are lots of little podiums, with the result that the height of dancers’ heads varies, making the crowd less daunting.

The ambience is rather British — Doncaster Occasional Partakers enjoying the sun, sweating seriously, and dancing non-stop. People wear the odd children’s toy and, perturbed, I notice more than one waterpistol. The music is House, and the DJs are big names: Seb Fontaine, Dave Seaman. Their booth is on a raised stage, confirming the accuracy of a 1999 clubbers’ favourite song, God is a DJ.

As the afternoon gets going, we adjourn to Kanya, which has a pool and some food, and are briefed on Manumission, a club which used to boast sex shows but whose marketing chief, Andrea, has only just graduated. Despite my nap, by this time I’m knackered. Eventually I make it along to a bar for early-evening drinks. The cycle is beginning again, but I must sleep. I just can’t take the pace. After an all-too-short repose, Philip Slade wakes me at 6am, in time for the early-morning plane.

‘WHY DO the young people like this?’, asked John Sparrow, warden of All Souls College, Oxford, of hippies back in the 1960s. I remember hating his famous Sunday Times article at the time (6 September 1970); and now my conclusion is that there are equally few grounds for a panic over sex and drugs in Ibiza.

What happens there happens in the UK. When it singles out Ibiza for attack, public opinion says more about parental paranoia back home than it does about British clubbing abroad. Committed Clubbers do only go to work so they can go clubbing, but, for the swelling ranks of Occasional Partakers, work is more important. The craze for Ecstasy does explain why the music can get away with being so dull and electronic; but it also explains why there’s the image of sex, but little sex itself.

Like Soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, E should encourage intercourse everywhere, yet in fact incites passion nowhere. In the 1950s, youth had intercourse for free and out of sight, in the back of a car. Now that youth lives at home till 27, it pays out for a whole foetid week of look, don’t touch.

Clubbers are getting older, more affluent and more settled with partners. The meat markets of San Antonio are in steep decline; the island’s one brothel is closed for the night, and the old in-your-face lager and leering are nowhere to be seen. Ibiza uncovered, filmed in early 1997, is no longer representative. Clubbers, it’s true, do begin to chew their lips — go ‘gurning’ — after a night of Ecstasy. But no grubby teens go berserk like androids, and no king DJ must die in a grisly heart of darkness. The brutalism of concrete, fish-and-chips and public sex has yet to make the island into Torremolinos.

So: Ibiza is a sunny 24-hour theme-park Shangri-La for clubs, but we don’t risk losing a generation there. Having taken the plane-capsule, you’d be odd if you didn’t go native once you’d arrived. You’d be odd if you never wanted to go back. Indeed, Ibiza is now so popular that, from the last week in June to the second in September, it can prove hard to find a bed to have sex in.

For Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans, Ibiza is just two hours away from local airports. Americans enjoy Ibiza so much, they often miss their planes and, a club-owner guffaws, ‘even the thickest, noisiest ones know they’ve got to shut up and be correct’. Yet 80 per cent of clubbers on Ibiza are British, so Britain receives the main impact of Ibizan club culture.

Ibiza’s chief influence on Britain, youth believes, is to promote tolerance. UK multinationals in alcohol, perfume and cosmetics avoid marketing to youth on the island because of its druggy reputation. But the fact is that these same companies employ young middle managers who holiday in Ibiza, take drugs, get on fine with very different people there, and bring a kind of sun-kissed, Mediterranean universalism back home. In Ibiza, you are told rather earnestly, there are no ‘doorpickers’ — stewards who invite in only the fashionable. Clubowners manufacture no queues to let the paparazzi know who’s cool: on a good night, they just let in 10,000 people. Although some of the ritziest clubs charge £30 entrance, that’s the only barrier. There are almost no fights.

The tolerance, however, is partly to do with Ecstasy, partly an ironic call-back to the 1960s. In 1967, Mick Jagger astonished William Rees-Mogg of The Times by repeating the doctrine, which we owe to John Stuart Mill, that you can do whatever you like as long as you don’t harm anyone else. Now, a whole weird island is organised along Millian principles.

Yet there are few opinions to be had on Ibiza. In the hippiest Greek island of the 1960s, you’d have found less dope and more opinions. People talk music and DJs, but, most depressingly of all, they just talk brands.

The British clubs, which are more powerful than Ibiza’s venues or its £10,000-an-hour DJs, now tour America and Asia as global brands. Around their brand values, they organise what kind of music you hear — Acid Jazz, Garage, House, Techno, and, this year’s favourite, Trance — where and when you hear it, and from whom. Finally, throughout, you discuss the merits and demerits of cans of Red Bull, branded bottled waters, or the effervescent B12 tablets of Berocca. Accessories? We’re talking Casio G-Shock watches, Oakley F1 shades, Moscow Mule Smirnoff-and-Cokes for girls and Red Label Budweiser for boys.

Altogether, youth on Ibiza are more likely to be sedated than wild — sedated not by drugs, but by low intellectual horizons and by low expectations. Youth looks forward to branded trivia, endless remixes and very little sex.  Nobody pretends, the way they did in the 1960s, that drug-taking will lead to openmindedness and to spiritual insights. In Ibiza you do nothing but chill out.

And yet — hey, it’s only a holiday.