Ibiza’s most brainless party (2nd Part)

(by Pablo Burgués)

… And this is the incredible story about how a tiny and harmless silkworm of Indian origin called Farrokh Bulsara turned into a savage and folkloric Lepidoptera with moustache called Freddie Mercury. Ahhhh, don’t you know what the hell I’m talking about? You’d know it if you had read last week post, so, stop grimacing and look at this link to read it. Having said this, let’s go on.

In the eighties, Ibiza, which once had been considered as the earthly paradise of the flower-eating Hippy movement, became the Mecca of disorder and vice. These two swearwords quickly (and against all odds) became a siren song for the ears of the most libertine male and female celebrities of the time. One of the promoters of this change of paradigm was the British duo Wham!, which in 1983 shot in the island the video clip of its single Club Tropicana. In the video (that you can watch here) you can see an Andrew Ridgeley who was youngster at the time and a George Michael who was straight in those days, both of them doing anything except working. The song quickly became a hit, and due to it from one day to the next all the modern guys and girls of the world wanted to come to Ibiza to blow off steam.

Grace Jones, Kylie Minogue, Toni Curtis, Bon Jovi, Anthony Quinn, Boy George, Robert Plant, Naomi Campbell and endless other celebrities became part of the street furniture in the island. Many of them had the hardly healthy habit of finishing their crazy nights in the swimming pool of a little hotel run by Anthony Pike, an ex australian former military who was more dissolute than dissolution.

It seems that the guy (whom you can see shaking the cocktail shaker at Wham!’s video) organized such wild parties that there came a point when the Spanish authorities decided that they should either close the nightspot or appoint Pike as Civil Guard General Director. After hard negotiations, they took the wise decision of keeping Luis Roldán’s post and, thus, they ordered to close the hotel.

But, stop there, my friends! Nobody thought that the owner had an ace up his sleeve in the form of a resident guest… A couple of days before the closure of the hotel, the Civil Guard sergeant in Ibiza got the unexpected and always pleasant phone call from someone called Julio Iglesias, who kindly invited him to have dinner with him that same night. We don’t know what happened exactly in that dinner, but there are two certain points: Julio had sex that night and Anthony Pike never had any other problem with the law.

Thanks to that masterstroke, on 5 September 1987, Freddie Mercury could celebrate his 41th birthday at the hotel with a super party that had everything except Betadine. But I’ll tell you about it next week.

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Translation: Dora Sales