Shadows Across The Moon. Helen Donlon

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 its extraordinary and notorious clubland cosmos. For most observers, this scene is the island’s 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