Hello. Well. On a holiday in Ibiza in 1986, I first stumbled across a bar on the West facing shore of San Antonio. It was just a simple building with shutters across, and the bar inside. On the outside was a small terrace with sun loungers and then the rocks. And then the sea.
Many places of the ’70s and ’80s get a nod as the heart of future events: CBGB’s, Studio 54, The Loft, The Warehouse, The Music Box, Playpen, Paradise Garage, The Gallery, The Hacienda, Shoom and Eric’s, The Blitz. These nightclubs gave rise to disco, new wave, synthpop, house music, electro, New Romantics AND ACID HOUSE.
As a kid of disco in the mid-’70s, and an electro-soul boy and synthpop teenager, it was no surprise that I found myself watching UK Soul Train after school on a Friday night. When kids’ TV had finished and the news at 6 was on BBC One, I’d turn to BBC Two and watch Jeffrey Daniels, wearing sandals and a sarong, and obviously showing how to moonwalk. Watching him dance like you’d never seen before to Chief Inspector by Wally Badarou, my scene was set: to find the dance floor and night music.
So, I found myself in San Antonio, Ibiza, in ’86, looking for Loose Ends and Maze’s Twilight — and it was there in bucketloads. Many of the clubs that became famous a couple of years later were already there, as house music was just becoming alive in Manchester and, mainly, Chicago and Detroit. The more common, as I call it, UK Soul Train-type tunes were there in abundance. Many trips to the Valley Lodge, Quaffers, The Gallery, Tropicana and The Hacienda had given me my schooling in electro soul, and that’s what I was looking for.
A famous night out whilst in Ibiza took me and three mates on hired mopeds on a four-mile journey to KU Club to see James Brown. Phenomenal. Legendary. A pool in a club. James was two and a half hours late. No matter. He blitzed it.
Whilst in San Antonio the next day, we were walking along the rocky sea edge, slightly to the west, and there we found a strange bar that played Dark Side of the Moon and Yellow.
The owner befriended us and explained how he was from London and that he lived there because he couldn’t go home. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
He was very tanned, with long dark hair and black Speedos. Mmm… it was ’86.
Anywho, it left a huge impression on me.
Many years later, after a night out in Manchester, I listened to a Café del Mar tape and thought it was the bee’s knees. Turns out, I had been there many years before, before the hype, before the explosion. And now, looking at pictures, it’s hard to see what I saw then.
But then, on a Pinterest page, was an old photograph from the ’70s of Café del Mar. And yes, I was right. It was where I had visited in ’86.
Es Paradis and Pacha were there in the following year. A style from Ibiza hit the UK shores, and history was written.
