Nightlife bounces back
Clubs throughout Europe are reopening with a sense of stability for the first time in 2 years
IBIZA, Spain — As the sun was setting over Ibiza recently, the party at Ushuaia was just hitting its stride. Nearly 8,000 people had gathered at the outdoor megaclub for the beginning of the island’s first clubbing season in three years, and the crowd — including many women in tasseled bikinis and tanned, musclebound men — seemed intent on making up for lost time.
While Artbat, a Ukrainian DJ duo, played a high-octane blend of house and techno, the dancers heaved around the club’s large pool, cheered on by guests from the overlooking hotel balconies. In the VIP section, a parade of staff carrying sparklers announced that a high-paying guest had just purchased another pricey bottle of Champagne.
Sipping a drink at the bar, Mina Mallet, a heavily tattooed 25-year-old finance worker from Zurich, said that the reopening of Ibiza’s clubs marked the end of a difficult and tedious period in Europe. “It means a new beginning: for enjoying life, enjoying our freedom and getting wasted,” she said. “I actually think people are going harder than before.”
After more than two years of uncertainty for nightclubs, governments across Europe have gradually dropped many of their pandemic restrictions over the last few months, allowing clubs to reopen with a sense of relative stability for the first time in two years.
In many countries, including Spain, Germany and Britain, governments now allow clubs to welcome visitors without any vaccine checks, masks or distancing requirements. And although the pandemic is not yet over, and a new variant could appear anytime to spoil the fun, Europe’s clubbers seem ready to relive the days when nobody had ever heard of COVID-19.
The return of the clubs has come as a relief to many workers in the nightlife sector, which has been especially hard-hit. Before the pandemic, 45% of the gross domestic product in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, came from tourism, for which clubbing is a major draw. In the first half of last year, tourist spending in Ibiza and the nearby island of Formentera
was less than one-third of pre-pandemic levels, according to the Statistical Institute of the Balearic Islands.
Ocio de Ibiza, a local nightlife association, estimates that 30,000 people traveled to Ibiza on a recent weekend to go to the clubs, a number on par with a pre-pandemic opening weekend. Sanjay Nandi, the chief executive of the group that runs the large Pacha nightclub, said before the opening that advance ticket sales had surpassed those of previous years. Of the island’s major clubs, only one, Privilege, does not yet have plans to reopen this summer.
“I know we are very lucky,” Nandi said, explaining that, like other clubs, Pacha had received help from Spain’s government in the form of a furlough program for staff. The company also received a loan of 18 million euros, about $19 million, from the government’s Recapitalization Fund for pandemichit businesses, and it was able to get some revenue through its constellation of restaurants and other venues. Nandi said that the size of Ibiza’s major clubs — whose capacities range from around 3,000 to 7,800 — and their associated political clout allowed them to weather the pandemic better than smaller venues. “Being bigger helps,” he said.
Other clubs in Europe have been less fortunate. According to France24, the French broadcaster, 200 clubbing venues in the country had permanently closed because of the pandemic as of last fall. A survey released in October by the Night Time Industries Association, a British lobbying group, found that 22% of the city’s clubs had shuttered since the pandemic’s start.
Perhaps the most ambitious measures to protect the clubbing sector were taken in Berlin, another European clubbing capital where nightlife is recognized as a key driver of the city economy. According to a 2018 study by the Berlin Club Commission, tourists visiting the German capital for its club scene contributed approximately $1.7 billion to the city’s economy.
As well as offering financial aid for small and large businesses during the pandemic, German officials classified clubs as cultural venues, allowing them to access a 2-billioneuro fund meant for institutions such as museums and theaters. In Berlin, extra emergency funding was also made available for shuttered clubs. Kyle Van Horn, the managing director of Trauma Bar und Kino, a Berlin club and arts venue, said the pandemic was a turning point in the way officials have treated clubs. “I think there was a change from the side of the government; they are finally seeing us as relevant contributors to society,” he said.
Lutz Leichsenring, a Club Commission spokesman, said that thanks to the support, no Berlin clubs had closed as a direct result of pandemic restrictions. “The aid money was done in a very well-targeted way,” he said by phone. He explained that the pandemic had vindicated yearslong efforts by Berlin’s clubbing industry to mobilize as a political force. “We were very well networked as a sector,” he said.
And perhaps inevitably, the social changes of the past two years are also making themselves felt on the dance floor. Steven Braines, a co-founder of He.She.They, a Londonbased record label and event company organizing
LGBTQ-inclusive parties at Ibiza’s Amnesia megaclub this season, said club organizers were now more focused on expanding gender and racial diversity among the acts they booked, which he said was partly a result of the heightened international visibility of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter during the pandemic.
Braines added that he sensed that men “maybe aren’t as predatorial anymore on the dance floor.” Club culture would be reshaped, he said, by a cohort of 18- to 20-yearolds who were now visiting clubs for the first time, and who had less experience with drugs and alcohol. “This will be a new breed,” he said.
One night, some of these newcomers were gathering outside Amnesia, on a highway outside Ibiza’s largest town. “I had just turned 18 when the pandemic happened, and everyone told me that I had lost the best years of going out,” said Sebastian Ochoa, 20, who works in social media in Madrid. “When I go out at home, there’s a limit, but here there’s the party, the after-party, the after-afterparty. I’m here to make up for lost time.”