The white isle’s clubbing scene is only a click away thanks to social networking on your mobile phone
This island has come a long way since 654BC when Phoenician settlers founded a port in the Balearic Islands which they named Ibossim – a reference to the god of music and dance Iboshim. How apt eh? Thousands of years later and the Summer of Love hits Ibiza, a tiny finca is turned into a small nightclub that would one day become the biggest nightclub brand in the world – Pacha. The 70s and early eighties saw the island become a haunt for the rich and famous, everyone knew this was party island, everything and anything could happen – and it always did.
Wham famously jumped on the bandwagon filming their Club Tropicana video at the infamous Pikes Hotel which Tony Pikes, owner of the hotel, reminisces fondly about, “Wham was a total bit of luck. Some guy was looking for a location and he found me, working on the place. He asked me if I’d like to do a video here. I said no, I’m not ready for it, but he talked me into it. So out they came. Anyway, funny story, on the plane over George Michael was talking to the director and the guy realised he’d left all the cameras at Heathrow. It cost three and a half grand for a private jet to bring all the photographic equipment out, and they’re doing it on a shoestring budget. Twenty five thousand for the whole deal. Well, George took over the direction and it got Best Video at one of the big award ceremonies. It also made me.”
Back then it wasn’t unusual to bump into Grace Jones or Freddie Mercury on the beach. These were the days of wild caribbean drug orgies, Princes and Presidents rocking dancefloors, gypsies catapulting hashish into the prison yard in Dalt Vila so the inmates could have a party, hippies everywhere – and then a certain DJ Alfredo stepped into the fray and things were never the same again. Zip forward 25 years and it’s oh so different. Corporate branding everywhere, Radio stations and TV channels clamouring for exclusive interviews, multi million pound villas being built on any available plot of land, DJs commanding up to £20,000 for a 90 minute set, magazines from all over the world sending their journalists over to find a story, blockbuster films being made with Ibiza as the main storyline – sure the place has sold out, but there’s still quite nowhere like it on earth.
This year however it’s not all about ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’, it’s about its all gone digital. Summer of Love? More Like Summer of .com. In years gone by getting onto the internet in Ibiza was a nightmare, trawling around looking for a dirty old cafe in the searing heat was no fun. But things are changing. There’s a whole host of new clubbing sites and mobile applications that have been launched which has made it easier to pick up the island’s gossip, strike up party conversations with people you met the night before (including the boy or girl you were too shy to hit on) – it’s enough to make the 60s hippies turn in their graves. The most exciting one this year has to be www.be-at.tv <http://www.be-at.tv> which mixes social networking with fully streamed video that has been shot on the dancefloor, DJ booth and festivals from around the globe. In Ibiza this summer they have five camera teams each with three cameras working it. This is the brainchild of renowned dance music figure Damian Mould and LA whizz kid Ray Smith. The site streams full on, one or two hour DJ sets, there’s a merchandise store whilst if the camera has picked you up, you can tag yourself in the footage that will then link through to your page. Anyone logging on can click through and befriend you, or you see someone you fancy the look of, strike up a conversation with them. You can also add those clips to your Facebook/MySpace page or send them as virals – safe in the knowledge everything has been vetted by be-at.tv.
iPhone and iPod Touch owners in the meantime will be able to download the Ministry of Sound’s ‘Clubbers Guide To Ibiza’ application – a downloadable guide to the island for clubbers available from Apple’s iPhone App Store for £1.79. It’s got information on clubs, bars, restaurants, daily news and gossip. One of the biggest problems for people wanting to go out to Ibiza is actually trying to find somewhere to work. Those days are over. digitalibiza.com has accommodation information, available jobs, tips on what to expect and the pitfalls out there and also interviews with people who have been working summers for years. Watch out too for the expected arrival of San Francisco based Citysense – a mobile phone application that monitors all of the activity in a city, well all the activity of people who’ve downloaded it to their Blackberry or iPhone and shows a map of all the movement around town. You could use it to check which places are rammed and which places are empty. No one is invisible anymore. As Carl Cox puts it, “When I was a kid, we used to send actual letters to fan clubs then wait weeks for a reply, now I have 330,000 MySpace friends tracking where I am all around the world.”
Check out:
www.be-at.tv
www.google.com/gmm
www.wat.tv
www.ibiza-spotllight.com
www.dititalibiza.com
iPhone Apps
