Fact #188020

Johnny Black (journalist, diary entry) 1987, Friday May 29 : Good taste, as I have observed before, knows no national boundaries. On sale in our hotel’s reception area are brass key rings, most of which bear the names or faces of pop stars (Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd etc), but a select few carry such messages as I Heart 69 or I Heart Whips, indicating a preference for oral sex or whipping. This presumably reflects the high number of transvestites and gays who inhabit the island, but I wouldn’t have expected to find them in such an obviously family-oriented hotel. I should mention again that I can’t abide the use of a heart symbol to represent the word love.

After locking myself out of my bathroom, I went out and called a cab to take me to Ibiza town itself. The drive took about twenty minutes and I headed straight for the Alt Vila (old town) to soak up some genuine atmosphero touristico. My main impressions were of dogs, windows, doorways, white walls, motorbikes (one scorched, blackened, burnt out in an alley) and paths made of stones. The Alt Vila is built round a hillside topped by a Gothic cathedral, an archeological museum and the castle, or the ruins thereof. In the castle is a lovely old cafe-bar where I had lunch of tortilla, salad and fried aubergines.

I was wandering around mainly in the quiet part of the day, from 11.00am until about 4.00pm, and the tourist season hadn’t really got into swing yet, so the town was quiet. I’ve never seen such beautiful clothes anywhere as I saw in the boutiques around the harbour, obviously catering to the many wealthy foreigners who come (or live) here, and to the few locals who have become rich by soaking the wealthy foreigners.

The narrow streets are full of discos with names like The End, Porque Non?, Naranja Mekanik (Clockwork Orange), Angels, Space. Almost all English or with English origins. Through its pop music and its fashion scene, England has come to dominate the thinking of the young in many parts of the world. Ibiza is an island which has been civilised and inhabited since Carthaginian times, but today it thrives on the reputations of wealthy outsiders who choose to live here. Of the 40,000 inhabitants, it is estimated that less than 500 ever wear the old national dress, and those are exclusively the old women and a few old men, their numbers diminishing year after year.

The look of the young is known as AD-LIB, a freestyle dress sense compounded of equal parts hippy-gipsy-cowboy-glitter, but very elegantly and expensively so.

I’m writing this in an open air bar by the harbour. I can hear three separate radios all at once. One in this bar, The Bar Miramar, and one in each of the adjacent bars. To my right there is traditional folk music, to my left pop. I’m in the middle with yet more pop - Level 42, Rod Stewart - and endless Coca Cola ads. When the Mirabar music stops and the deejay starts to talk, I become much more aware of the other two radios blaring. Ahhh, the tranquil shores of the Mediterranean.

Speaking of which, I picked up a magazine called mediterranean, which looked like a magazine devoted to goings on in the area but, no, it has an axe to grind, it has a constituency, as george Darby used to say at The Sunday Times, back when it was a newspaper. Mediterranean is the organ of the million or so foreigners who have retired to the Spanish Med coast, and it acts as a launching pad for them as a powerful new pressure group. As a result, many of the features are about elderly artists and businessmen, intermingled with stories about geriatric care facilities. The letters page is full of pleas from people who have grown old enough to be almost infirm or housebound, and suddenly realise they need the kind of medical care they would have got for nothing in Britain on the NHS, but the net doesn’t really extend to the Mediterranean, so they have a problem.

Later that evening we all rendezvoused at the bus which was to take us to The KU Club, our reason for being here. Well, we didn’t all rendezvous, there were a few who didn’t show, causing the excitable Spanish PR lady to exclaim, "Well, now I don’t not care no more for them who is not here! We are going now!" Her name, I understand, is Michelle.

When we arrived the place wasn’t jumping. There was too much light because the event was being filmed for TV. Rumours of Harrison Ford were everywhere, but Simon Le Bon was the first star we saw.

The AD LIB dress style is very visible tonight. The leg jobs are out in force as Marillion swing into a mimed version of their current single, Incommunicado. Satin, silk, costume jewellery, underwear masquerading as outerwear, men in leather cod pieces, men dressed as harlequins. Girls dance very listlessly atop tall towers above the swimming pool. An ageing hippy strolls by in a brocade jacket straight out of Sgt. Pepper, studded with brass buttons.

Chris Rea takes the stage just as I finish an interview in the VIP Area with Princess Smilja Mihailovitch, the lady who invented the AD LIB dress style, a very gracious and lovely old lady who believes she is still young - forever young - by wearing the fashion.

It is an extraordinary event, even if only for the things it represents - glamour, money, sexism, power through entertainment, power through manipulation of the media. The girls seem blissfully unaware of their status as sex objects, or maybe they know and enjoy it. Maybe they feel that is their role in life, to look beautiful for … for what? For each other? For themselves? For men?

I’m told on good authority, that there’s a poodle here with its own security pass. A man with cowboy chaps and a bare behind just minced past.

Duran Duran ("El muy importante grupo in el historia del mondo" or something to that effect) hit the stage just as the food is served up in a side bar. No contest. The world’s press flock to the food and the Durannies end up miming Notorious to real people from Ibiza.

You have to wonder what kind of girls would come here to this island. Johan from Germany’s "Style" mag, lives here six months each year and rates then "the stupidest girls in the world" and I suspect he may be right.

One odd aspect of the event is that the bands on the stage are very much secondary in importance. The audience is the thing, and the bands are diminished in status, almost to the level of court musicians in medieval times. They are men hired to entertain the elite. It will only be through the distorting lens of the tv tube that the bands will seem to be significant contributors to the event, so once again the media will be manipulated by the people who have the power, and the viewers will be simultaneously duped and satisfied.

A man flounces past, his padded white shoulders quivering like seagulls with seizures. His pads would make Joan Collins look like Olive Oil. If he invited a girl to see his pad, she could simply stand on tippy toes.

I;’ve just chatted with Nick Rhodes of Duran. He reckons this place was the world’s best six years ago, but now it’s full of "forty year old baldies with gold bars on their shoes."

As I pass a girl from the Fugitive TV crew, I overhear her say, "It’s just too high stress factor for me."

Halfway through her second number, Nona Hendryx came off the stage and fell into the pool. As yet, no-one knows if she was badly hurt or not. (It transpires later that she had cut her head on a steadycam.)

So many of the people here have what I have come to think of as cocaine faces, typified by blank eyes and thin, tight lips, but I’m told ecstasy is the drug of the island.

Spandau Ballet have just come on stage with the immortal words, "Hey, howya doin’? We’re gonna have some fun." Strange that, because the phrase that keeps running through my mind is the equally immortal, "Are we having fun yet?"

Back in the VIP Area again split-dressed, sequinned, peroxide blonde with a brassy American accent is smoking a pipe. Her ageing beau deserts her when a Mr. Mercury and a Mrs Caballe swing into an over-the-top ditty called Barcelona (Son of Vienna meets Bohemian Rhapsody with fireworks). Now can we all go home, please?\\

The audience is in synthetic raptures as the firework continue. Gosh! Gee whizz! It is exciting isn’t it? Isn’t it? Harrison Ford had the right idea. He was invited but stayed home in Paris with his new baby.

Freddie Mercury is somehow the perfect symbol, the ideal idol for this hedonistic bunch of juvenile grown-ups. I suddenly have a vision that if another workers’ revolution ever happens, it won’t be in France or Russia or England. It will be everywhere. If the spark ever goes up it will tear these people and their negative values apart. I suspect, however, that it will never happen.

In a desperate attempt to whip up something interesting for the tv cameras, an onstage cretin invites people to "Jumping now in the swimming pool, please." I can’t bring myself to stand up to find out whether they’re respinding. Stylish, sophisticated people up here in the VIP lounge are standing on chairs and tables to get a better view of this elegant entertainment. What? No custard pies? No banana skins?

A colleague has just suggested that Freddie Mercury’s right knee tremble on stage was caused by the fact that he’d just peed down that leg and was trying to shake it dry.

A drag queen in a puffball skirt and Doc Martens shimmies past trying to find a star to stand next to. In casual conversation, I learn that at the party last night, Chris Rea and Fish from Marillion were twice turned away from the VIP food room because the security men didn’t know who they were.

Then, with no warning, it is all over. The vast auditorium begins to empty. We stand idly around for a while then head for the bus. It’s 3.00am when when the bus drops us off. I head for my room and I’m asleep as my head hits the pillow.

1987, Saturday May 30 : I wake up feeling unreasonably refreshed and take a taxi to Ibiza town where I more or less repeat my excursion of the previous day. I find a shirt and trousers for Jojo, then head up through the Portal DSelas Tablas into Alt Vila, where I once again end up in the cafe inside the castle, eating tortilla and aubergines, while the jets roar overhead, in and out of the nearby airport.

It’s a fine place to sit and gather up a few memories of the trip, little details that I forgot, or deliberately avoided putting in earlier. I remember how the transvestites formed a tight little group at the foot of the stairs up to the VIP lounge in the KU Club, vying for position, desperate to be close to a star. Then, when they realised that the next door along gave access to the backstage area, they all shimmied off in that direction, having a much more audible good time for the benefit of onlookers.

I remember a journalist in Mimmo Ferretti’s house asking, "Which one’s Fish?" as a six foot six inch giant in a tartan suit lurched in front of him. Who else could that have been?

I remember some statistics. The whole show should have cost £600,000 but it escalated to over £12m. The cost of bringing the 60 press people to the island came to £40,000, or one pound for each of the inhabitants of Ibiza. Twenty three private jets were used to transport guests, press and artists.

(Source : Johnny Black's diary)