Spirit of Ibiza ’89

We’re a big supporter at Faith of the great work that Dave Swindells produced in prose and images for Time Out over 3 decades. He’s due to release a book called ‘Spirit of Ibiza ’89′ in September, which features many images that helped to build the monster of an island that it is today.

Your photographs are iconic, what were your expectations of Ibiza and Amnesia before you visited the island, and what were they as you left?

Thanks, it’s great when some pictures are perceived as iconic, as that suggests they mean a lot to people.
I came to Ibiza with Alix Sharkey, who’d edited i-D magazine, and our brief from 20:20 magazine, (a sister publication to Time Out) was to find out what made this Mediterranean island so influential.

What did we expect? Well, most of what we knew about Ibiza had been told to me by DJ-promoters like Nicky Holloway and Paul Oakenfold, Trevor Fung, Danny Rampling and Johnny Walker, as well as by my brother Steve, (who hosted The Lift and Jungle clubs in the mid-‘80s), who’d visited the island twice, primarily for its gay nightlife. The reviews I’d heard had been uniformly positive, so I guess that we expected to find the thrills of Mediterranean beach holidays + ‘Balearic Beats’ + ecstasy that had got people over-excited.

But we also remembered that Wham had filmed the ‘Club Tropicana’ video around the pool at Pikes Hotel (which is one reason why we visited Pikes when we saw the mural on the roadside), and heaps of pop stars had partied at Ku and Pacha, so we expected to find a glam, ‘Euromillions’ side of the island too. Nicky Holloway had raved about chilling out at sunset outside the Café del Mar, so I expected that the beach there would be beautiful, which it wasn’t. And we knew that Ibiza was ‘polysexual’ long before the term was invented, which was another indication that Ibiza would be inclusive, that everybody and every type of music could come together…

Amnesia, and DJ Alfredo in particular, had been the catalyst which showed that music played in clubs didn’t have to be limited by particular genres.

As for our expectations after leaving the island, I’d have to go back and read the article Alix wrote, which was headlined: Ibiza Hell Out Of Me. I haven’t got the whole feature, but looking at the introductory paragraph tells its own story: ‘Alix Sharkey witnesses the horrors of an island paradise gone wrong, where being British is the passport to excess.’ That’s a lot harsher than I recall, actually, but I guess you could say it was prescient in the light of what came later: Ibiza Uncovered and the like. While we were on the island The Sun had a front-page story headlined ‘PERIL OF DRUG ISLE KIDS’ and ‘ECSTASY ISLAND’, which probably acted like a giant magnet, introducing Ibiza to a huge swathe of Britain who’d never previously heard of it. One thing was very clear: the British were going to come in much larger numbers.

The mix of people – races, sexuality and ages seem special to that period – did that inspire you as a photographer?

Definitely. I’d always loved events which attracted a real mixed crowd who were drawn together by the music that was played, but Ibiza’s big clubs were also very socially-driven too: the people who paid a premium to book the tables overlooking the dance floor at Pacha weren’t necessarily interested in cutting-edge dance music, they were (partly) there to see and be seen. And at Pacha, in particular, whole families came along, with parents and sometimes even grandparents all partying together.

British DJs and clubbers had often grown up within distinct, almost tribal sub cultures (soulboys, B-Boys, punks, Goths, etc), so in the mid-’80s Soho and central London were important partly because it was neutral ground for clubbers from across the city. Ibiza was much more than neutral, it was like a summer wonderland that revealed hitherto-unimagined possibilities.

Having said that, my brother Steve had run a club, The Lift (1983-5) that was predominantly gay yet which had the tagline ‘All human beings welcome’ because he wanted it to be truly mixed rather than another clone zone, so I was used to multiracial and ambisexual partying. Even so, it was obvious that in Ibiza gender and sexual preference made no damn difference at the door.

Where else did you photograph during that Ibiza trip?

I photographed at Pacha, Ku, Amnesia, Es Paradis (taking a mini-tripod with me so I could do long exposures with all those columns around the dance floor) and Café del Mar. And we also we went to La Salinas, ending up close by the Malibu beach bar, popped into Pikes Hotel, and I took photos around Ibiza Town too. One morning Alix, who spoke Spanish, befriended and interviewed a local policeman. I met him in Ibiza Town a couple of days when I came back from Ku at about 8am. He was just about to go on patrol around Sa Pena, a maze of alleys between the port and the castle in D’Alt Vila. He warned me never to wander up into Sa Pena without a policeman as I’d be robbed before I knew what had happened. So I bravely walked around there with a police escort, and took a nice photo of a guard dog. Sa Pena has many boutiques and bijou apartments now, but apparently it can still be a dodgy there.

Why do you think people still adore those pics all these years later?

That sounds like the cue for a song: ‘Good times, we all love good times. Leave your cares behind…’ That’s what people did on Ibiza, but it was so much more than a summer break in the sunshine. Ibiza was partying in Paradise, because almost everything that people desired was there (and if it wasn’t then, it is now, with yoga retreats, haute cuisine restaurants, superyachts, boutique hotels and more luxury than ever), but it also came with hearing new music with like-minded beautiful people (or just Londoners, LOL) under the stars and in the morning sunshine. And who doesn’t want to be reminded of heaven on earth? Inevitably when they were obliged to build roofs over the dance floors the atmosphere and style changed with it, so people look back fondly to the time when only a parachute stood between them and infinity…

Are there still elements of that Ibiza ‘89 style that are worth capturing in 2011?

The most important element is ‘freedom’. People believed that anything was possible on Ibiza. That the music could leap across genre-boundaries and not only still be exciting, but better than the sum of its parts; that one or two of the big clubs put MDMA powder in their cocktails; that parties could carry on round the clock for as long as people wanted to keep going; that it didn’t really matter whether you were rich or poor as long as you were into the music (though the rich could afford the best seats overlooking the dance floor); that there was always a secret cove or beautiful beach where you could create your own party… That has gone, as so many things (after-hours parties, the club parades through Ibiza Town, handing out flyers and so on) have been banned, and beach parties curtailed. It’s inevitable, with so many vested interests (including the superclubs which have to protect their huge investments), and island authorities which are keen to protect the lifestyles of the local Ibizencans and not ruining the delicate ecology of the island, that a lot of these changes have happened, and highly unlikely that they will be reversed.

Book Launches: Hotel Es Vive, Ibiza: 18th/19th September 2011
RED Gallery, London: 6th October 2011

‘Ecstasy Island’: Dave Swindells’ photos show Ibiza at the time when its music
and drug of choice inspired Britain’s biggest cultural phenomenon since punk.

However vibrant the club scenes in London, Berlin or Bucharest may be, during the summer season all eyes turn to Ibiza. It’s been like this for decades: Ibiza had pioneering venues like Pacha, Ku (now Privilege) and Amnesia which were superclubs 15 years before the term was commonly used in Britain, but in London in the mid-1980s most of us were barely aware of it. Unless you were gay or part of the jetset glitterati it’s unlikely that you’d have been familiar with what was developing on the island. Ku was already the world’s largest club venue, with a capacity of 7,000, but incredibly, in 1989 neither Ku nor Amnesia had roofs over their dance floors, so that the locals could barely sleep throughout the summer. At Amnesia only a silk parachute came between the dancers and mid-night electric storms, or the morning sun…

‘Spirit of Ibiza ’89’ documents Ibiza in the summer of 1989, when Ku and Amnesia were still open-air parties, when Pacha was less than half the size it is now, and when a new wave of British clubbers and club ‘workers’ joined the locals going to Café del Mar in San Antonio to watch the sun setting into the sea.
Spirit of Ibiza ’89 is a homage to this special time in the development of Ibiza, and to the impact and influence that Ibiza had in the UK, where the combination of ‘Balearic Beats’, acid house and ecstasy helped to inspire a huge cultural shift during the so-called ‘summers of love’ of 1988 and 1989.

Dave Swindells took many of the defining images of these rapidly-changing scenes, by concentrating his lens on the people whose lives were being changed by the music, the clubs and the drugs, as well as those, like Danny Rampling or Boy George, who were proactively spreading underground dance culture.

Swindells had been the Nightlife Editor at London’s Time Out for three years, so he knew all the principal DJs and many clubbers too. He’d photographed London’s nightlife since 1984 for i-D and Time Out, so he and writer Alix Sharkey were commissioned by 20:20 magazine (a sister publication to Time Out) to report on what was special about this small Spanish island which had so profoundly influenced music and clubs in the UK.

In the spring of 2011 Swindells teamed up with Ernesto Leal and Lisa Loud – herself one of the original Ibiza club kids who went on to become a world-renowned DJ – of the Our History project* (www.culthist.com) to produce an exhibition of these photographs at The Printspace on Kingsland Road in London (www.theprintspace.co.uk). The intention was always to take the photos back to Ibiza, back to the scene of that special time, as it were, with an exhibition of these photos featuring as part of the International Music Summit in Ibiza Town in May. Throughout the summer these photos are being shown at the beautiful Hotel Es Vive in Playa d’en Bossa, Ibiza. (www.hotelesvive.com)

This exhibition inspired the book you hold in your hands. From hundreds of slides taken during a hectic week in June 1989 Swindells and book designer Jason Kedgley selected images which showed that often (but by no means always) the British dressed down and looked distinctly different to their sartorially-sophisticated cosmopolitan counterparts on Ibiza. But these Brits were so full of enthusiasm, energy, euphoria (and other words beginning with an E) that Ibizan club promoters wanted them on the dance floors anyway.

It also shows that in 1989 Ibiza was still very different to London. The clubs were far bigger and more extravagant than London venues yet still retained a Spanish core, before the hordes of British, German and Italian clubbers invaded the island. It was also long before programmes like Ibiza Uncovered or Balearic Babes, long before Radio 1 began broadcasting from the Café del Mar, long before Ryanair and Easyjet made flying as cheap as chips and the internet made everything everywhere the same, accessible to everyone at the same moment.

As the introduction to the book suggests, though, in spite of the homogenisation of youth culture which has intensified since the World Wide Web captured us all in its silky threads, Ibiza in 2011 is not an entirely different world to that shown in the book. Some of the fashionable ‘looks’ seen in ‘Spirit of Ibiza ’89’ would fit in perfectly on a hot night outside Café del Mar (or Dalston Superstore) in 2011. The style and devil-may-care exuberance of open-air clubbing in ’89 was born again when DC10, the Ibizan club next to the airport, came to fame after 2002.

We’re proud of the high production values which have gone into the printing of this book, but nonetheless book purchasers will also receive a free digital version of the book – just the thing for your iPad, Kindle, or laptop!

For further information please contact
Ernesto Leal This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it & Juan Leal at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Dave Swindells This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

*{ourhistory} uses archival material and multimedia exhibitions to map and display the often uncharted history and achievements of people working within the creative media, with particular emphasis on the dynamic evolution of the nightlife scene

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