There’s not a single still body in the entire room. Everywhere I look, pulses with movement. Hundreds of young people are dancing, hands in the air, some are clutching phones and others throwing up deuces, holding drinks, pressing another within their own, colored red in the disco light. Club lights rove over the heads of the night’s revellers, illuminating the sweaty darkness. They move in time with the music’s bpm, the sound’s overpowering the room, it’s the kind of sound system that throbs in your bone marrow.
Look. We’ve all been to a club before! It’s just that Pacha Ibiza is that club. For so many reasons. A Megachurch for hedonists, party people across the world fly into La Isla Bonita to have a good time, and Pacha’s going to be on the list. Often it is the list. And this summer, they’ve gotten in Solomun for another months long residency – and he’s flown in some hand-picked colleagues, too. “Over the years I have shaped Pacha on my nights exactly the way I feel good in it, so I can honestly say it is my home,” Solomun tells me.
Solomun, this German-Bosnian legend of house music, has brought out a different DJ every Sunday night back to back with, and it’s a real Who’s Who in club music today. Peggy Gou one night; Barry Can’t Swim another. “I always love inviting people for the first time,” he explains. “Like this year, Kettama or DESIREE. And once or twice a season I like to book someone nobody expects. This year that was Idris Elba. Most people know him as a brilliant actor, but he is also a very good DJ. And I also enjoy the all night longs a lot. I do five per season, where I play alone from start to finish.”
The night I’m there, Kettama’s doing a set. We’re right in the booth itself, buzzed from the tequila, sticky from the sweat of the night, moving our hips in tandem to the utz utz utz, it’s dark and hot and everyone is moving in tandem with the constant beat.
Everyone keeps on saying that Gen Z don’t party, Gen Z don’t smoke, Gen Z don’t drink or fuck or whatever middle-aged people think only they were interesting enough to do when they were young. Well, I think we all know that’s not true. You’re reading PAPER Magazine, darling! The anti-fun hysteria is almost as dull as the surface-level data that depicts a generation. Like the lapping turquoise of the Mediterranean, Pacha Ibiza glitters upon the Ibizan port of Talamanca as a bejewelled antidote to the naysayers.
Young people pour in, in the hundreds. White tee-shirts for guys and black crop tops for girls, as is the zeitgeist of lazy summer dressing. Queues lap around the historied club, which has seen the likes of Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and Diplo play, esteemed colleagues like David Guetta line up summer residencies akin to Solomun’s this year.
“What?” my friend screams back over the music. “You want another shot?”
Well I thought that was an excellent idea but I couldn’t tell her, I couldn’t even really think about it, the beat dropped and everyone went a bit crazy. The beat will drop every five minutes and what I like about clubbers is that we act like it’s the first time, every time.
“This is the best night of my life,” a guy next to me in the bathroom queue said. Quite earnestly, actually. “I’m not joking. Came in all the way from America for this.” Beside us, a couple were making out. Four bronzed limbs encircled two tanned bodies in the glimmering darkness. The best type of club is one that feels like a house party.
I stroll through the dark corridors that connect bathroom to dancefloor, dancefloor to VIP. A cool breeze brings relief to my momentary solitude. People flit in and around, charging ahead, stumbling behind. I make my way back to the booth. Everyone’s BNO happiness has erupted into a physical ecstasy. Solomun is here, he’s slapping Kettama on the back. Under the strobe lights and in front of the dancing bodies, it’s one generation to another. I suppose that’s kind of the point. There’s no room for sentimentalities in the club. So instead I turn to my group beside me.
“Let’s get in another round of shots,” I say. We bump shot glasses, feel the tequila slide over our sweaty hands, tilt our heads back to throw it back, grimace upon resurface. And our bodies are already dancing again.
Do you have a favorite Ibiza party story, I eventually ask Solomun. Not in the club, but over email a few weeks later. Autumn is in full swing, and gold tans fade like slipping memories. “I'm sorry, but that's a question I can't answer,” he replies. “There have been so many nights that picking a favorite is really impossible. And the most beautiful stories are, of course, the ones you're not allowed to tell anyway.”
