Returning to the White Isle for Pacha’s 50th birthday, I was pretty much the same age as the walls around me. But there’s something about a hard drum beat at full volume over a finely tuned sound system, a bassline alive with menace and sex, and that terrible, sinful snare drum build coming crackling in with suppressed tension, ripping through roll after roll after roll after roll, getting higher and louder and faster and faster until it fills your ears with its inhuman crescendo and boom! Dear Lord, I was dancing.
What on earth was I doing? Trying to relive my youth on the dancefloor at the epicentre of Ibiza’s bohemian party culture? Was I overexcited? Was it time to go home? But then, as the crowd surged around me, I realised that Ibiza’s dancefloors are still truly democratic. It doesn’t matter what you look like, what your age is, whether you’re gay, straight, black, white – even a squid-headed alien – as long as you want to throw a few shapes rather than a whole lot of attitude.
Pacha is as good a place as any to try and understand the mystery of Ibiza, the third largest of the Balearics. Having previously run clubs on the Spanish mainland, the club’s founder, Richardo Urgell, moved to Ibiza in 1972, bought a deserted patch of land across the harbour from Ibiza Town and built the club in the style of an old local finca. “There wasn’t even a road,” Francisco Ferrer Arabi, Pacha’s brand ambassador laughs. Arabi was nine at the time and first went to Pacha for one of the kids’ discos put on for the locals during the winter. “Everybody thought he was crazy.”