Strange times

Something happened last week which illustrates how different from the rest of the world Ibiza is. A man died at the club DC10. Sadly, there’s nothing especially unusual about that. Deaths happen at discos all over the world as a result of fights, too much alcohol or too many drugs.

What made this death seem strange to anybody unconnected with Ibiza was the victim’s age. He was 77. I didn’t actually know him, but he was certainly a familiar figure in the island landscape. With his long grey hair and odd name Zgy Om was, as you might guess, a hippy. The universal reaction to his death was that it was a great way to go, if you have to go. Certainly nobody ever raised an eyebrow about him being in a club, other than a bowling club, at his age. It’s hard to imagine that happening in the UK or most other places.

The other thing which Augustians might find hard to understand, I certainly did until a couple of years ago, is the nature of the place where Zgy died. DC10 is what’s called a “day club”. The name’s fairly self-explanatory: It’s a nightclub which operates through the day. Until I cam here I certainly couldn’t understand why anybody would want to go to a disco when the sun’s up, but it makes a strange kind of sense.

There are seven so-called “superclubs” on the island, massive places with a capacity of up to 10,000. They are rented out to promoters who book the deejays and publicise their events in return for a share of the admission charge and bar profits. That means the clubber coming over for a week’s holiday in July or August will have at least 40 events, each with a different music policy, to choose from every week. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of smaller bars and clubs across the island.

Competition between promoters is intense, and there are inevitably winners and losers. Generally, every night there is one event that is the most popular. The rest are also-rans. Even people who aren’t big fans will even go to the most popular event because nobody wants to dance in an empty disco. And once you’re dancing you don’t want it to end, even at 7am when the club closes.

To cash in on this feeling a few clubs in the 1980s began opening in the morning. The most successful is Space which, for much of the summer, is open from 8am through until 6am the following morning. It’s a neat business trick to keep revenue generation going for 22 hours a day, albeit during a season that is less than10 weeks long.

That makes it sound as if the day club concept was a carefully planned business strategy. It wasn’t. The club started opening during the day almost as an act of desperation because not enough people wanted to come to its unfashionable location at night. Space only really became hugely successful when deejays started to move their equipment up from the subterranean bunker, which was the original disco, into the sunlight above. There’s something particularly pleasurable about dancing in the open air.

The only disadvantage was for the neighbours. Underground the sound doesn’t travel, but that changes when you move outside. In fact most of the island’s clubs used to be substantially outdoors,under the stars or the sun. Now they’re covered to meet the increasingly stringent noise pollution laws. It’s understandable, but a shame.

Those laws mean music is only allowed outdoors until midnight. Even the busy bar areas are now strangely quiet after the witching hour even though they continue serving drinks until 4am or so.

Space is trying to get round the noise restrictions, apparently, by putting a sliding roof on the outside terrace. In the past clubbers had to move inside at twelve, so many left at this point. But, in true Ibizan style, the building work at Space hasn’t finished even though the season’s begun. Perhaps half the club’s capacity is still rubble. When up to 5,000 guests are paying 40 euros or more to get in and 6 euros for the cheapest drink, a small bottle of water, (that’s over £25 and £4) it’s a substantial financial blunder.

Of course those prices put some people off including those who run DC10, the place mentioned at the beginning of this article. Now the last club to operate substantially in the open air, it embodies one part of the spirit of Ibiza. There are constant threats to close the club down because of noise, even though it takes its name from a plane thanks to its position right under the last few feet of the airport flight path. You can see the passengers’ faces from the dance floor. If Zgy had to go, it was arguably the right place.