Читать книгу Shadows Across The Moon - Helen Donlon - Страница 9
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 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 adjectives such as vain, aimless, violent, greedy, shallow, charlatan.
Feelings towards the island by foreigners who have lived there can swing to great extremes, but one thing everybody agrees on is that beneath the human element the island itself has a unique energy. Vibe, if you prefer. Visitors with their antennae primed can sense it very quickly under the touristic veneer that foreign tabloid newspapers have never quite been tempted to pierce. Ibiza has been ‘ruled’ many times throughout its checkered history, but the essence of the island’s resilient and alluring character has always remained. Some historians claim that reports of this unique ‘energy’ stretch as far back as Homer. Many people still believe that it was the mysterious and commanding rock of Es Vedrà which lies off the south coast at Cala d’Hort opposite the enigmatic Atlantis Beach which was being described by Ulysses in The Odyssey when he reported,
“I had hardly finished telling everything to the men before we reached the island of the two Sirens, for the wind had been very favourable. Then all of a sudden it fell dead calm; there was not a breath of wind nor a ripple upon the water, so the men furled the sails and stowed them; then taking to their oars they whitened the water with the foam they raised in rowing. Meanwhile I took a large wheel of wax and cut it up small with my sword. Then I kneaded the wax in my strong hands till it became soft, which it soon did between the kneading and the rays of the sun-god son of Hyperion. Then I stopped the ears of all my men, and they bound me hands and feet to the mast as I stood upright on the cross piece; but they went on rowing themselves. When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate, the Sirens saw that we were getting close in shore and began with their singing.” (Homer’s Odyssey, circa 800 BC).
Woven endlessly into repeated stories of the island’s power, the Es Vedrà connection here is a stunning and fabulous myth. In both senses apparently, since according to Martin Davies, a local historian whose company Barbary Press has published several beautifully designed and well-researched books about the island, it is just that – a myth. “We don’t really know a lot about the Sirens, but that rock was probably in the straits of Messina,” he says. “That’s one of the points in the Ulysses story which most experts agree about. It would be between Sicily and the toe of Italy, so in fact Es Vedrà has nothing to do with the Odyssey!”
In any case, the myth has always been a popular one. One night during London’s Swinging Sixties the guitarist Eric Clapton (who would play at the Plaza de Toros in Ibiza Town in 1977) ran into underground artist, film-maker and illustrator Martin Sharp at London’s Speakeasy club. Just back himself from a trip to Ibiza, Sharp had written a poem that was inspired by both Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and the Es Vedrà legend of the Homer sirens, and he gave it to Clapton to turn into a song. ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ was to appear on Cream’s album, Disraeli Gears, for which Sharp also designed the psychedelic cover image.
Es Vedrà has basically always remained free of human habitation, with the notable exception of the Catalan friar Francisco Palau. “Ibiza, that beautiful, rich and fertile possession of Spain,” he wrote in the 1860s, after having been arrested and exiled to the island by a group of mercurial Spanish Carmelites. Palau then spent six years in deep and gratifying solitude and prayer, living the life of a hermit on the imposing rock that would later appear on the cover of British musician Mike Oldfield’s 1996 album, Voyager. Other than Palau though, Es Vedrà’s only long-term inhabitants have been the wild goats, and a colony of the endangered Eleanora's falcons.
Many musicians and artists have been drawn to return again and again to the island whose golden light is also continually remarked upon. Ibiza light is noticeably different from that further across the sea in Sicily, for example. Ibiza is affected by more shadows, as a result of the many low hills that are spread around the landscape. Clean winds blow away most traces of pollution, and the rich sunset is enhanced by its advantageous position in the Mediterranean.
The remarkable artists Hipgnosis (who designed dozens of commanding album sleeves for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and others) started to bring this light into their work a long time ago. Aubrey Powell, one of the founder partners of Hipgnosis has had a house in Formentera, Ibiza’s small neighbouring island, for many years. He told me, “The light here in Formentera was very influential for me in terms of what we did with Hipgnosis. It was something I saw very early on; the particular vistas and landscapes that you get here which are very Dalíesque. You could see why Dalí painted in Cadaqués because it has the same kind of vibe, and that incredible light that you get is very like what you see in Hipgnosis works, those particular types of landscape. Take Elegy for The Nice with the desert and the beautiful sky, or the diver on the back of the Pink Floyd album cover Wish You Were Here, the still water with this incredible blue sky. Hipgnosis were very into landscapes, it would give the impression of an atmosphere as it happened. For me as the main photographer for Hipgnosis I was definitely influenced by what I saw here.”
Once upon a time, archaeologists and historians claim, Ibiza was inhabited only by bats (in terms of resident mammals). In 1994, the bones of sheep and goats, dug up at Es Pouàs near Santa Agnès revealed that the island would later have been inhabited by a Neolithic group who had made their way across the sea from the Spanish mainland. Further remains of horseshoe-shaped houses were also found at Cap de Barbaria over in Formentera.
The Greeks passed through and took note of Ibiza in the 9th century BC, but it was the Phoenicians of the Levant, the masters and commanders of the Mediterranean sea, who are traditionally recognised as the first settlers to establish a culture on the island. These maritime sovereigns (who were originally based on the coast of today’s Lebanon and Syria and became known as the Carthaginians after the founding of Carthage) were drawn to the Balearic Islands, and perhaps especially the tiny Ibiza, as it provided for them a very handy recess between the active port of Sardinia and the Spanish mainland. They arrived on the island around 650 BC, and brought the first alphabet that was used in Ibiza with them.
The first Phoenician settlement has long been believed to be at Sa Caleta, on the south coast. The site is still marked there today. However, local historian Martin Davies points out that this has now gone up for debate, as archaeologists have recently claimed that it wouldn’t have made sense to have ignored such a beautiful and strategic bay as the main one in Ibiza Town in favour of Sa Caleta. “All these things depend on what they find, a ceramic fragment or whatever,” Davies says, “and one newly found object can change the whole picture. The archaeology of the island is a constantly updated field.”
Several hundred Phoenicians congregated at Sa Caleta nonetheless, and they are believed to have survived thanks to their advanced hunting and fishing methods. They had brought with them their hunting dogs, whose probable descendant is the Ca Eivissenc (the native Ibiza Hound) or Podenco. To this day Podencos are the most noble and independent-minded of any dog you can see on the island. They can easily roam for over 20 miles in one stretch, and are often spotted in the countryside at night, fearlessly roaming for hours in search of prey as they trot like confident racehorses down the middle of the country roads, unperturbed by traffic.
The Phoenicians named this tiny island Ybšm and the generally received wisdom is that the name comes from Bes, the Egyptian god of home protection, music, dance and sexual pleasure; although a few linguists argue that their word for balsam, perhaps referring to the scent of the pines, is the true source. After all the Greeks named Ibiza and Formentera the ‘Pityûssae’, islands of the pines. Phoenician coins did feature an image of Bes though: a bearded elfin god with a huge phallus. Ybšm was a great hideaway and warehouse even then. Sailors could store goods picked up on their travels on the island, where there was less chance of theft than there was on the Spanish mainland.
So it was that Ibiza developed its significant early role as a sanctuary, and by the time the Phoenicians had settled in it became one of the major ports in the Western Mediterranean. This era saw the introduction of viniculture to the island; a pioneering Phoenician development that to some extent inspired both the Greeks and Romans in their wine-making techniques. Wine was transported and stored in the huge rounded earthenware amphoras that to this day are a celebrated artefact of the island. During the Phoenician era Ibiza’s wondrous salt pans were also focused on, and they began to form a major part of the island’s economy, as did the mining of silver and lead, and the growth of arable farming.
One of the most magnificently unspoilt areas on Ibiza’s west coast is the now almost inaccessible crumbling promontory of Punta Galera, where at dusk the light causes the Cadaqués-like rock strata to resemble animals crouching towards the sea. It is easy to imagine that even in the time of the Phoenicians this stunning sunset would have been hard to miss. Franco-Swiss filmmaker Barbet Schroeder shot a good part of More, his dark 1969 film about listlessness and addiction, at his mother Ursula’s house at Punta Galera. His cinematographer, Néstor Almendros, captured the unique golden evening light in the scenes where the protagonists, a young couple toying with love but possessed by impending heroin dependence, bask in a timeless halcyon tranquility on the ancient rocks, against a soundtrack written especially for the film by Pink Floyd.
The pagan Phoenicians were sun and moon worshippers. Their goddess was Tanit (partner of Baal), and her energy is still said to guard but endlessly challenge the fiercely independent women who have always been drawn to live on the island. Tanit represents dance, fertility and death. Archaeological findings seem to suggest that both Bes and Tanit were being worshipped on the island by 700 BC. Their legacies certainly live on today, not just on the dance floors of the clubs, but through the island’s full moon and beach parties, and in places like Moon Beach in the north and the Sunset Ashram at Platges de Comte, or anywhere people stop to observe the sun come down on the horizon of the Mediterranean, a moment which in Ibiza heralds the coming excitements of the evening.
“An island of barbarians” is the now famous description of Ibiza cast circa 60 BC by Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. Some would say nothing has changed. He also described the men of the Balearic islands as, “of all men the most fond of women, and value them so highly above everything else that, when any of their women are seized by visiting pirates and carried off, they will give as ransom for a single woman three and even four men.” Throughout Ibiza’s eventful history, pirates and barbarians of various origin are a common thread in the narrative. But however violent the pillaging and destruction, either on land or sea, it has always come in human form, since another of the island’s great charms is that, due to the specifics of the soil and an awful lot of good luck, there have never been any poisonous reptiles in Ibiza. Or at least not until recently…for since early 2003 snakes have suddenly been reported as creeping in at various countryside locations, and this recent and quite anti-Ibicencan phenomenon is blamed on the importation of non-indigenous olive trees.
In The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 1830-31, Volume 1 it was reported that “the peculiar boast of the natives is, that no venomous reptile can live in Formentera, whether from the presence of the semper-virens, one of the snake-roots of antiquity, or that their earth has the quality of destroying serpents, as Pliny records that of Ebusus [Ibiza’s Roman name] to have done.” Pliny the Elder had indeed earlier stated, “There are various other kinds of earth, endowed with peculiar properties of their own…The earth of the Balearic Islands and of Ebusus kills serpents.” This has led historians to all basically concur that the presence of snakes today is absolutely recent.
The licentious dwarf god Bes was claimed by believers to be the defender of the land against snakes. Just to the south of today’s Ibiza Town there still lies the ancient Phoenician necropolis of Puig des Molins, which is said to have contained over 3,000 tombs. Some journalists have tried to assert that the Phoenicians would never have buried their dead in a place which had poisonous serpents, and that this is the reason for the existence of the renowned burial site, but the fact that millions of burials took place all over the Mediterranean – including Phoenicia itself, would disprove this. Some also claim that it was believed that burial in Ibiza’s earth would speed the journey on to the afterlife, and that rich people often paid well in advance to ensure a place for themselves or their relatives in the necropolis.
In his fascinating counter-cultural memoir, Bore Hole, the English author Joe Mellen recalled of his time on Ibiza in the 1960s that, “access to the tombs was only by one hole in the mountain where the caretaker sat in front of the gate. I went down once and remember the total darkness when the caretaker switched off the electric light, pitch black darkness. With the lights on I could see a few skeletons in open tombs, carved like chests out of the rock, and a maze of passages that extended far beyond the light’s penetration. It was an eerie experience.”
For anyone interested in taking a close look at some of the archaeological remains and other ancient heritage sites available to see in Ibiza, there are many well-preserved locations dotted all over the island, indicated by clearly marked pink signposts along the main roads. Apart from the fabulous museum up behind the medieval walls in Dalt Vila (the old ‘high town’, which in 1999 became a UNESCO protected site) and the necropolis of Puig des Molins in Ibiza Town, there are remains of the Phoenician settlements at Sa Caleta, sites at Ses Païsses near Cala d’Hort and Es Pouàs near Santa Agnès, the remains of Roman aqueducts at S’Argamassa on the east coast, and the goddess Tanit’s sacred sanctuary at Cova des Culleram in the north of the island. High up on a steep and winding hill path a long drive from the village of Sant Vicent, Cova des Culleram is still treated as a shrine, and is adorned with all sorts of trinkets and hope-filled messages to the goddess.
The Roman general Scipio came by in 217 BC, and he looted the island for three days, before sailing off with the spoils. When Carthage fell in 146 BC, Ibiza had a period of independence, before falling under full Roman suzerainty, and for roughly the next two hundred years, the island had a shared Roman/Carthaginian identity, which included a growing bilingualism. The island’s currency now bore Roman figures on one side, and Carthaginian gods Bes and Eshmum remained on the other side. The Romans, who introduced slave labour as well as setting up olive presses and fish farms, eventually came to accept the island’s love of Bes, and talismans bearing his likeness were soon being created.
Gradually though, all other traces of the Punic era were wiped out: Ybšm was renamed Ebusus, and Eshmun’s temple in Dalt Vila was now to be dedicated to Mercury, the great god of commerce. It was Ibiza’s first temple of Mammon. As if on cue, things now took a turn for the worse. The Romans distractedly slipped away to concentrate on developing North Africa, taking the slaves with them. For the next half millennium not much evolved on the island, although the disruptive Vandals arrived for an 80 year stay in 455 AD. Then the Byzantines conquered Carthage in 533, before also taking control of the Balearics in 535.
Other tribes who have come, seen, conquered…and danced include the Moors, the Catalans, and large gangs of North African pirates. The Moors resuscitated island life when they took calm control in the 10th century. Renaming Ebusus Yebisah, they brought in the Arabic language, and Islam.
It is probable that the greatest influences on traditional Ibicenco music come from the Moors. The vocal style is haunting and often melancholic. Despite centuries of Christianity and multiple outside influences it is still possible to witness traditional performances out in the countryside on village fiesta days, sometimes with a female balladeer whose back will be turned to the audience as she incants some tragic tale. Men create and perform on wind and percussion instruments, including drums, flutes and castanets, and the traditional costumes usually worn are elaborate and beautifully crafted, a skill that is still lovingly passed down from one generation to the next.
And here Bes comes back into the picture again. Bes is strikingly similar to the Greek goat-god Pan or his North African equivalent, the Moroccan Bou Jeloud, and has even been linked by historians to the Christian Satan. It’s worth taking a short diversion here, simply to illustrate some close similarities between traditional music rituals in North Africa and the latter day outdoor trance party scene in rural locations in Ibiza.
To this day Sufi trance rites are still performed annually in the village of Joujouka in Morocco’s Rif mountains, in a celebration that resembles the Roman Lupercalia or Pan Rites. For centuries these traditions had disappeared into obscurity until interest in the rites was regenerated in the West by British artist, writer and sometime Moroccan resident Brion Gysin. In the Moroccan rites, villagers gather to put on elaborate trance rituals in an attempt to summon Bou Jeloud (the Pan/Bes figure), accompanied by the Master Musicians of Joujouka. This is a group of Berber Sufi trance musicians who, despite performing centuries-old traditional rhythms, have famously collaborated with latter-day western artists such as Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, free jazz composer Ornette Coleman and singer Robert Plant.
According to legend, Bou Jeloud had made a Faustian pact with a young shepherd by the name of Attar. He would teach him the secrets of music if Attar promised he would keep the secrets safe. If he did, Bou Jeloud’s own reward for this gift of music would be to take his choice of bride from the village. Attar failed to keep the secret however, and as a consequence Bou Jeloud was offered Aïsha Kandisha – a goddess who resembled Astarte, and in some ways Tanit, who is claimed to have danced him to exhaustion, driving him insane and hence away from the village all alone, leaving the villagers to a bounteous harvest. This ritual event is still re-enacted annually in an ecstatic trance dance ritual that symbolises a blessing for the coming harvest, while the Joujouka musicians perform their accompanying soundtrack to the rites.
British artist and exile Genesis P-Orridge called the Joujouka music “as profound and spiralling as DNA. This is the raw genetic material of all sacred music.” Timothy Leary said, “Here is religious intoxication which pre-dates the Vedic soma-psychedelic scholars, ten thousand generations older than Buddha and Christ. Oldest blood-seed ritual. Fierce, unstoppable unity dance of life, ancient, pre-human mutational congregation, fertility worship, source of totem, shameful seed of evolution.” In the 1950s, The Master Musicians would perform to an international crowd in Brion Gysin’s 1001 Nights café in the International Zone in Tangier, the area known as the Interzone in William Burroughs’ work. "We need more diabolic music everywhere" Burroughs himself declared after hearing them. Timothy Leary proclaimed the Master Musicians to be "a 4,000-year-old rock ’n' roll band”.
The intrinsic value of the Bou Jeloud rites is to create a healing trance setting. That healing element of trance rituals still continues on in Ibiza through a combined lineage descended partly from the Moors, and partly via the ‘freaks’ who started making their way from Europe and the US to Goa, the Portuguese fishing colony on the coast of India, back in the 1960s. By the 1990s, that Goa freak community had expanded, taking in new generations who pioneered the modern electronic version of psychedelic trance party culture.
Today, there is a whole community who have grown up on the Goa-Ibiza trail. Their Ibiza rituals are less about pipes and flutes, as they were with the Moors, since the drum is now more usually the basic instrument for outdoor parties on the island. Tribal drumming at sunset can still be witnessed, for example, on Sundays at Benirràs (itself an Arabic name given by the Moors), a beach on Ibiza’s northern coast, and is another example of this kind of outdoor ritual. The psychedelic trance parties in remoter parts of the island is yet another.
Drummers at Benirràs gather from all corners of Ibiza and perform together in a climax of rhythm as the sun sets. It’s not unusual for small groups of drummers to appear in the island’s bars and superclubs from time to time as well. However in very recent years, i.e. since about 2008, the presence of drumming communities has started to be less prevalent on the island, as times have changed and the hippie community which celebrated the ancient traditions has begun for the first time to go more underground, or even to move on.
The Moors famously boosted the agricultural economy of Ibiza with their superior irrigation systems. But they couldn’t resist using the island as a renegade base from which to storm the Christians of Catalonia, Pisa and Tuscany, which coups de main saw Ibiza pillaged in 1114 by a Papal-sanctioned Catalan and Pisan naval incursion. Moorish domination nonetheless prevailed through several dynasties, during which time they laid the grounds for some incredible musical styles and traditions (especially when accompanied by natural mind-altering substances such as marijuana). The traditions were extensive and contemporary Ibiza clubbing practices are in many ways just a 21st century translation embracing many of the ritual aspects of that culture.
These days Ibiza is a part of the autonomous Balearic Islands community of Spain, and is officially called by its Catalan name, Eivissa. The Catalans (actually Catalan-Aragonese) first arrived in 1235 and ended the Moorish age of Yebisah, launching a beautiful period in the island’s history which saw a new ‘freedom charter’ exempting its citizens from military service, granting free legal aid and a provision for islanders to retain all profits from the sales of salt. Agricultural workers from mainland Spain were encouraged over to help with farming, and in return they were offered a house and some land of their own. Now the official language was Catalan, and the official church Catholic.
Bubonic plague has swept the island twice. The first outbreak is thought to have occurred in 1348, and the second in 1652. This latter extended assault on the island’s health saw the port declared a contamination zone and marked as highly unsafe, which basically closed down maritime activity. The pall cast by this grimly dark and dispiriting epoch provoked a destructive famine which is alleged to have taken the lives of one in six of the islanders.
But the one gung-ho archetype to have been a consistent presence throughout the island’s history (and even unto this day) is that of the pirate, or corsair. The Catalans even sportingly authorised local corsair activity, as they could see it was a great way to make money and, to a certain extent, this ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach was even a reasonable response to the permanent inevitability of piracy in the Western Mediterranean.
‘Privateer’ was the preferred nomenclature in this era of pro-active island defence. Even in 1356, one Pere Bernat, a notorious Ibicenco corsair had been issued the state’s full authority to defend the island from marauding Moorish ships. State-sanctioned Ibicenco privateers were furthermore eventually entitled to an excellent 80% of all booty captured, while the crown was only asking for their 20% commission. By the 17th century, the Ibicenco corsairs had become widely notorious and feared in the western Mediterranean, not just claiming vast quantities of stolen goods, but also gaining a heroic reputation for recapturing slaves that had been taken by the Moors. In 1806 Ibicenco privateer Antoni Riquer Arabí captured the Felicity, an English sailboat which was helmed by the infamous, bloodthirsty privateer Michele Novelli, alias ‘The Pope’. Arabí’s boat El Vives, and his fearless retinue are still celebrated in local lore.
The capital, Ibiza Town had at one point in the 16th century been wasted by Turkish marauders, and conical watchtowers were later built along the coast and inland. Many of these still survive today. The Castilians came to claim the island in 1715, and quickly renamed it from Eivissa to Ibiza, imposing Castilian Spanish as the official language, and renaming the various island districts to Castilian versions of their names. They also started to set up local town halls, flogged off the salt pans, built more churches and installed the island’s first Catholic bishop. On the whole, historians tend to agree that the island would now enter a long and maudlin period of cultural depression.
Ibiza only began to recover its colour towards the end of the 19th century, when the first settling travellers were to arrive by way of the new ferry services to and from the mainland. The initial bohemian travellers of the early 1930s, including characters such as the artist and Dadaist photographer Raoul Hausmann, were joined by other artists and writers escaping the spread of dark political clouds such as the nascent fascism movement that were spreading across Europe. These escapees represented in many ways Ibiza’s first proto-hippies.
Not that this would lead to mass tourism just yet, since by 1936 the bloody Spanish Civil War had broken out and the lives of Ibicenco families would be affected in ways which are still too painful for most locals to talk about today. A nightmare bloodbath ensued as the island saw itself align with forces on two opposing sides – Nationalist and Republican. Island cafés were marked as designated hotspots and news centres for one group or the other. Massive bloody barbarities were executed by both sides. The most brutal single act of horror was carried out by the Catalan Anarchists, who had briefly gained island control after hoisting the Francoist Nationalist forces. The Anarchists murdered more than 100 Nationalist inmates who were locked inside a holding enclosure in the castle in Dalt Vila. When the Nationalists hit back, they scoured the countryside for Republicans and tortured, executed or imprisoned them (many subsequently died from starvation) in a specially constructed concentration camp at La Savina in Formentera. The smoke from the Civil War fires still leaves a subliminal trail around the island, and for several families many hatchets remain unburied to this day.
Christian holy days eventually replaced the traditional pagan festivals that had long been in place. The annual summer solstice Nit de Sant Joan in the north of the island is a great example of an old pagan festival that is now being held in the name of a Christian saint, while keeping the old customs and rites alive. The festival is open to people of all ages, and until recently still included a late night trance party which took place right outside the town hall in the centre of the village of Sant Joan. The highlight of the whole event though is jumping over the bonfires which are lit at midnight in a field close to the village. Locals leap over each of the fires in quick succession, avoiding the flames and supposedly burning off negative feelings and making wishes as the jumps are made. Another similar solstice tradition is to write down your hopes and dreams on small pieces of paper before ripping them up and burning them, one by one.
Much is made of courting rituals, traditional and modern, in Ibiza. Often described as an island that is good for flings but unsophisticated in the ways of love, clubland’s generally short-term flirtations come from a long tradition that cherishes outlandish coquetry above subtle and steady entreaties. Gifted British linguist and translator John Ernest Crawford Flitch grasped this when he witnessed some heated scenes in the church of Santa Eulària, and he reported in his 1911 book, Mediterranean Moods, how “The fire was no mere feu de joie but a deadly encounter; not a smile that was merely flippant or trivial or coquettish, but regards that were grave, as all ardour is grave. Then I knew that Mass may have other uses than that of devotion. One breathed something more intoxicating than the smoke of incense. The air was also heavy with the smoke of passion…life burning at the fever-point. Certainly the chief business of Santa Eulalia is loving.” Later, after observing youths dancing and making music on their pipes at the sea’s edge he observed that, “courtship in Ibiza is a delicate and dangerous negotiation. The girl is not hasty to attach herself to a single lover. Why should she be when she has the hearts of half a dozen suitors and more to play with? But the game is full of dangers and it requires a firm and adroit hand to play it without disaster.”
German philosopher (and translator of Proust and Baudelaire) Walter Benjamin spent many happy times in Ibiza in the early 1930s. He and his friend Jean Selz, who claimed to be the “only Frenchman on the entire island”, were just two of the visitors who came to Ibiza and reported in their writings what life was really like back then. This era in the island’s history is often nostalgically evoked by older residents, as it represented an era of beautifully unpretentious and calm bucolic living in a tiny and still untrumpeted community. The few visitors that were on the island all seemed to recall spending their days swimming, hill walking, meditating and reading in blissful solitude, and all against a backdrop of great natural beauty.
Benjamin lived in an old house in Sant Antoni but would frequent the Migjorn bar which, like the Hotel Montesol (originally the Gran Hotel) on the town’s central avenue, Vara de Rey, first opened its doors in 1933 and soon became a social hub for the few foreigners in the community. As is so often the case, the freedom of spirit afforded by the unspoilt and calm natural beauty of the island’s daily life would translate even back then into scenes of dissolution on the Mediterranean bar terraces. One night Benjamin, who was usually a picture of temperance (although he had famously smoked hashish in 1927 in Berlin), proceeded to get catastrophically drunk after knocking back some 148% proof gin in the Migjorn bar, whereupon he collapsed on the sidewalk, before insisting on walking the 15 kilometres back home to Sant Antoni. Benjamin and Selz also sat smoking opium one night above the port in Dalt Vila. A brilliant critic and noted philosopher, Walter Benjamin took his own life at Port Bou in 1940, rather than be held captive by Nazis.
When France’s Socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated by the outlaw Raoul Villain, and mobilisation for what became World War I was declared in France three days later, it was to Ibiza that the runaway executioner eventually fled. The curiously-named Villain knew of the island’s reputation as a safe place for a stowaway, and with the help of artist Paul Gauguin’s grandson, he built himself a house in the then remote Cala de Sant Vicent, in the far north. Hoping to spend the rest of his days in peaceful obscurity, Villain’s luck changed rapidly when he was apprehended during the Civil War by Republican troops who found his behaviour odd, and suspected he might be a Fascist. He was convinced the soldiers were looting his precious worldly goods and had tried to defend his home, rather than taking to hiding as his neighbours had strongly advised but his verbal protests backfired horribly, and Villain was shot dead on the beach. It took him two long painful days to die, mainly because the troops had issued a severe warning to the neighbours not to help him in any way, but once he was seen to be dead, the ever hospitable Ibicencos buried him, with a French flag.
Ibiza’s evolution from a melancholic hinterland doused in the malingering murk spilled during the Civil War into a dazzling and seductive tourist zone, took a matter of only a few years once building started. The bohemian travellers, most of them artists or outlaws (and often both) had started to congregate in the island bars and take up residence in apartments around Ibiza Town, Dalt Vila and Figueretes, or in countryside fincas. At the time these were all very cheap to rent by European standards, particularly once you factored in the gloriously warm, sunny, natural and stress-free environment that was a crucial part of the package. Aside from the Migjorn and the Montesol, other bars were opening around the port, including Clive’s, run by the enigmatic charmer Clive Crocker, and the Domino bar which had become a base for the beatniks, jazz lovers and black marketeers. Then there was the Bar Alhambra next to the Montesol on Ibiza Town’s Vara de Rey, and behind the medieval walls in Ibiza’s old town, stood the Hotel El Corsario (‘the pirate’).
El Corsario was opened by one Emil Schillinger. Already the proprietor of the well known port side hostel, El Delfín Verde, Schillinger was a former Nazi who had gained social respectability on the island after sheltering the Jewish refugee art dealer Ernesto Ehrenfeld. This is an example of the island’s tacit code of immunity, which many similar stories would back up. As a further example, at the end of the Algerian war, the island took many exiles of the OAS, the country’s dissident secret army, into its bosom without any fuss.
El Corsario soon became a lively meeting place and social club for the so-called Grupo Ibiza ’59, a posse of artists including such luminaries as Erwin Bechtold and Egon Neubauer, as well as architects such as Josep Lluis Sert (who worked closely with Le Corbusier) and Erwin Broner. Errol Flynn would often stay at El Corsario, and across the early years of Ibiza’s reign as a celebrity island other paparazzi-friendly names including Aristotle Onassis, Grace Kelly, Romy Schneider, Dean Acheson, Maximilian Schell, Walter Gropius, Prince Rainier of Monaco, members of Pink Floyd and many more would add colour to the hotel’s lively and comfortable rooms. Then the proto-nightclub La Cueva de Alex Babá was opened in the mid-60s by Alejandro Vallejo-Nágera, a local man who was considered by many to be the first real Ibiza hippie. Cannabis and opium were now being consumed on the island, as was LSD. In fact many of the very first reports of successful (and otherwise) LSD trip tales anywhere were reported as happening in Ibiza.
The Irish writer and broadcaster Damien Enright lived in Ibiza and Formentera in the early 1960s, until his dreams of paradise were shattered when the woman he loved took off with someone else behind his back, and his once idyllic life came disastrously undone due to his being undermined by fair weather friends. He eventually got enthusiastically but naively embroiled in a high risk international drug running gamble which went chaotically wrong for him, and later wrote a memoir which captures both of the famous Ibiza extremes – the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. In the memoir, Dope in The Age of Innocence, he lovingly describes the Ibiza Town port side bar scene, and the exuberance and near religious fervour of the jazz lovers of his circle. That circle included Bill Hesse, the American saxophonist who would stand by the sea at the edge of Formentera and blow his saxophone passionately into the night winds, completely naked, and who, according to Enright, “had taken acid. As he put it, he had seen the man, he had seen the light. Bill lived for music. When I came back from London and told him I’d bought Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, he got up next day at dawn and crossed on the boat to Ibiza to hear it at the Domino bar. He passed by our house that evening, to tell me about it. There were almost tears in his eyes.”
The Domino bar, whose owners had a vinyl collection that included the works of Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and all the jazz greats, would close at 2 a.m. Drunks would then roam meaninglessly around the port side, or sleep it off on the pavements outside the bar, or perhaps, fired by amphetamines, sit and talk till dawn as the fishing ships came in. These hours, roughly between 2 a.m. and 9 a.m., are locally known as la madrugada – the morning hours that in fact comprise the late partying hours of the day before – a phrase still used in Ibiza clubland today.
In 1963 there were still only about 37,000 inhabitants on the island, and it is estimated that even by 1965 there were only a hundred or so acknowledged foreign resident faces seen around town. Everyone knew each other, so they said, and certainly those hanging out around Dalt Vila and the port would have. On the other side of the island meanwhile, the town of Sant Antoni was slowly evolving from a quiet fishing village into a tourist area with specially built hotels to cater for the new European tastes and expectations. Aided by its stunning sunset position, and the remarkable beauty of the surrounding area, Sant Antoni’s development was the result of Franco’s main tourist drive in Ibiza, which also included the installation of a bullring (a concept totally alien to Catalan thinking) – and that bullring has in fact gone down in history as one of the first great rock ’n’ roll arenas on the island. Bob Marley played there, as did Thin Lizzy and Eric Clapton.
The French-Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus remarked about the scene in the harbour cafes in the mid-1930s, where he’d sit and write, or watch the world go by, “Towards five in the evening the young people would stroll back and forth along the full length of the mole; this is where marriages and the whole of life are arranged. One cannot help thinking there is a certain grandeur in beginning one’s life this way, with the whole world looking on.” The highly acclaimed British travel writer, Norman Lewis, spent time in Ibiza in the 1950s, and later wrote, “According to local gossip, in which I was soon included, the peasant women (although not the fisherfolk, who were more honourable in such matters) disposed of unwanted husbands by poisoning or other methods. A local beauty who ran a bar a few miles away was said to have got rid of hers by throwing a stick of dynamite down the well in which the man was at work.”
With its very mixed up international tribal history, the native islanders’ tolerance of outsiders and visitors couldn’t help but evolve rapidly and considerably over time. New groups of individual international settlers were accepted, and the peluts were eventually as integrated as the earlier beatnik, artist, traveller, dropout or experimental cosmonaut.
The British actor Terry Thomas, renowned for his upper class bounder character parts in dozens of films and television programmes made between 1933 and the mid-1970s, was coaxed into moving to Ibiza in 1967 by fellow thespian Denholm Elliott. Thomas built his own house high up in the hills above Sant Carles, on the east of the island, and the house is still run by his son and daughter-in-law, and used for weddings and other gatherings. At one event held at this charming hilltop roost a few years back, I sat down with filmmaker Terry Gilliam who, despite coming up against endless Ibicencan bureaucratic hitches and obstacles, had thrown himself into the role of patron of the island’s Film Festival. “It seems to me there’s no escape from Ibiza,” he sighed with some resignation. “I mean once you sort of show some interest you become like a prisoner of the island. It’s like the siren song was sounded.”
