In my mind's eye, there will always be a magical party island in the middle of the Mediterranean in the 1990s. I know now as an adult that such a place in all likelihood never existed, but as a teenager the fantastical isle of Ibiza was as real and present as the words on this page. Everyone believed in it. Some brought back fantastical stories of the tiny, sex-fuelled party island, and I listened to these tales on the Adrian Kennedy Phone Show late on weekday nights. It was a cultural touchstone - this magical place of hedonism and dance music in the 1990s.
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| Artist's depiction of Ibiza in the 1990s. |
As a shy teen, I dared to dream of such a place, where my inexperienced expectations of sex — to my great astonishment — were met. My sexual dreams fulfilled, I could insert myself in any warm hole I liked and never fear that I was anywhere near the constraints of the societal threshold. The women there were, as beautiful in my imagination, as beautiful as the 1990s aesthetic would allow: crop tops, choppy haircuts, too much make-up, smaller backsides, and less somewhat less athletic. On Ibiza, you could encounter Emma Buntons, Lisa Scott Lees, Pamela Andersons, and possibly even the ladies from the Venga Boys, who may or may not have been transexuals (I don't remember if that was ever resolved). You could have it anywhere: sex in the club, sex in the street, sex on the beach (there was even a song about it), sex in the apartment you rented, a hand job in a taxi, a drunken, gross encounter down an alleyway on top of a kabab. You would need to go out of your way to not get laid at least once a day. And as all virginal teens know, each encounter would take up about an eighth of your day. If you were a hungry young man, your red-raw, detached penis would need to be placed in a paper bag and left in your luggage when you flew home.
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| Who can say. |
By all accounts of this of this bacchanalian, late twentieth century Atlantis, there was sex and drugs to be found everywhere. They were ubiquitous and available, the gears of indulgence well lubed by a brash rejection of traditional mores. Indeed, on Ibiza back in the 1990s, your sexuality ran free, and it was customary to unleash the full power and beauty of your libido, or at least some flaccid approximation of a beautiful libido. It didn't matter who you were, or how attractive you weren't; everyone was on ecstasy, and the MDMA goggles made everyone attracted to the magic of humanity itself. Some might have hesitated to take E after the rumour that Scooter had died from an overdose of fifteen pills, but that was a mistake, as the story was a myth. Scooter was a band, not a solo artist, and the guy who died was supposedly called DJ Scooter. In any case, it would obviously take far more than fifteen pills to kill any member of Scooter.
"Oh, but there's a nice part to the island, away from the parties and debauchery," some conversational bore would tell you, trying to dampen the vision you held dearly in your mind. Leave us be. Some of us, occasionally at least, want to be lulled into a sweet dream by enchanting music. For Ibiza of the late '90s, the soundtrack was Born Slippy by Underworld, I Can't get no Sleep by Faithless, Sandstorm by Darude, Silence by Delirium, and countless other track all so uniform and indistinguishable from the outside that they seem to meld into each other, creating one endless track, inspiring the dancefloor to rave on into the infinite night.
Ibiza's mythical sway lost its power at the turn of a new decade. Groove Jet by Spiller, released in the year 2000 seems almost like a love letter to a rapidly disappearing dream. I remember chatting to college friend late that year, who confessed his disappointment in the lack of orgies being held around campus. We both agreed at the time that this was a perfectly reasonable expectation. But looking back, it was one perhaps founded on the myth of the magical sex island in the 1990s. Ibiza, and its creed, was beginning to look like a hollow promise. The island may actually exist, but its pilgrims now seem fewer in number and less in awe of the place. I heard years ago that it had become a 'sausage fest', and it seems that a visa to Ibiza (properly pronounced a vita to Ibita, by the initiated) requires trimming a lot of body fat and adding a lot of waxed muscle.
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| Sophie may well have been mythical, too. |
In the cold, plain light actuality, it is unlikely that Ibiza in the 1990s ever existed outside the Venga Boys' song and the imaginations of credulous young men like me. The man who once, on the Adrian Kennedy Phone Show, testified to having sex in broad daylight on an Ibizian beach was most probably a fraud, or perhaps caught in a fever dream by an inescapable need to believe in such a place. However, to an awkward teenage boy, enduring an isolated, uneventful adolescence, Ibiza was real. And like any truly great product of the imagination, it manifested itself without support of an actuality, immune to the tedious regulation of the world of facts. The man Fairflower can take joy from the memories of the more exciting world of the boy Fairflower. Nobody can take from me that which cannot be possessed anyway.
