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Irreplaceable Ibiza
By Scott Manson, London Lite 20.04.07
Thousands of ravers head for Ibiza's clubs every summer
Look here too
The sun is shining and summer is well and truly on the way. How do I know this? It's not the flocks of birds on Clapham Common, nor the cryptic annual advice from my nan to "cast n'er a clout 'til May be out" (something to do with keeping a vest on, I've always assumed).
Rather, it's the inevitable arrival of Ibiza-themed nights. Yes, even though you may never have experienced the many pleasures of the White Isle, you can live it up vicariously through the promoters who assume that sticking the word "Ibiza" in front of their night gives it instant credibility.
This Sunday at Pacha, for example, is billed as an Ibiza special, with the mighty Space club transporting itself from the Balearics to an exhaust fume-choked bus terminal in Victoria.
Those who've been to Space in Ibiza may find it hard to marry its open-air mayhem and ridiculously attractive punters with a bunch of blokes wearing too much hair gel and shrieking girls but hey, at £14 a pop for vodka Red Bull in Ibiza, maybe Pacha London isn't actually such a bad bet after all.
The first of the London clubs' Ibiza-themed nights also gets clubbers' minds focused on their holiday plans. Ignore clubland's doom-mongers and media morons who gang up to put the boot in, declaring that Ibiza won't be as good as it was (yawn) and that Ayia Napa, Mykonos, someplace in Brazil that you've never heard of or some rancid hole in Lithuania is the new Ibiza. They're wrong.
Nowhere will ever take Ibiza's place. Nowhere else could combine clubs that fantastic, people so gorgeous and such amazing weather. It's a land that pushes your pleasure buttons again and again, and where, if you have the stamina, all manner of wonders may be revealed to you as you crawl backwards across the dancefloor clutching an inflatable gorilla and politely asking a cigarette machine for directions.
No longer need you seem like the weird one among your group of mates. If you like staying up later and partying longer than anyone else then, in Ibiza, you're among friends. There will always be someone more hardcore than you, I guarantee it.
Go to London's Ibiza-themed nights, by all means, but be aware that these are the George Lazenby to Ibiza's Sean Connery. Should you make it to the magical Mecca of dance music this year, I hope to pass you sometime as I crawl backwards across a dancefloor being unusually intimate with that inflatable gorilla.
