IBIZA & tRANSIENCE: CAN PLACES, SPACES AND FACES EVER TRULY BE DETACHED?
We were headed out to a smaller town on the northern part of the coast, Sant Antoni de Portmany, where the hotels were cheapest in October. Home to a huge marina, an aquarium, endless beaches and some of Ibiza’s most infamous clubs, we were content with having variety in what we could do, even though we pointedly went with no expectations - partially due to it being the very end of the party season, partially because we had significantly less spending money between us than the horrendously high figures we’d been told from friends who’d already been, and partially because we’d intended on just booking a quick bit of winter sun. A rooftop pool, a beach opposite our apartment, 26 degree weather and as many Maxibon Cookies as we could get our paws on (perhaps a naive hope to have, as for some reason we couldn’t find them anywhere).
My partner and I are no strangers to being somewhat akin to the term ‘agents of chaos’. We’re both party people/hedonists/ravers/sesh-heads/whatever other terms are adjacent to those, and as a creative couple - myself being an artist, and my partner being a DJ/producer - we seem to constantly seek out inspiration, adventure, experiences that give us a good story to tell and often spawn a lengthy debrief conversation about humankind and connection, which in turn informs the art we respectively make. It seems that a lot of the time, when we go to events or just wing it and see what happens, we encounter the right people at the right time, and our shared sense of freedom and curiosity means that we often end up in very much left-field situations - all of them good, but just nothing that we could ever really expect of the original reason we were out.
Our first fleeting connection was with the lucky buyer of aisle seat 26F on our outbound Ryanair flight. Before the plane was even fully boarded, he leaned over and asked us in a thick Irish twang: “d’you guys fancy a beer? On me”. Obviously we said yes, and prior to the general plebian trolleys being wheeled out, we were graced with a can of Stella Artois each (I’m not a beer drinker, but the cider was 1.50 more which felt a bit too much of a pisstake) whilst our new friend, who introduced himself as Ramie, sipped a plastic faux-glass of red wine and told us about how he’s a DJ and is here with 120 others who used to cut about Belfast’s rave scene, all headed to a town across the island from us to play and sing and boogie at a small bar on the beachfront. We spent the entire two-and-a-half hour flight chatting, and he passed us his number so that we could come say hi when he was playing.
The next came during our desperate search for the ‘right’ bus stop (hint: there is only one outbound bus stop at the Ibiza Airport departures hall), the culmination of which was myself shouting ‘IS ANYONE TAKING THE L9 TO SANT ANTONI PLEASE’ down the 90-strong bus stop queue, most of whom justifiably just stared at me in disgust/confusion/irritation. Two lovely Northern ladies near the front came to our rescue, who said that yes, they were headed to Sant Antoni, had we just got off the flight from Manchester too? And before we knew it, we were loading our collection of luggage into the boot of a taxi whose driver I fruitlessly attempted to barter with on the price, and we were finally on the road. It turns out that the cost of a taxi split four ways was cheaper than a bus ticket, and far quicker; those extra 20 minutes saved are invaluable to people who intend on going out on the town as soon as they check in.
We excitedly nattered about everything we could possibly fit into a 40-minute drive, but the highlight of the conversations came when one of the ladies mentioned her partner being in a band back home in the North of England, which - and you’ll understand if you’ve ever been even minutely involved in the creative and music scene of a city - is fairly common nowadays. What really took us aback was the realisation that the band that her partner was in was part of a gig that my partner, mouth agape in the front passenger seat, had photographed about a month or so ago, and that after fond discussion of Manchester’s alternative haunts, it was incredibly likely that we’d actually all already crossed paths before today.
Fleeting, insane coincidences like this seem to occur more often than could be considered completely accidental, and it almost makes me believe in the concept of fate. But, in the chaotic, carefree spirit of Ibiza, once we had roughly split our taxi fare with whatever coins we had and shared brief plans for the weekend, we split up to our respective accommodations, and never encountered each other again.
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There is a sense of transiency in Ibiza that I’ve not noticed in too many other places; a feeling of fleetingness, the ‘here for a good time, not for a long time’ attitude from seasonal workers and hedonistic tourists alike, where lasting relationships and communities can struggle to be nurtured. There is, of course, the obvious problem of drug usage on the island, an industry fuelled by markedly few loyal customer bases, large bulk orders for groups of tourists upon touchdown to Ibiza, and such brazen attempts at selling that I wouldn’t even consider it underground - in our few days there, I would estimate that we were approached no less than a hundred times asking what we did and what we were after. These offers came from people on the streets we walked down to find food, from workers behind hotel bars, from promoters lurking outside lesser-known clubs aiming for a bit of loyalty, from tourists at the airport arrivals terminal heading home who couldn’t take their supplies back with them but didn’t want them to go to waste*.
(*This one we did accept: a Spanish hippy couple by the arrivals taxi rank, the boyfriend of which asked me if I smoked as I passed him with a lit cigarette. Yes, mate, but I don’t have any cigs left - got a lighter though, if you need it? I go to hand him my Bic and instead he presses a small clingfilmed ball into my palm and closes my fingers over it - which we later discovered was moon rock, and says ‘here. It’s good shit’. And the girlfriend leans over and goes ‘yeah, it’s good shit’. It was, in fact, good shit.)
The seasonal workers - usually aged between 18 and 27, from the UK or neighbouring countries in Europe and often working minimum-wage hospitality jobs to fund their stay in a self-proclaimed paradise - are some of the main contributors to this, and many find themselves tangled in low-level dealing operations from their apartment, from behind the bar, or at superclubs on in-season weekends where they can move more covertly. Some escalate from just selling to friends and other workers to drug-dealing income becoming their main source of income for their time abroad, to the point where it appears to be very much normalised as a reliable way to get by on the island. With hospitality jobs reliant on the efficiency of promoters and bookings, drug dealing is arguably a more stable source of income for many who engage in it, and offers a shred of consistency amongst the chaotic nature of the party capital of the world.
The free-for-all atmosphere in the main towns provides a false sense of security in illicit operations, creating an idea for seasonal workers dealing on the side that their activities will largely go unnoticed and therefore unpunished. For the most part, local authorities are focused on tackling large-scale operations: the importers, the kingpins, the logistical coordinators distributing product to any corner of the island where there’s at least one bar, which means that smaller, more ‘intimate’ dealers, so to speak, assume that the crime of slinging a bag to a few mates or a rowdy group of ‘Brits abroad’-esque tourists they’ve befriended at the Irish pub (which, legally, is still distribution and carries up to 6 years in the non air-conditioned slammer) would be considered a small fish to fry in the vast selection of Ibizan sharks dominating the island’s club scene.
This false assumption also comes with a false sense of security for the seasonal workers caught up in low-level dealing: that everyone does it, so it’s fine, and you won’t get caught. For most, that’s probably true. You fuck back off to 6-degree weather in October, leaving behind your cramped flatshare and bar-cleaning rags, and you likely become a part of one of two groups:
1.) You had a sick time. You convince all your other mates to come out to Ibiza next year, ready to flaunt your new connections and guestlist promises. Life back in the UK is boring, yes, but you’re motivated to visit again and therefore are somewhat content to return to working through the winter to afford to do so. Aside from some small public disorder fines, you escape relatively unscathed.
2.) You had a sick time. You convince all your other mates to come out to Ibiza next year, ready to flaunt your new connections and guestlist promises. You have become cripplingly reliant on various forms of substance to fuel your day-to-day work and catch yourself in the disabled toilets of your new ‘Spoons job taking a cheeky ‘one-off’ key to get through the bank holiday rush. You got caught up in the whirlwind of the island’s drug trade, which paid off for the most part, but made access to drugs too fucking easy and now you are left chasing that unreachable high of your overstayed welcome in the land of the eternal sesh.
2.) You had a sick time. You convince all your other mates to come out to Ibiza next year, ready to flaunt your new connections and guestlist promises. You have become cripplingly reliant on various forms of substance to fuel your day-to-day work and catch yourself in the disabled toilets of your new ‘Spoons job taking a cheeky ‘one-off’ key to get through the bank holiday rush. You got caught up in the whirlwind of the island’s drug trade, which paid off for the most part, but made access to drugs too fucking easy and now you are left chasing that unreachable high of your overstayed welcome in the land of the eternal sesh.
Outside of these groups lies those whose actions - funnily enough! - finally have consequences, receiving jail time, hefty fines, or lifelong bans on travel, nuking their plans of ever ‘doing it all again’ in the future. Their holiday/gap year/seasonaire lifestyle becomes a permanent black mark on the rest of their lives, where their desire for temporary hedonism is stronger than the idea of ever returning to normalcy or settling down. Their travels are no longer the separate entity, detached from routine, that they sometimes tend to be, and the old adage ‘what happens in Vegas Ibiza, stays in Vegas Ibiza’ is redundant if you’re spending the rest of your free-spirited years crudely painting pills and baggies with sweat on the walls of your prison cell in Madrid.
VICE made a very interesting documentary on this exact issue (and are who I should credit for the original usage of ‘land of the eternal sesh’), but I am aware that VICE primarily is an entertainment company rather than a source of factual journalism, and so whilst I do think that the majority of the documentary is fairly true-to-life, it would be unrealistic to say that the portrayed cases of young seasonal workers getting sucked into the drug trade are commonplace for all. It does do a good job of showing how casual this appears to be, though - there’s a particular interview with an Irish lad who, like others, started off his season in bar work but realised just how much he could make if he was dealing instead. A deal happens whilst the crew are in the car: the lad is friendly to the buyers, cracks a few jokes, and once back on the road and discussing seasonal workers, immediately follows up with the harrowing statement of ‘it goes from the eternal sesh that’s fun, to the eternal sesh because they have no other choice and they can’t afford food’.
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It is normal for short trips to be transient parts of life, for them to feel removed from ‘real life’, for holidaymakers to start their day with a margarita because ‘fuck it, you’re on ‘oliday’. There is - at least, among Brits - a weird acceptance of behaviours on holiday that would be considered as ridiculous or worrying if carried out in normal life, like shagging between plastic sun loungers on the beach at night or getting so wasted at 3pm that you become a danger to yourself and others. You exist in a bubble of oblivion, where time isn’t real and consequences don’t exist, and become the most primal, unhinged version of yourself - one who eats sand for an Instagram story, for example, or abandons any moral values at the Ibiza Airport bus stop.
As one can reasonably assume, the local response to the reliance on island tourism to sustain their economy is varied at best. I’m sure it’s fair to say that lifelong residents of Ibiza don’t take too fondly to having their summers dominated by thumping house music and rowdy hen/stag dos; although we never experienced any explicit rudeness, we were part of potentially the last few of many thousands of partygoers causing chaos in weekly increments from April to September, and quite frankly I would be sick of dealing with our kind too. Tourists blur into one, continuous web of faces, accents, and bucket hats across the six-month peak season, and for each budget flight leaving for England on a Friday carrying hundreds of sunburned shoulders and crippling comedowns, there’s guaranteed to be a new, fresh batch of pasty white skin and Klarna’ed ASOS fits incoming, ready to be unleashed upon the small coastal towns with a new hunger for substance and carnage, as if the preceding weeks had never happened.
To the inbound travellers, the preceding weeks had never happened. Not to them, anyway. They weren’t there. The messiness of whoever was holidaying in Ibiza the previous week isn’t their problem, and in a display of ‘main character syndrome’, the new arrivals hope to make the most of their own holiday perhaps without realising that the locals have already seen twenty groups of pink ‘Pussy Patrol’ shirt-bearers just this month, and that attempting to climb up onto the wooden sunchair-like facade of the Ibiza Rocks Hotel DJ booth has been done, mate, it’s not legendary any more. In the same way that airports and train stations are liminal spaces, created only to facilitate the in-between moments, Ibiza feels a bit detached from reality, mostly in the few days where the party scene was still a thing during our mid-October trip. Travellers become caricatures of The Most Irritating Fucking People You’ve Ever Met for a week and then bin their new personas (along with a leftover baggie and beach towels) as they board their flight home, dehydrated and broke, leaving any person they encountered who’s in Ibiza longer-term to believe that every young Brit visiting really is just this insane, unrestrained alcoholic. When you are exposed to an extreme for a long period of time, or thousands of examples of this extreme, it becomes less extreme to you - a left-field analogy, but similar to how people become radicalised in extreme political ideologies.
The disillusion with young British travellers was not something we had visibly noticed, although perhaps that was more to do with the places that we frequented being those whose incomes relied on the hordes of bum bag-clad tourists to sustain themselves, and so being outwardly nice is kind of part and parcel of remaining open. But being a permanent resident of the island and living in that extreme for a good six months of each year, being exposed to waves of carefree and irresponsible behaviour - and having to accept that their clientele’s detached, unrestrained, separate week-long periods of freedom and the perception of few lasting consequences is their consistent day-to-day reality for most of the year, being unable to do much about it other than become part of it or move away from the place that they grew up - must be pretty fucking rough. Suddenly they are outsiders looking in on their own roots, where the fast and carefully curated chaos of tourism takes precedence over the stability of its own people, placing more importance on the fulfilment of the short periods of escapism and pleasure-seeking than the lives of those who call Ibiza their home.
There are absolutely parts of Ibiza that aren’t primarily dedicated to tourism and partying: on our long walk back from the aquarium, located on the complete opposite end of the town to our hotel, we passed through quiet residential pockets of white villas and balconies peppered with laundry left to dry in the sun, where we felt like we were in a different place entirely. There were still sun-bleached promotional stickers for artists and collectives plastered on lampposts, flyers for DJ equipment and speakers for hire, and a good number of secure, modernised mansions sporting plaques on their front gates with details of who to contact to rent the property out for large groups. The idea of hosting a massive party in such dormant, peaceful areas seemed more stressful to us than anything else, although it was very much in keeping with the idea that visitors to Ibiza tend to be more focused on their insane blowout week-long sesh than whether said sesh will disturb the neighbours. But alongside these, there were rusted cars parked in driveways, well-fed cats with collars, and older couples enjoying homemade lunch together on balcony tables - and there wasn’t an ATM on every single corner.
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Arriving on the last weekend of the peak season meant that we felt the pressure to party on the Friday that we landed and on the Saturday night afterwards, to make the most of anything that may be closing its doors past that point.With limited options for closing parties, and the motivation to source a few good venues for an inevitable return next summer with a group of mates, we felt a pressure to not waste time doing the touristy things that could be done the following week, and to prolong the partying so that the days coming could be spent relaxing without posthumous FOMO. This, obviously, leads to being mortal in a Spanish Burger King at 2pm, attempting to nurse the post-lunch drinking break with more drink to ‘get us perked up again’, and wishing at 10pm that the superclubs next door would just fucking turn the music down because we really can’t be arsed to go out now.
With our feet in both doors of the Ibizan experience - partying, clubs, fast food and cheap(-ish) cocktails vs. beautiful never-ending coastlines, warm turquoise ocean waters and the most incredible grilled seafood I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating - it made the contrast between on- and off-season ever more jarring come Monday, when bars we’d frequented over the weekend had already closed their shutters and the number of other young Brits that we’d pass and crack dry jokes had decreased substantially. The beauty of the traditional Mediterranean architecture, white painted villas with arch windows and tiled skirting, became more obvious when the six other pubs in the vicinity were no longer blaring Vengabus or running their strobe lights until 4am. There were still young people who seemed like they’d come for a week-long sesh pottering about the town in football shirts and cross-body bags, looking a little bit lost at the realisation that KFC may actually be the only place for a cheap cerveza at this point. Perhaps, like ourselves, they had seen the low prices of accommodation at this time of year but neglected to think about why that was the case. Perhaps, also like ourselves, they had the hope of the party finding them and just wanted a bit of sun, with no expectation of much else other than a good time.
The natural beauty of the island is apparent even before you land, when you’re gazing longingly out of the aeroplane windows, and we were appreciative that we had the time from Monday onwards to explore other towns and go on long walks in the sun without feeling like we were missing out on anything. That idea in itself held us back; to consider watching the incredible blush-pink sunsets or exploring an aquarium created in a cliff cave as ‘missing out’, a ‘lesser option’, is insane. For most, going on holiday is something that you do to escape the stuff you normally do at home. But if you’re a sesh-head travelling to one of the most infamous party spots on the globe, your lifestyle comes with you, repackaging your average weekend out on the town with a gorgeous seascape and the promise of not just a wild Saturday night, but a five-day bender, and who wouldn’t want to be insanely high by the sea knowing that they can do it all again tomorrow?
A longtime friend of mine who has frequented Ibiza more times than I can recall, and who described themselves as ‘a drug-taker that is very close to pushing the limits of functional’, referring to being a habitual bud-smoker and occasional party drug enthusiast, described the island itself as the real drug. The beauty, the energy, the atmosphere, the passion shared from their mom (also an Ibiza frequenter, both past and present) to their teenage self, creating the idea of an exciting, surreal paradise of laughter and memories, soundtracked to floaty electronic synths and supplemented by white rum and fresh orange juice - all molded together in one big blissful, drawn-out state of euphoria. The concept of travelling to the party capital, surrounded by debauchery and pink sunsets, and remaining close to stone cold sober is an initially-surprising yet very-much-welcomed choice that they make. They tell me that they don’t feel like they need anything else - that the feeling of peppered sunrays on their skin and the smell of salty seawater, the sounds of laughter and speedboats lapping at the docks of the marina and a cacophony of ‘cheers’ in the distance, cheering from the bars, bad singing to catchy, poppy noughties tunes, the feeling that this, actually, this is happiness, this is joy and euphoria and gratitude for life - is more than enough for them.
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In the opening of this piece, I talked about Ramie, our new cabin-mate, the Belfast DJ who suggested we come to the gig he was playing at on the Saturday night. You may have wondered if we took him up on this offer. Or, if you are someone who is no stranger to trying to gather heads for an event or have experienced the same kind of ‘passive bonding over the shared yet separate experience of a holiday’, you may have assumed that we promptly forgot about this conversation upon sinking a tequila sunrise by the hotel pool and chalked another one up on the temporal friendship board, next to every ‘friend’ you’ve met in the club toilets who you swear you’ll hang out with again someday.
As I also talked about, my partner and I are adventure-seekers, and so on Saturday morning we cheerfully sent Ramie a text asking what time the event he was DJ’ing at was starting and if we definitely had the right location. We’d worked out that we could get the bus across the island to the town, Santa Eularia, but that the last one ran back to Sant Antoni at 8pm, so we’d have to arrange a taxi back, which various local bar staff told us upon our questioning about nearby taxi services would run upwards of 50 euros. Steep, sure, but so is everything else on the island. If we went out early enough, we’d have chance to explore a little more of Santa Eularia, an opportunity we hadn’t really considered before, and that was enough to make us put together our plan to catch an early bus, have a walk around and something to eat before heading to the bar, meeting Ramie and all 120 of his crew, and having a boogie.
Santa Eularia was a gorgeous little town. Buskers sang a cheerful rendition of ‘Valerie’ by Amy Winehouse on the seafront whilst we walked in the opposite direction with our 360-degree camera, capturing the sights of a place we never meant to encounter. We stopped at an unassuming little restaurant on our way towards the bar for some pre-drinks, upon seeing their menu board outside: not only did they promise 6 cocktails, but one of them being a Mudslide was enough to convince us. Like adults, we shared what were essentially 4 boozy milkshakes alongside a plate of garlic bread with cheese.
We eventually made it to the venue, situated right at the end of the main seafront strip and looking packed out already. With free entry and no tickets required, we sauntered straight in, feeling reassured that we were definitely in the right place after hearing choruses of Irish twags resonating around the tiki-themed seating areas. A lady holding a sweet little spaniel puppy passed by me, and enthusiastically introduced her dog to me when she saw my look of excitement. The puppy rested her head on my wrist whilst I stroked her, locking me into position for ten more minutes of chatter whilst my partner found the toilets.
Whilst Ramie had not replied to our messages from earlier, we knew he would be here later on and excitedly chatted about how we were probably the first people to have ever actually taken someone up on something like that, a casual natter across Ryanair row 26 DEF being realised into an actual plan of sorts. We are no strangers to loose plans for parties and raves being unravelled at the last second, and I suppose that aspect of transience that I mentioned earlier is guaranteed to exist across events where 90% of the attendees are not sober and, whilst not intentionally maliciously at all, overcommit themselves to prospective ideas out of the sheer passion of being around others with the same interests that mostly never come to fruition. In the world we live in today, communities must be sought out rather than stumbled upon in most cases, and especially for those who attend things that their primary friendship circles aren’t as interested in, the desire to bond with others and the notion that times like the ones they’re in can happen again, if you make them happen again, outweighs logic and the realism of the outside world that many people seek to forget about when attending raves.
Raves and dance spaces, much like Ibiza, tend to exist in a bubble of their own, temporarily shielding those within it from the frustration and monotony of normal adult life; unless it relates to the potential of an afters and the logistics of people getting home for work or to feed the cat, job schedules and the real-world timeline are not usually brought up in conversation at these events. The focus is on the here and the now: do we all love this kind of music? Great! Do you live around the city, or at least within commuting distance, or are you just visiting? Cool! How about this other event next month; do you think maybe we can get a group together?
The answer, more often than not, ends up being no. The initial response is a resounding yes, but once the event closes down and everyone returns to reality, the kinship and the passion takes a backseat to maintaining something of financial stability and a routine - keeping a job, paying rent and bills and council tax and groceries and debts and credit cards and wincing at your bank balance in bed whilst nursing a comedown to back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld, and reluctantly committing yourself to a ‘quiet month’ whilst you assess if you can afford to do it again in a few weeks’ time.
There is no conscious attempt at deceit when agreeing to fabulous plans that will be forgotten about post-rave; it is just part of the combined blessing and curse of being a part of spaces that exist solely in the moment, fleeting parts of life that provide escapism from the real world (whether consciously sought out or not) and continue to foggily exist almost solely in memory and shaky iPhone videos. In the same fashion, the concept of ‘Ibiza’ is a byproduct of its own success: it has built itself into a chamber of ‘going big or going home’, occupying a hazy but satisfied space in the minds of the thrill-seeking partygoers it attracts year on year, becoming a memory where you know you had a good time but the fine details of which escape you. To revert back to its roots as a sleepy, sunny Balearic island and dissociate itself from the legendary party scene that it has curated would plunge its economy into irreversible depths, and not only remove all of the loyal tourists returning each summer for more carved-out weeks of hedonism, but likely impact the lives of the locals who were born and raised there, leaving them with fewer opportunities for consistent work, large sections of each coastal town boarded shut and falling into disrepair, serving only as bleak reminders of the permanent mark that the party industry has made on an unassuming island, and a jagged perception of what their home really is, and all that it ever was.
Obviously deeper nuances like this were not something that we were consciously thinking about when discussing the potential of being the first people to ever actually commit to plans made on a flight to Ibiza, and we were simply excited at the prospect of seeing this guy happily astonished at the reality of our presence. But after lurking around the venue as blatant odd-ones-out amongst the groups of close friends, and no success in finding Ramie, we cut our losses and decided to peg it back into the main town to catch the 8pm bus back to Sant Antoni, agreeing that we’d still had a good day out but that the vibe of the function was more akin to a family reunion that we felt somewhat like we were intruding on, by no fault of their or our own. At the end of the day, our plans made on the plane were formed from a passing shared enthusiasm for music, and maybe sometimes they’re better off remaining as a ‘what if?’ in our heads. Maybe the not knowing and the anticipation is more exciting than the actuality; maybe we would have just seemed like we were weirdly eager or stalking this man we’d met exactly once for no longer than two hours. Maybe, in his mind, it was an offer that was not meant to be taken literally, being someone familiar with the constant chaos of Ibiza and knowing how easy it is for travellers to find these side quests to their main plans - and in our minds, having never been here before, aware that the season had ended and in pursuit of opportunities to dance, it was an offer that we couldn’t refuse.
During our once-again desperate search for the right bus stop to take us back to Sant Antoni, we met with a German lady clad in shiny black PVC, sporting a platinum-blonde pixie cut and patchwork tattoos, who we playfully joked with about her looking more suited to the industrial concrete beasts of Berlin techno clubs than shimmery clean places like Ibiza Rocks Hotel ambiently playing tropical house, and is she sure she got on the right flight? She was also searching for the same bus stop (we were both at the right one), and like us, she had also fallen victim to the pursuit of transient opportunities herself: a DJ from the North West of England that she’d met on her flight had offered her guestlist for his set at Pikes, an infamous 15th-century mansion situated more rurally than most superclubs and historically notorious for being a playground for the rich and famous, but she hadn’t heard much from him following their encounter and was headed there hoping for the best. Being from the North West, my partner and I were able to translate the rushed voice note that the DJ had sent to this lady, twenty seconds of thick Lancashian accent with chatter in the immediate background that told her “there’s not really a set list of names, you can just show up and say you’re with me and it should be sound, don’t worry”. All too familiar with this empty promise ourselves, but having already boarded the bus as a trio, we relayed the voice note in simpler terms to her, trying to politely emphasise that she should send him a message back asking for confirmation of her entry in writing to show at the door, just in case. And when she waved goodbye to us and got off the bus on what looked like an empty dirt road, but with the faint thump of bass in the distance, we wished her all the best for her night.
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A few days later, after a perfect holiday filled with Piña Coladas, pizzas, and seashell collecting, on our final bus trip back to Ibiza Airport to catch our flight home, we received a reply from none other than Ramie. We were of course not resentful or pissed off that the Saturday night had not gone to plan, but at that point we’d thought we had the wrong number altogether. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that Ramie was doing just as expected during his own travels:
And following our reply along the lines of ‘no stress, hope it was a great night, we just decided that the taxi cost was too much and dipped’, we received yet another offer - one for his event in a town a few train stops from us back in England that we had discussed on the plane, taking place no less than seven months in the future - and whether he will remember ever asking us or not, at least in that moment, he hoped to see us there.