Memory Dance x Ibiza

To launch the Julien Temple documentary film, IBIZA - SILENT MOVIE (2019), I was invited to give an introduction. Here is the essay from that night…

A short tale.

I recall the first time I went to Ibiza in the mid-nineties. An eleven-year-old. Two parents and an adolescent brother. In many respects this was a prototypical family holiday in the Spanish Med. We could have been anywhere; ten days of white sand beaches, hotel swimming pools, red shoulders, and English fry-up caffs. But taking a bus trip into San Antonio one night below my tiny pre-teen mind.

We ate out at a family restaurant. Walked the boulevard by the sea as day became night. The neon came on and the clubs and bars of the main strip thronged with people listening to the chart music I was familiar with from home. English people being loud. Police watching on in disdain.

Then, trying to find a way back to our bus stop, my dad said he knew a shortcut. He didn’t. He always does this. He ushered us down a back street and the music grew louder, more rhythmic. This was house music. Glamourous people dancing in tiny bars. One place had men stood outside dressed wholly in leather. One man had his buttocks on display, poking from out of his leather shorts. You don’t see this in Hull. My Dad sped up his detour and we rushed out toward ‘safety’. The 4/4 beat continued.

‘What was all that about, Dad?’, I asked.

‘Not sure, son. Funny wasnt it’ he replied in his usual non-disclosure voice.

Back home in England, I remember being excited and confused by that street of repetitive beats and leather gear. Soon after, in early teenage-dom, I watched the Sky One documentary series, Ibiza Uncovered. An epiphany. That street now made sense. This thing called dance music. The leather. The drugs and the drinking. Escapism and hedonism and Manumission all just moments away from our safe and secure suburban holidaymaker’s hotel.  

I’ve been back a few times since, without parental guidance, and I’m always reminded that this is the essence of the place. Ibiza is many things. There are many Ibiza’s. From the dancefloor to the sands, to the hippies and the Brits abroad. In many ways, the island has changed radically throughout its history, in some ways it has stayed the same. And it is for these reasons, I suppose, why one of the most celebrated British documentarians has decided to make this film you are about to watch.

Ibiza on Film

Fiction filmmaking has often turned the lens onto Ibiza. In the swinging 60s, Spanish jaunts like Balearic Caper, a heist comedy, and the Pink Floyd sound-tracking More in which an American girl introduces a German boy to heroin and LSD on the dunes of Ibizan beaches, set the mood that the island was a place for hedonistic misfits and groovy cats. In 1974, Orson Welles’ F Is For Fake turns its gaze on Hungarian painter and art forger, Elmyr de Hory who lived and worked on Ibiza.

However, since the 2000s, the go-to feature format has typically been lurid teen comedies and romantic tales of clubbing, yachts, and glamour. Kicking off with Kevin and Perry in 2000 through to 2018’s Netflix film Ibiza – Love Drunk which IMDB describes the plot as ‘Harper, a single 30-something New Yorker, lets loose on a business trip to Barcelona, leading to a flirty encounter with a famous DJ.’

Less said.

In documentary, the post-war period is noted by ethnographic docs about rural island life, while 1966’s Hallucination Generation, is a propaganda piece that aimed to demonise the island’s pill-popping beatniks and drug dealers - but actually makes the life they lead seem rather exciting.  The later arrival of Acid House in the 1980s saw camera crews jump on a plane to document the burgeoning scene and is defined by Channel 4 piece, ‘A Short Film About Chilling’ which sees key protagonists DJ Alfredo, 808 State and Terry Farley brought together under the Balearic haze.

Today the online content farm is awash with myriad long and short form Ibiza documentaries; both those that celebrate its late century electronic music heritage, (from iconic club Space, to chill-out veteran Jose Padilla) and those that revel in the newness of 2019’s super-wealthy selfie obsessed tourists, VIPs and the beautiful people.

Julien Temple

So where does this Julien Temple film fit in to all this?

Ibiza: The Silent Movie marks 40 years in the game for Temple. Starting, of course with the explosion of punk, the Pistols, McLaren and Westwood with The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle in 1979. His documentary career is defined by those relationships at the heart of the UK/London guitar industry, and he’s made films with The Clash, Stones, UK Subs, Ray Davies, and Wilko Johnson. Aside from the occasional detour into fiction, see 1986’s Bowie-starring musical, Absolute Beginners, Temple has remained in factual filmmaking. His docs have always been that bit anarchic, occasionally surreal, and loaded with a cheeky humour. This film is no different.

But it is to Temple’s archive essay on Glastonbury Festival, that this film shares its closest kinship. Given full access, he took footage shot by his crew and combined it with archive, and crowd sourced films, into a two-hour epic that drills down into the madness of that special place in Somerset.

Film

In describing the film, Temple said he was attempting to draw an entire history of the island dating back 2000 years to the Phoenicians, Moors, and Romans, and from these early origins he brings together the identities and motifs that recur though the film right up to the Ibiza of 2019.

It’s a history rush that blends the various mythologies of the island with so called archiveology. Temple is an acid-scorched collagist. This film is not linear. It chops and changes. This is a chemically enhanced tale of insiders and outsiders. It presents the Mediterranean landscape and seascape forever in flux between agriculture and industry and new age utopian idealism, and the fractures that sometimes happen when those facets meet.  A place of great contradictions across politics, class, and environment lines.

As he said in a recent Guardian interview, quote - “Connecting the past through music of the past and archive, the collision of things that are not necessarily meant to be together is a very fresh way of entering the past of a place and explaining its relevance to the present.” 

So, with this there is no dialogue. Archive material from the 20th Century (some, like the Glastonbury film, has been crowdsourced and uploaded online) and recreations rub up together in the frantic edit with elaborate Gilliam-esque title cards illuminating facts and figures.

What we get is 90 minutes of Dadaist play, General Franco, Mafioso, and post-war escapism. Misfits, strays, and hippies. Spirituality and sunsets. Tourism. Turmoil and Tans. And money. Lots of money. And rhythms. A near constant stream of Balearic, Chicago House, Detroit Techno, Acid House, Jazz, and New Age is our guide. No talking heads. No commentary.

Temple on the decision to play with the form said in Mixmag: “You can really play with the soundtrack in a way that you wouldn’t want to in a more conventional, dialogue driven film and be very experimental with the sound effects in combination with the music.” Because he comes from the world of London punk guitars, and has openly admitted not being so aware of electronic dance music, Temple enlisted the sage advice of Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim to produce the soundtrack. Calling on his three decades as disc jockey and dancer on the White Isle; Cook mixes a DJ set of familiar 4/4 tracks, of hands-in-the air vocal chops, and blissed out Balearic.

One of the title cards reads:

THE ISLAND ENJOYS LOOKING AT ITSELF

This seems like a neat summation of this strange and glorious place. For better or worse, we too fall under the spell. It’s impossible for us not to rejoice in its contradictions and its sense of being. And even when it’s ghoulish and reckless. We can’t not watch.