I’m doing Pikes Oct 12th if anyone is out then
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This is a really good article about Nico (and lost Ibiza) - a long one so save for when you have time
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Has anyone read the book that this is an extract from? Had it in my Amazon want list for a while but never got round to actually buying it
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yes, it’s vg. I had dinner with Helen and Ibiza historian Martin Davies a decade or so back. She was a lovely lady, passed about 4 years ago. Kris Needs and Helen were an item at that time. She had a lot on contacts in music industry and used to licence music books, including Clash titles to foreign publishers.
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I highly recommend Songs They Never Play On The Radio mentioned in this piece, one of the best books about bands ever written.
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Looking at a week in July 2026 with the family. Thank god for my Booking.com discount. Makes this far more reasonable…
Sorry kids, a week in Butlins it’s going to be…
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The game’s gone
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went 2023 & found a nice apartment for OK price
Looked this year early on ^ very little supply meaning massive prices
Has their been a crackdown
I think (hope) it’s probably a system glitch due to looking so far ahead.
Heading over for the annual Harvey pilgrimage in Sept, my solitary excursion into the cosmos this year. Am under no illusions… the island has had some diabolical press this summer, but I mainly see it as an excuse to catch up with pals I hardly ever see anymore.
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Folk Ibiza remembered…
A few words on a week 15 years ago that changed not just my life but my perceptions of music and Ibiza. I first wrote about it all in 2013, when bored out of my mind in a Sussex attic, I started work on a (now deleted) e-book about former interrailing adventures. Over the course of 10 months, it evolved into something else altogether as different farcical experiences across Spain all congealed into one story. Some people reading this may recall it all very differently, but it is as accurate as I can remember.
**
2009 had been a year of significant personal flux. I swapped Whitechapel for Brockley, acquired a car and immersed myself further and further into the East London maelstrom. There was a lot of strange ‘plant food’ doing the rounds, during the ‘great drought’. The Horse & Groom pub near Liverpool Street station had firmly established itself as a weekly meeting point for the local misfits, night owls and disco evangelists, a vibrant social nexus and promotional bazaar for weird and mystical music (or Tensnake). With social media at an embryonic stage, I was still spending a lot of time on forums and the dying embers of all those blogs with exotic names and pictures of Cerrone or Lynsey de Paul… Simon Spacerock, Donna Slut, Lovefingers, Cool In The Pool… each a trusted source of ruthless freeloading for a bulging iPod Shuffle.
Around this time, a promotional piece appeared in a blog called Balearic Mystique (potentially still cached somewhere in the ether…) posted by someone called ‘Justin’ who ran a bar in Manchester called the Folk Café. It seemed he was staging a festival in summer 2010 called FOLK IBIZA. It felt like a very different kettle of fish to all the other (garishly) advertised events on the island. For starters, there was mention of a party on a pirate ship. Without much hesitation, and arguably against better judgement, a ticket was purchased.
At some point in the following weeks, an envelope arrived second class containing a loose synopsis of the planned itinerary, featuring a colour photocopied map, a torn threaded wristband and a safety pin. I immediately detected a ‘loose’ approach to event organisation; something more akin to an anarchic ‘Treasure Hunt’. The cast of attendees was a who’s who from the balearosphere. Many of them were people I had only previously seen or heard mentioned in hushed, reverential terms or whose music had graced my mp3 player. In some cases, I had no idea where they were from or what they even looked like. There included people from The North, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Columbia Road, and a sprinkling of Ibiza-based expats.
Unlike the others, I was stopping off to see my family on the mainland first, having driven down from London. Passing through France, I felt a degree of excitement my cynically hardened 35-year-old self rarely experienced anymore. I booked the ferry, because the car was coming too. I booked a room at the Vara del Rey Guest Rooms too, which - in keeping with the anarchic spirit elsewhere - deployed a creaking pulley to get your bags up the stairs.
This post isn’t about Ibiza as such – I’ve covered the island itself in depth elsewhere – but the camaraderie that week. I met so many people with a connection to Lowlife or DJ History. I had a beer with my DJ friend Michael Cook at the much-missed Monkey Bar. Two other Lowlife veterans from London, Mark & Emily, were on board for the festie too, a couple I had ironically bumped into by sheer chance at Space two years earlier. Then there were lesser known yet still strangely familiar faces… Desi, Andy Allday, Balearic Mike, Mudd, Jan Hammered, Soft Rocks, Timm from Coyote, and local stalwarts Fred and Bekka, as well as another expat bod Ian Kennedy who somehow managed to enlist the singing services of a real life Gypsy King at the Putomayo Café.
Now… that week had moments of real mirth, particularly the carnival of camp at Ses Salines, the communal celestial sunset moments to La Isla Bonita, or someone from Horsemeat Disco bellyflopping in the sea. But nowhere I think epitomised the festive spirit quite like the party at the Putumayo. Words cannot express how joyous that evening was on the outskirts of Cala Gracio, where in my ‘animated’ state, I told a startled Kelvin in the toilets that the 1993 Sure is Pure remix of D:Ream I Like it was a ‘transcendental piece of music’. The Putomayo was a charming albeit discreet finca with a porch and outside terrace, run by a genial Dutchman who everyone adored (if not necessarily understood). At no point were our ‘passes’ validated or did anyone take charge. The much-hyped pirate ship appeared to be a phantom one. But such was the goodwill that everyone let it go.
I previously wrote this about the Putumayo night:
…It may have been the most laidback bar in the west but the proprietor had no wish to lose his licence and the Guardia Civil was not an institution anyone on the island ever wanted to cross. As night fell, the party continued inside. The windows rattled to the unmistakeable sound of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The room was small and sweaty, more motorhome than pleasuredome, but nobody seemed to mind too much […] At some point, I called it a night or maybe I called it a day? It might have been dawn or it might have been dusk. No doubt someone knew. I got a cab. Others chose more unorthodox routes. Some even ended up on the side of a country lane after a ‘borrowed’ van broke down. Road trip or Acid trip? Either way, it was quite a journey…
The week climaxed with a knees-up at Aura, a popular hang-out for local music heads. To this day, I can still hear the melodramatic Henrik Schwarz remix of Bill Withers “Who is he and what is he to you?” a tune that had us all grinning with glee. It was perhaps unfortunate that I should bungle my return ferry trip to Barcelona, unwisely mistaking 7pm for 7am on the ticket, but the initial panic subsided after managing to book another one. I suppose serendipity ensured I would not miss the grand finale. From such absurdities are legends born, and I felt such an affinity with everyone on that final night, destined forever to be the weird Spanish-speaking guy who brought a car to Ibiza only to fuck up his return journey - but that week, nothing really mattered.
I felt incredible sadness as people departed. Whilst there had been occasional moments of tension during the week, the energy was so happy and contagious. I had been around kindred spirits united in a celebration of good music in the cradle of where it all began. We had gained a tantalising glimpse into what the island could still offer, away from the trash and the billboards, and something inside me yearned for more. Deep down everyone sensed we would never experience anything as surreal as this again.
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Never been. Haze zero interest in ever going.
Oh god - the meow meow period A dark time for me 
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Me too - Didnt know *Simon Spacerock, but those & Keyboard Masher / Dream Chimney / Ripped in Glasgow
All burnt to CDrs now in the loft
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