Ibiza beats a long way from the showbands
IT’S pushing toward dawn and I’m lost in a place I really don’t belong. Sweating like the proverbial pig and surrounded by 2,999 strangers on the dance floor of Pasha, my body clock has lost all contact with real time as megawatt speakers boom a beat so deep my large intestine is doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk. Surrounded by multitudes lost in the rhythm of Stezo’s ‘Freak the Funk’, they buckle and sway with hollow meerkat eyes, crazy hair and a fashion sense veering between ‘Love Island’ and Bang Bros.
Two nearby mid-20s girls are clad only in flesh-coloured thongs, rocking out oblivious – and exciting nary a second glance from anyone. Physical abandonment is the only game in this world of light and dark, assisted, most likely, by methamphetamine – ecstasy or E. We’re a very long way from the Mick Delahunty Showband at the Ierne Ballroom, folks. Over in Ibiza for a friend’s big Four Oh, and it’s impossible to avoid that island’s greatest rhythmic export – clubbing. The DJ stars of the business – Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold and Fatboy Slim – are available seven nights, from dusk till dawn, at up to €100,000 a pop. Yet all of them bow before the mixmaster supreme, David Guetta, the Springsteen of the spin decks who’s been dictating the island’s floor action for over a decade. Rumour has it this prince of prance earns a cool €150,000 a night – nice work if you can get it. Up in the VIP section, where a bottle of Beefeater Gin costs a cool
€600, we gaze upon this throng of humanity swaying to a Guetta groove that runs from midnight to 4am.
Then it’s up to the rooftop for another open-air trance dance until well after sunrise. “Is this a bucket-list thing?” a pink-haired young one from Munich asks me. Nodding in the affirmative, I inquire after her story. “I work in the motor tax office 50 weeks of the year, this is my 14-day therapy for the soul,” she replies, toking on a funny cigarette the size of a rolled-up tabloid.
Walking along the marina in the warm 7am sunburst, youth in its hazy splendour is coming down easy off another night’s hedonistic high.
And a word of advice should you wonder what your offspring gets up to on this balmy Med sanctuary – it’s probably best you don’t know.
Hilarious, reflective letters a fine epitaph
IT’S hard to believe there was a time when drunken debauchery was a prized occupation here, offering a doorway to a literary underworld bathed in a creative oil of alcohol.
This was the 1950s Dublin so well chronicled in JP Donleavy’s classic novel, ‘The Ginger Man’. Earlier this week, on the first anniversary of his death, ‘The Ginger Man Letters’ were published – the correspondence between Donleavy and two of his fellow Trinity College roisterers, Gainor Crist and AK Donoghue, whose outrageous antics upon the city’s ancient cobblestones inspired much of the book.
A collection of 220 letters chronicling hilarious, brawling and often reflective days populated by occasional cameos from the likes of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Richard Harris and John Huston, it marks a suitable epitaph for an author who truly lived the life he so eloquently recounted. JP, as always, put it best: “When I’m dead, I hope it may be said: his sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
Famine movie was long overdue, even if un-PC
I WENT to see the Famine revenge movie ‘Black 47’ last night – terrific is the only word. It’s a wonder this most harrowing period of our colonial history didn’t make it to cinema screens sooner. Un-PC it may well be, but still entertaining with a capital E.