Thank you to the person who pointed out the links to the bob marley audio wasn’t working – in our haste we forgot the golden rule of putting “.com” at the end of the domain name.

So here’s all the three parts:
Bob Marley in Ibiza part 1.
Bob Marley in Ibiza part 2.
Bob Marley in Ibiza part 3.

I am the worst sort of explorer, in that I am always stubbornly and vocally un-interested in something unless it’s something I’ve discovered.

True to form I have always publically yawned over Atlantis – Ibiza’s “secret” beach. The locals assure me it is no more or less than a rather nice beach and that’s good enough for me.

However, one of my best mates was over from London for the weekend. He’d found Atlantis on his last visit and – like any good evangelist – wasn’t going to let me off the hook till I’d found it too. So off we go in the hire car with a bottle of water, a camera and some sensible shoes.

Lucky it’s one of those glorious Mediterranean autumn days where the sky is hazy blue and the sun is a silky gold as melting butter.

The first leg of our hike takes us to the most incredible view of Es Vedra I’ve ever seen. I spin in dazed circles around the top of the lookout tower, as enchanted as Alice in Wonderland.

Next up, the fun stuff. A slip-slidey journey down towards a narrow spit of land. Jumping from rock to rock, skidding on loose gravel, occasionally grabbing onto an errant pine branch and clinging for dear life. Above us, climbers are traversing a proper cliff, brightly coloured ropes swaying in the light breeze as they call to each other. They are enviably calm.

I nearly panic when I have to shimmy down a couple of metres of sloping stone to reach the fabled pool at Atlantis. (The only thing I’m more afraid of than heights is spiders, or possibly vice versa, depending on the height and/or size of spider involved.)

When I stop hyperventilating and look around I am dumbfounded. Blunt columns of soft, oatmeal-coloured stone frame the opal sea. Tiny speckled fish dart above shallow, rectangular steps showing where indifferent rock was quarried into a pool. Stone cairns of various sizes are dotted around and swirling, primitive faces break the right-angle lines of earlier craftsmen.

Finally, I get it.

Over dinner with my housemate’s visiting parents I pull out the camera. “Have you heard about Atlantis? It’s this secret beach… It’s amazing…”

Yep. I’ve officially joined the ranks of the Atlantis bores!

The final part of the Bob Marley concert in Ibiza in 1978.

Bob Marley Ibiza Part 3.

Part 2 of the Bob Marley Ibizaconcert in 1978.

Our good friend lenny managed to get hold of the bootleg of Bob Marley playing at the Bull Ring in Ibiza in 1978. Lenny has remastered it and cleaned it up.

Lenny and Ibiza Sonica Radio have kindly given us the full audio.

Click to download Bob Marley in Ibiza part 1.

(Parts 2 and 3 to follow)

S.O.S. WE NEED HELPERS FOR OUR CANCER CHRISTMAS FAIR!

The Cancer Association of Ibiza & Formentera (Ibiza y Formentera Contra el Cancer) is already preparing for its next Christmas Fair on Sunday December 14th at the Recinto Ferial (Exhibition Hall) in Ibiza Town. For this occasion we not only need helpers on the day, but volunteers who can help to collect all the necessary prices and contributions which are indispensable to the success of the Fair. In fact, the Fair cannot operate without these contributions. Any person who can help in any way is requested to contact the numbers: 971 391 357, 971 804 002, 971 346 094 or 971 196 394.

We also need products for our Home Produce stall. Anyone who is able to offer home-made cakes, pastries, preserves etc. please contact Diane on 971 804 002.

Mark the date of the Fair in your diaries now. Following the ever-increasing success of previous Christmas Fairs, the organisers will be combining the traditional stalls, events and shows with the opportunity to buy seasonal gifts and provisions and enjoy a wealth of festive games, competitions and entertainment to appeal to young and old alike, including the opportunity for the children to meet Father Christmas!
And don’t forget – our Christmas Cards designed by the island’s children are now on sale.

Ibiza & Formentera Contra el Cancer is here to help you. If YOU know of any cancer sufferer resident on the island who needs special assistance, please let us know.

Our activities since the last fair

1. We are currently providing economic aid to island cancer sufferers in financial need, including those who have to journey to Palma for radiotherapy treatment.

2. We operate a web site providing information and assistance for island cancer patients.

3. We assist in promoting the needs for a radiotherapy unit in Ibiza and in anti-smoking campaigns

4. We have funded the decoration and furnishing of the new waiting-room area and chemotherapy room at the hospital Can Misses. These areas are now more comfortable and agreeable for cancer patients.

5. We provide “back-up” information and advice for cancer victims in the form of pamphlets and booklets in both Spanish and English.

6. We have funded a new machine for the detection of lung and other tumours.

7. We provide translation services at the island hospitals.

8. We have financed women in economic need who wish to use the new DIGITAL breast cancer monitoring service now available in Ibiza.

The AIFCC is a beneficial organisation represented by a local executive committee & voluntary helpers who work gratis for the association meeting personally the expenses they incur in their voluntary work. Any island resident who has a special need related to cancer within their family, or who wishes to join or help the AIFCC should check the contact details on our website.
Pamela Deakin (Vice-President)

Aura will be doing parties every fri and saturday until new year from 8.30pm to 4am

Now that the funky room will closed in the winter our loveable island rogue Vaughan is doing Funkt on saturday nights with Graham Sahara, Nicc Johnson + guests

The year is 1970. A bare-footed Joni Mitchell is ‘looking for the key to set her free’. Fleeing her lover, she packs up her guitar case and tip-toes the beaten path down through the French grape-vines, battling across the border to Spain and onwards to Barcelona before finally carving a path across the sea and coming home to Atlantis. Dipping her toes in the azure-water, she breathes in the Ibicenco air and breathes out her soul-defining record ‘Blue’. Her lover, Graham Nash, will hear her farewell letter when the album is released a year later in 1971. Postcards from the edge will never be the same again.

Nico (Christa Päffgen)

Eighteen years later and The Velvet Underground’s poet and muse is holidaying on the same shoreline. Having successfully achieved the impossible by curbing her 15-year heroin addiction, the strikingly strong-boned woman, once a blonde nymph, heads out on her bicycle to take in the scenery.

As she breathes in the citrus aromas from the orange-groves she suffers a minor heart-attack and hits her head as she falls, dying instantly. Her name was Nico (an incarnation orchestrated by the island itself when photographer Herbert Tobias re-named her on a modelling assignment in Ibiza when she was just 15 years of age).

The island ripples are still felt today, remembered recently in London where producer John Cale curated a tribute to her life and work at the South Bank Centre on 11 October, 2008: twenty years since her untimely death.

Two fables. One island. What transpires in between these two dates is nothing short of a magical musical epiphany.

Syd Barret from Pink Floyd at a Formentera bar

It may well be 30 years since the hippie-confetti petals settled on Ibiza’s shore, but swathes of mythic stories, spread like so many Chinese-whispers (like the two above) still shape-shift across the Balearic isle like a salt-spiked fog. The rhythms of the Mediterranean sea are reluctant to reveal their dormant secrets, but Ibiza still has a twinkle in its eye… and well it might.

Before Manumission’s Ibiza Rocks plectrum was but a sparkle in the music industry’s indie-eye, the first rock ‘n’ roll settlers were hopping off the boat from Barcelona in 1960, called to arms by American painter Bernard. Many were escaping the McCarthy regime – exiles from the land of the free to the island of the running-free. For the throngs of Vietnam-draft-dodging hippies, this gypsy island was an essential stop on The Big Trip (the final destination being the eastern mysticism of India.) Stopping briefly in Ibiza, many failed to leave.

In the years that followed, leading myth-makers from the darkest depths of primal rock ‘n’ roll sailed into Ibiza’s port to soak in the makeshift-Mecca for themselves: Pink Floyd recorded an album, Mike Oldfield propped up the bar at Es Canar alongside Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell wrote at least one track from seminal record ‘Blue’, Bob Dylan hid in a windmill, King Crimson dedicated a song to sister-island Formentera, Eric Clapton and Bob Marley played to their adoring fans. These shape-shifters weren’t just escaping the onslaught of a Cold War reality – they were embracing the arrival of a free-spirited ideal. In 1960s Ibiza the fantasy became reality.

l-r: Syd Barrett, Hank Wangford, Roger Waters at Hanks house on Formentera (courtesy of www.hankwangford.com)

Aptly, Ibicencos themselves divide their history into two epoch-defining periods: ‘antes’ (meaning before hippy invasion) and ‘ahora’ (meaning now). Sure enough, in the 1950s after their genuine isolation since the Spanish Civil War, travellers were positively welcomed onto this ancient, polyglot pirate island. Staying true to these island roots, the rock ‘n’ roll pirates were more than happy to oblige…

Though many of the facts surrounding this time fall into the category of widespread myth and hearsay, it is widely documented that the first open air bonfire parties on the island were organised by French hippy-entrepreneur, Anant. With merely a single sound system and a humble tent from Morocco, the objective was modest: communal partying that forty years later revolutionary defines Ibiza, here and now. In so far as the legend of Anant goes, however, the trails stops dead there.

Perhaps he left when the island’s cult 1960s bar Anita’s was shifted off the island… perhaps he remained. Perhaps he still resides in his Moroccan tent off the coast of Es Canar, burning incense and watching the tides turn. You see, Anant is just one in a sea of many curious mysteries that surround the hippie invasion on the island, ebbing and flowing.

Frank Zappa and Grace Jones at Cafe del Mar

Speaking of her time spent in Ibiza during this time, New Zealand author Janet Frame summed up the ethos of a generation when she wrote she, ‘felt at peace within my own mind, as if I were on an unearthly shore.’
Her musical peers swiftly came round to her way of thinking, seeking refuge on the island in their droves, whether it be for the all-consuming appetite to make music, or at its most basic: to lap up the simple pleasures in life.

For Frank Zappa, Mike Oldfield and Jon Andersson (lead singer of prog-rock band Yes), it was unanimously the latter, as they leisurely propped up the bar at Cafe Del Mar in 1978.

For others, the island was a perfect stage. Mirroring the series of gigs that take place every summer now at Manumission’s Ibiza Rocks Hotel, the first rock pilgrims who strummed out their masterful melodies were none other than freedom fighter Bob Marley and guitar god Eric Clapton, both gracing the Bull Ring in 1977-78.

Scratchy footage can still be gleamed today: a sleepy Marley can be seen lazing on the weathered steps of the ancient arena, taking time out during sound check to answer the Spanish media’s queries on Rastafari God-incarnate Haile Selassie, the king of kings.

Asked if he could ever deem Selassie a dictator, the spiritual troubadour is quick to fire back: “What does he dictate?” Later that day he will break down into classic hit ‘Is This Love’ to throngs of his pogo-ing white-European fans, many of them blissfully unaware of Marley’s Ethiopian regent and the power he exerted on the reggae star’s music.

A year before the same venue played host to South London blues rocker Eric Clapton, sparking an NME review which – at the time – elevated the island of Ibiza to mythical status. In his summation (which could just as easily have been written in 2008 as in 1978), Mick Farren wrote ‘Ibiza is a very long way from the high-pressure world of first division rock ‘n’ roll. From the ancient Spanish women shrouded in all-concealing black dresses to the jet-set girls in minimal bikinis and hand-tooled cowboy boots, everyone moves at a leisurely Mediterranean pace.’

Ibiza’s sister island Formentera wasn’t known as the ‘stepping stone of the gods’ for nothing, and it soon attracted the sparkling attentions of a sprinkling of notable artists. If Formentera is an allegory for the wild, unkempt and untamed rhythms of mother earth, then Bob Dylan was its most soul fitting resident-in-waiting. And so it came to be that rock ‘n’ roll’s most infamous myth-maker made his pirate island of Formentera the greatest myth of them all.

Legend still whispers that Dylan took over a 200-year-old windmill in the small town of El Pilar in the 1960s and inhabited it for some time. Or so the story goes. You won’t find any photographs but, what you will find (if you look hard enough), is a depiction of the very same windmill on Pink Floyd’s 1969 ‘Soundtrack From The Film More’.

The cover art of “More”

The haunting structure imposes itself against a burnt orange Ibicenco sunset, the backdrop to their first work sans psychedelic sorcerer Syd Barrett, who was ousted in ’68. Rumour has it the band even built a studio in Formentera with the sole purpose of recording the accompanying album (and name-sake track ‘Ibiza Bar’) to Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film about strung-out hippies that was partly filmed on the island.

Prog rockers King Crimson swiftly followed suit in 1969 when they released the track ‘Formentera Lady’ on their 1971 concept album ‘Islands’. In it, the verse bursts to life with the lyrics: ‘Houses iced in whitewash guard a pale shoreline/cornered by the cactus and the pine/here I wander where sweet sage and strange herbs grow/down a sun-baked crumpled stony road.’

Although the song has dimmed into obscurity over the years, a small memento of Formentera’s past-life remains in the form of world-renowned guitar repair workshop ‘Formentera Guitars’, which can still be found in the town of Sant Ferran De Ses Roques. The records of Pink Floyd and King Crimson (whose guitars were regularly serviced here) are all that remain.

Yet in Ibiza, the past is never lost. Just last summer I walked down those self-same ‘sun-baked crumpled stony roads’, breathing the scent of the pine trees. If King Crimson themselves had emerged from the shimmering summer air to strike a few chords, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This is part of the secret lure of Ibiza; that despite the overwhelming influence of electronic music and club culture there lies in its magical heart something for every music lover.

From Mike Oldfield, whose Voyager album cover features Es Vedra, to Joni Mitchell to David Bowie – who’s Life On Mars name-checks the island – Ibiza is a rich source of inspiration to musicians of every persuasion. Long may it remain so.

By Kat Lister

The designer Marinela at her exhibition tonight at Nassau Beach bar in Playa D’en Bossa.

photo posted from my iPhone

“Be positive. This island has so much to give. Ibiza is unique in the world. Dance culture has been here for 2,000 years.” – Johannes Goller, Cocoon, on what he learned from summer 2008.

Bad news is easy to find in Ibiza, if you look for it. Tourist numbers are down, people aren’t staying as long, clubs have suffered, bars have suffered… Or so mutter the naysayers.

However, look beyond the slightly dour media pronouncements and the perennial assertions that somewhere else is “the new Ibiza” and you’ll find the summer of 2008 was as packed with adventure,
excitement, flashes of brilliant colour and irreplaceable moments as any in memory.

Not least for Cocoon, who saw attendance figures soar 25-50% compared to last year and amazing
performances from their family of DJs: Sven Vath, Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano.

“It’s been a redefining season for Ibiza and one where the winner was innovation and everything else was the loser, for better or worse. I don’t believe Ibiza likes complacency” – Helen Reilly Donlon, Storm Ibiza on a summer of change.

Looking back now, it seems easy to spot the trends of the summer. But who, at the beginning, would have guessed that SuperMartXe, an upstart Madrileno gay party, would become a textbook success story? Rumour has it Privilege are so thrilled they are considering more renovations to accommodate SuperMartXe’s extravagant stage shows – possibly even a swishy, Moulin Rougestyle
red velvet curtain?

David Guetta’s F**k Me I’m Famous night at Pacha has been another runaway hit in its first season as a weekly party.

“It’s been insane, absolutely massive,” says Pacha manager Danny Whittle.

And Pure Pacha thrived post-Pete Tong with the huge success of the Swedish House Mafia, Fedde Le Grand and the grand old bands of British dance: Faithless and Basement Jaxx.

Elsewhere, tried and tested routines broke down. Manumission struggled to find its place at Amnesia, dropping its ticket price precipitiously during the season.

A warning, if they’re listening, to all involved in the highly public spat that saw DJ Oliver and Baby Marcello leave La Troya at the end of August. Baby Marcello has been the face of La Troya since, oh, forever. And whatever their differences it’s hard to imagine the club without him, or vice versa. They would do well to iron things out over the winter.

“Clubbers are clued up. They know their stuff. People want quality. Next year will be no different,” Gill Nightingale, Cream Ibiza on the secret of their success

Size definitely mattered this summer. Promoters across the board admit that smaller nights have taken a hit, while the established club brands have solidifi ed their hold on the island nightlife.

Cream has had “one of the three best” years in its history on the island on the back of a powerhouse DJ line-up that includes Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, Dave Spoon and Annie Mac, and a firm finger on the populist music pulse (Eric Prydz UK chart hit ‘Pjanno’ was their biggest tune of the summer).

Some smaller events did flourish by wisely staking out a niche. The Shipwrecked boat parties, which run out of San An, were packed to the gunwales every week with a combination of hard-partying tourists and workers blowing off steam. Other parties like the open-air Zoo Project and Azuli’s secret beach bashes proved there is still an enthusiastic core of clubbers eager to hear underground music in unusual locations.

“The reduced numbers on the island has led to a better quality of crowd. People really want to be here for the music and atmosphere” – David Dunne, Hed Kandi on what’s made 2008 special.

Perhaps there aren’t quite the numbers of previous seasons but if anything that has created a more close-knit, intimate atmosphere. Clubs are friendly, people are getting to know each other, going
out of their way to extend a welcome to visitors. And the clubs have taken to putting on the best possible shows, as a kind of ‘thanks for coming.’

Pacha flew soul star Macy Gray in for a live PA at their end-of-season party (not “closing” because, of course, they are open all year round). While El Divino’s biggest night, Hed Kandi, is planning a post-closing closing party especially for the workers.

Much to the delight of freakydancing fans around the world, DC10 is reportedly (at time of going to press) going to be having its traditional closing bash on October 13th – making it a very lucky Monday should they pull it off. (They ended up being forced to close 10 minutes before their 6th Oct party and subsequently held their closing at Privilege).

Nor will the delights of the season exactly stop there, as locals are already looking forward to Bambuddha Grove’s annual Halloween bash which some say is the real end of the summer.

“They won’t stop coming. People who come to Ibiza are ingenious enough to make their own fun,” Danny Whittle, Pacha on what the future holds.

We couldn’t say it better…

by Cila