Amnesia’s pre-smartphone archive
Ibiza is a ghost town in the winter months. But in a few months’ time, both the infamous Ryanair flights and the A-listers’ private jets will descend onto the Balearic island for the season’s opening parties. This year, the team at Amnesia used the calm before the storm to dig into the club’s 50-year history.
What began as a party inside an old Spanish farmhouse in 1976 grew into a hedonistic haven for party lovers in the 90s and has since cemented its status as an iconic institution, operating for half a century, with the music played inside the venue shaping the sound of dancefloors across the planet.
It was at Amnesia, in 1987, watching legendary resident DJ Alfredo play Balearic beats in an open-air set of under the stars, that Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker took ecstasy for the first time, and decided to take what they’d heard back home to the UK. “That night I found everything I had been looking for. All four of us changed that night,” Danny Rampling would later say to the Guardian in 2007. “I can remember saying I think we may be on to something here.” Within a year of returning from that holiday, the UK’s rave and acid house scene was born, and the dance music in the country was utterly transformed forever.
So when a dusty metal VHS was discovered at the back of a forgotten cupboard in the club last winter, Amnesia’s Delfina Uriate told me that the team felt like “an archaeologist discovering a dinosaur bone.” The footage was a rare archive of the club’s dancefloor in 1992. Beyond the unsurprising number of swinging jaws and fabulously eclectic fashion, there was one thing I couldn’t work out while watching the clips: where the DJ was. The entire crowd were doing something rare to see in a nightclub today — facing each other.
“In the past, the protagonists of the club were the people gathered together. Today, the DJ has become the protagonist — the new rock star of our time and that inevitably changes the way people position themselves on the dancefloor,” Delfina tells me. “Everyone is facing forward, towards the DJ, whereas before there was more of a mix, a gathering, a sense of being part of something together.”
“It is funny that the club is called Amnesia”, she goes on. “There is a huge part of its history that has very little visual documentation, beyond the memories and stories of the people who were actually there.”
By chance, Delfina recognised a man dancing enthusiastically in one of the clips and forwarded me his contact details. It was the island’s famous Marcello, who first came to Ibiza from Italy in 1987 and began a 28-year stint of working at Amnesia, wrapping up his last season in 2015. He had three jobs most nights (though he’ll tell you it never really felt like work): PR, working down at the port for Amnesia, inviting people into the club; choreographer, pulling together a troupe of dancers he called “movers”, most of them just tourists he'd spotted on the dancefloor and talked into staying the summer; and dancer, tasked with getting the party going. His record for working over the years was 100 nights straight – sans drugs. “You don’t need anything to have fun, just the music,” he says.
“People need to move,” he continues. “There’s something magical about moving, you know? You feel better, you smile, you connect with people. That is what is missing now in Ibiza: that connection.” Marcello’s not the only one who thinks this. A video of UNVRS, Ibiza’s largest club just a few minutes away from Amnesia, went viral this summer, thanks to the motionless crowd and a sea of phones in the air. The comments exploded with users mocking the people in the video and lamenting the death of the dancefloor. “You just see people with the phone on their head like a zombie,” Marcello says of the UNVRS. “Zero people dancing. It’s insane.”
Marcello blames phones. He told me about one Sunday in Ibiza in the late 90s, when he saw the owner of Amnesia with the first mobile phone he’d laid eyes on. “It was huge, like luggage.” In less than 20 years, almost everyone would have one of these in their hands on the dancefloor. The lack of phones in the found footage is striking: nobody is looking down, other than to have a sip of their drinks, and people are dancing with wild abandon, no fear of being filmed and ridiculed online.
Phrank, a legendary photographer who’s been documenting Ibiza’s clubs since the mid 90s, is one of the few people who were able to point a lens at the crowd in these pre-smartphone days. “Back then, taking a camera into a club wasn’t normal at all,” he told me. “Some clubs would take cameras from you at the entrance. I sometimes smuggled a little point-and-shoot camera inside.”
He too saw how the arrival of the phone transformed the scene on the island. After securing a regular photography gig at Space, often being paid in beer, camera-phones began to arrive. “I remember telling Fritz, who was director of Space at the time, ‘You can forget trying to control this now – you can’t take everybody’s phone away’.” He was proved right. “Today, sometimes there are so many phones in the air that people seem to forget to enjoy the actual moment.” But, as a photographer, he understands the impulse. “If somebody spends a lot of money on a week in Ibiza, of course they want some memories to take home.”
“But one thing I still like about Amnesia is that the dance floor matters. For me, it still feels like the party is at the heart of the club,” Phrank continues. “Despite all the changes, Amnesia has managed to keep something authentic.” It’s true: nightclubs across Europe are shutting their doors, and it’s getting increasingly rare for spaces like this, with half a century of history to look back on, to continue thriving.
There’s a lot of nostalgia which can come with looking back at the golden days of clubbing, particularly in a place like Ibiza. But ultimately, the people in the footage of Amnesia in 1992 are no different from us today. They want to move, forget about the world outside, and connect. And today, at a time when smartphones are making us feel more stressed and isolated than ever, it’s never been more important to celebrate spaces where we can, even if briefly, log off.