Three sassy-looking girls stand in the guest-list queue at Pacha, waiting for
access to the club that some say is the best in the world. With their good
hair, expensive frocks and glittering shoes, you would think they would be a
shoo-in for Pete Tong and Jade Jagger’s night. Jagger is inside – which of
her cosmically fabulous pals will be with her?
But, ouch! The woman with the clipboard isn’t playing ball. The rising
consternation coming off these twinkly London social divas is palpable, and
there is going to be a scene. It’s not quite “Don’t you know who I am?”, but
it’s getting there. With finality, the clipboard woman says, “I’m sorry”,
sounding not a bit of it. One of the divas gets cross, and it all ends in a
bit of handling by the heavies on the door. The people watching this from
the paying queue – the ones who have to pay £40 just for the privilege of
getting in – salivate with a delicious Schadenfreude. Nothing brings
the socially ambitious down to earth like not being in the loop on Ibiza.
If only they had booked a table in the VIP section (minimum spend, £300 per
head) or, better, the VVIP section (minimum spend undisclosed); if only an
island “fixer” had escorted them in; if only they had invested in the
look-at-me security of a couple of gorillas, none of this would have
happened. If you are moneyed and used to having your own way, in Ibiza these
days you need nannying – and this is fast becoming the island’s most
profitable business.
The array of paid helpers on hand to negotiate a good time in Europe’s
unrivalled party destination is incredible. As well as the dedicated
concierge companies, the clubs now have teams of mollycoddlers, ready to
bring bottles and bowls of strawberries to tables in ever-expanding VIP
sections. There are even rave butlers: fit young Scandinavians who will
preempt your hedonistic requirements. Dressed in hot pants and pinnies, with
pockets full of the tools of hedonism, they will drive you to the club, get
you in and make sure you never run out of ice and cigarettes when you
return, messy, to your villa. They’ll even bite that pill in half and give
you a gin and tonic to swill it down with. I assumed they were the stuff of
myth, but, no, I tracked down the thirtysomething English girl who hires
them out for a few hundred euros a night. “People work so hard these days,
especially in the City,” she says, in a pseudo-motherly fashion. “Why
shouldn’t they get off it in style?”
I came to Ibiza to spend some time with such businesses. Simon Bushell, a
former Sony A&R man, left London to start Service Splendide out here
last year. He began by delivering his passengers in VWs and Fiats; now he
has big, fat Lincolns. He provides drivers who know the island, who know the
clubs, who just know. Had those Pacha wannabes had one of Bushell’s boys
drive them in a gleaming 4x4 from their villa to drinks on the terrace at
the hip L’Elephant, they could have hooked up (mwah, mwah) with the manager,
Alex Pascual (God, she is so fabulous, and she knows everybody), and if they
had seemed cool, maybe she might have made a call to the right person. For
the right money, chiquitas, the indignity of it all would have belonged to
some other unsuspecting raving fool.
The clubbing demographic is changing here, and fast. The hunger for privilege
is rapacious. At Blue Marlin, a bar on Cala Jondal beach, the minimum spend
on the best sunbed is £300. Pacha has long been an elite place, but Amnesia
now has a big VIP section, too; almost all of them do, even the cheesy Eden.
This year, at the opening party of Space’s We Love Sundays, which people
travel from all corners of the world to attend, the club opened its first
small VIP area, and tables sold for a rumoured £3,000.
Serena Cook, of Deliciously Sorted, paved the way when she started her company
six years ago, after a period as a personal chef to her friend Jagger. She
is staggered by the company’s year-on-year success. She can fix most things
for her clients, a good 20% of whom arrive on private jets. A good deal more
will be staying in expensive villas, with chefs, personal trainers and
specialised staff catering to their whims – while I’m sitting in her office,
someone calls requesting “a chef who can cook River Café-style food”. One of
Cook’s staff, Pascual, spends the entire summer just walking the rich
clientele into clubs. Cook’s connections are impeccable. “If clients ask to
be seated next to some celebrity who they’ve heard is on the island, then
Fred at Pacha will make sure it happens. We know everyone here.” Bombing
round the island in her battered red Jeep, she is a dynamo of efficiency.
Sheets of a certain thread count, a Hummer or Porsche to cruise round the
island, shopping trips for pampered wives to perfect their Ibiza-look
wardrobe, candles of a certain height, shape and scent, a fridge filled with
whatever you want, extravagant parties for the money-no-object raver – all
no problem. Last year, for example, P.Diddy “was on his boat, but wanted to
arrange a villa party to keep the press happy”. Cook sorted out all the
necessaries. “Then he cancelled it, literally, at the last minute because he
was having too much of a good time to bother.”
I hang around her office, listening to her organise a four-hour, prePacha
villa party for some Russians who want an international DJ, a Russian band,
caviar and a specific type of vodka flown in from Moscow. The whole thing
will cost them £67,000 – rather more than a few vodkas and a wicked
compilation CD while you get your groove on for a night out.
Cook takes me to a dinner she has organised for a group of Londoners on a
beach near Santa Eularia del Rio. She gets on with sweeping the ordinary
folk out of the restaurant, while one of her liveried staff lines the path
with flares and tea lights in paper bags. When the insouciant clients
arrive, they have no idea that, two minutes ago, lesser mortals were being
shuffled off stage left, so as not to interrupt the chic view. People such
as Cook turn the island’s rough-diamond quality into a seamless luxury
playground. She explains the agenda for most of her clients: “Chefs,
drivers, a day on a yacht, a night in Pacha’s VIP area, dinners at the right
tables at El Ayoun and L’Elephant, beach life at Jockey Club or Blue Marlin,
maybe a villa party, all coordinated by a hostess who visits their villas
morning and night to tell them what they can do for fun that day.”
A rich gay client is about to arrive, and Cook’s assistant is talking him
through his phenomenally tight schedule, right down to: “Monday morning,
after Space, you will be tired, so the chef will fix smoothies on the
veranda, and there’ll be relaxing massages in rooms.”
The increasing demand for VIP treatment has surprised even those who work in
the thick of Ibiza’s club world. Mark Broadbent, one of the promoters of We
Love Sundays, says: “It’s not something we ever wanted a part of – I hate
the idea of VIP. I put a big rave on: it’s for the kids who do shitty jobs
all over the world who come to party. The beauty of coming to Space is
rubbing shoulders with whoever. When that Jimmy Choo girl [Tamara Mellon]
came down, she didn’t want to be in a VIP section; she just wanted to party.
But a lot of people need a VIP area. Times have changed.”
When Kevin Spacey was over last summer, he asked to go to DC10, one of the
more intimidating clubs on the island – uncomfortable, spartan, hard-core –
but he changed his mind when he heard there was no velvet rope to hide
behind. When Paris Hilton was here last year, she had a hot little party
with Jagger at L’Elephant. Jagger’s part in it ensured that the great, the
good and the all-important bad turned out. All of which was a big tick next
to Hilton’s name – a tick that was removed a few days later when she
was spotted at a foam party near San Antonio. In a way, you’ve got to admire
her for breaking out of the tyranny of obsessively doing the right thing in
the right place on the right night – that is something a lot of new-rich
ravers obsess about, which is why they ensure there is always someone there
to steer them in the right direction.
Pacha’s brand director, Danny Whittle, says the club doesn’t accord its VIPs
too much privilege, and won’t move people around. He pauses, then admits it
did once, for Prince William. While many are old dance-music-heads, a lot of
Pacha’s new guests, such as our future King, aren’t what you would call
bona-fide clubbers. “This lot, the newer money, used to go to St Tropez.
Initially, they sit there with their eyes on the dancefloor, agog. After an
hour, they’re on their chairs, punching the air.”
As I skulk around the club on a Friday night, the vast VIP section doesn’t
seem to jump like the dancefloor. Still, Pacha has increased the space
devoted to VIPs three times in the past four years – this summer,VIPs and
VVIPs take up more than a quarter of the club’s capacity of 2,500. Whittle
says of VIP areas: “Personally, I hate them. I don’t like that style of
clubbing. I’ll always prefer a bar to a bottle in a bucket, but that’s the
way the island is going.”
When I call to ask for figures about the growing number of superyachts coming
to the island, the woman at the end of the phone laughs and says: “All I can
say is, every year we get more and more. The demand on the port authority is
very big.” Last year, 2,905 private jets flew in. It is increasingly hard to
build anything here, unless it is a golf course or a five-star hotel. Even
P.Diddy has complained about the expense, in Pacha’s magazine. “I’ll keep
coming back, but the crazy prices are spoiling it,” he grumbled. Average
ground-level ravers, electricians from Leicester and the like, will spend
£1,000 in a week. If you want to tick all the glamour boxes, you can
multiply that figure by at least 20.
The promoter Rob Star has been putting on his Mulletover parties in Ibiza for
three years. “In that time, I’ve noticed more and more of those people who
used to come out here in the 1990s are coming back with their big disposable
incomes. These people will hire villas, put on a private party, get the
right DJ. I went to a 40th last year in Villa Roca for some City bloke.
Groove Armada were DJing, and all these hot waitresses were coming round
serving you what you wanted. I was sitting there thinking: I’m in this
amazing James Bond-style villa, with everything laid out on a plate – is it
me, or has this island changed a lot since I started coming here?”
The tourist board is delighted. “We would like to have no mass tourism.
We don’t like it at all,” says Carmen Ferrer, director of the Foundation for
Tourism Promotion. “We want upmarket visitors. We want to compete with St
Tropez, Positano and Mykonos. The clubbing is great on many levels, but the
drugs and the abuse of the freedom here, the noise, is something the
governor wants to control.”
All through the 1990s, while the club scene and a small, bohemian jet-set
community thrived, Ibiza’s reputation in the wider world was based on the
seedy San Antonio, familiar from 18-30 scandals and television shows such as
Ibiza Uncovered. The fact that the island, in a matter of five or six years,
has become such a chichi place is indicative of the sort of holiday that
rich people want. And the rich folks who really go for it are, in large
part, British. Our appetite for hedonism is unquenchable.
What’s more, these people aren’t kids. The rich Ibiza raver could be in their
mid-forties, just like the London-based socialite who puts her kids and the
nanny up in the island’s Pikes Hotel, while she takes a villa, so she can
enjoy herself without fear of corrupting her offspring.
Of course, what Ferrer likes most is the money we British spend. In high
season, 50% of the island’s tourism is British. They aren’t all here raving
like lunatics, but statistics show that we are the biggest party animals in
Europe. We are also a funny type of snob. It surprises me when Ferrer
namechecks the local girls Jade Jagger and Charlotte Tilbury for the role
they play in tempting the right sort of person to Ibiza. “The thing is, the
British perception of the island has always come partly by word of mouth.”
Every time Jagger, Tilbury or one of the raised-in-Ibiza kids of bohemian
Brits – social-page favourites such as the children of the Monsoon founder,
Peter Simon – mentions the island in a magazine, its mythology grows. Jagger
has turned this into big business, recently netting a healthy six-figure-sum
sponsorship deal for her Jezebel night at Pacha from Beefeater gin.
Ibiza is a beautiful place: it has mountains, forests and copious secluded
beaches; its compelling nature is not solely down to clubs and drinking rosé
on the beach. But the sybaritic seductiveness of the island is powerful. A
huge article about Ibiza in an international glossy magazine was shelved
after the writer went Awol when he arrived. He had to come back the
following year to research it all over again.
Having spent five days trying to keep my hair on, watching quite how much you
can gild a good time if you have the money, I realised that even the
self-important and the grand like to lose themselves, and here, on this
island, the potential for that is incredible. If you know what you are
doing, this place is still just lawless enough for you to do exactly as you
want. As Steve Hughes, the manager of the bar at Bambuddha Grove and a
long-time island inhabitant, says: “Ten years ago, it was completely
different. What’s happening now is intensive capitalism – in a place that is
very, very accommodating.”
