Ibiza 1983 (1)

Ibiza 1983 

(1)

In June 1983, the first international runway I touched down on was the airport and gateway to the magical space and place that is the Isla Blanca of Ibiza. All true, I'd flown only twice before — once when I was about ten, to Birmingham — and not the one in Alabama, though on a Chuck Berry note, Ibiza was like the promised land when I got there — to stay with a university friend of my dad's, and once when I was thirteen, and my gran had taken me on holiday to Jersey for a week.

My partner, Nina, was working in a little cottage, or finca, industry sweat shop there for the fantastic designer who was soon to become my dear friend to this day, Jenny Macrae. [Jenny's surname was Westwood at that time; her then husband Rod, a photographer, is related to Vivienne Westwood's first husband.] It wasn't sweat shop in either ethos, or hours spent at machine or ironing board, but it was situated in a small outhouse with a corrugated iron roof which, despite being painted white, generated plenty of sweat in the Balearic midsummer heat. Nor was it really cottage industry, as the turnover was quite high, supplying the two major hippy markets on the island, as well as a couple of chic boutiques in Ibiza town. Nina's job came with accommodation in the beautiful traditional white Spanish finca just outside San Carlos, that Jenny and Rod rented, to which the little factory outhouse belonged. 

Nina and I had been together just over a year, and the time we got together coincided neatly with my getting my first decent private methadone prescription, from Dr. Paddy O'Connor at 108 Harley Street. Dr. O'Connor spoke in a lilting Southern Irish brogue, and was a former Air Commodore who had been decorated during the war. He was quite lax in his practice, as was customary, and would often come out with lovely off the cuff things. I have never been particularly enamoured of amphetamine and so, unlike with many of his other patients, to me he didn't prescribe the amphetamine Ritalin — now of course renowned as the drug that supposedly counteracts ADHD, but then popular with junkies because you could crush it up and inject it with your methadone ampoules, for a speedball effect. Being a posh junkie, or so I liked to think, I preferred some cocaine in my amps, when I could afford it. Anyway, one day he glanced up, in the middle of writing my prescription, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and remarked rhetorically: 'You've never really been a Ritalin man, have you?' in his soft brogue. I just let it pass, glancing over to the picture on the wall which, I'll always remember — it had a little brass plate as in a gallery, to tell you — was entitled 'Peat Bog', by Bingham McGuinness. Aside from this being such a quintessentially Irish title from an artist with such a quintessentially Irish name, the oil painting itself did what it said on the jar, being an indistinguishable, featureless blur of burnt umber and camouflage green, a bit like Turner in the undergrowth. That was in May 1982, and in mine and Nina's first year together, we consumed a lot of drugs, and sold a fair few too, not that I wasn't gigging, but I wasn't world famous either and a couple of gigs a month on the London pub rock circuit could not finance my new penchant for private medicine, never mind restaurants, clubs and other things I've always liked. Nina herself at that time refrained from getting her own script, and by June the following year, by which time I had migrated for my script to Dr. Ann Dally, in nearby Devonshire Place, she had had enough, or like many people before and since, told herself she had. 

Nina's friend Åsa, who had travelled with Jenny in the 60s in Southern Spain, and who also worked in the fashion and props industry, suggested that she could get Nina some work for the summer with Jenny, so after detoxing round at Dick Taylor's house in Twickenham off Nina went to Ibiza, leaving me and Wee Johnny Molloy from Belfast, her old friend and ex' and now our lodger, resident in her mansion flat by the river in East Twickenham, where we were bang at most things it's possible to be bang at, aside from people trafficking or living off immoral earnings. The snag, or fly in the ointment, in the masterplan was that Nina and I were really in love, so when she rang me from the little wooden kiosk in Anita's Bar in San Carlos, the only method of telephone contact back then, the finca having no landline — the kiosk is still there, though rarely if ever used these days — I realised she missed me as much as I missed her.

By the time she rang again the following week, being the impulsive and impetuous chap I am, I announced to her that I'd bought a charter flight to Ibiza for the following week. These were the days before budget airlines, where to get somewhere in Europe cheaply, you bough a return charter flight that came with a fictional holiday. If you wished to stay longer than the week or two the fictional holiday purportedly lasted, you simply advertised the return half of your ticket in a local bar, and then when you did want to return home, answered a similar advert' yourself. Charter flights, whilst often delayed, as they would be relegated to the bottom of the runway queue behind any scheduled airline flights at busy times, weren't too bad —you got a couple of free drinks and a plastic airline meal. 

Nina was, whilst pleased, more than a bit taken aback at the announcement of my imminent arrival, as I'd just gaily assumed that it would be cool for me to stay at Jenny and Rod's, not knowing that she was staying in a tiny box room that also housed Jenny's clothing stock. We arranged for me to call back to the little wooden kiosk in a few days, so as she could broach the subject with her employers and landlords, who were still very new friends. Bless them, they're top people and they acquiesced immediately, and Nina told me when I rang that they had said they would move her into a larger side room in the finca that opened onto the garden, not that they really had much choice, my inbound flight being a done deed. However, they couldn't have been nicer about it. Nina's final words, having said she could pay a friend and colleague in the sweat shop to drive her to the airport to meet me, were: 'There's no dole out here, Auntie. Everyone has to do something — you'd best bring your guitar.'

Now, I had no clear plan whether I was going to give up methadone or not, but I missed Nina like crazy, and Ibiza sounded beautiful — it was and is. Groves of oranges, lemons and avocados, and carobs and figs just falling on the path or road, far from any alcohol and ecstasy fuelled mayhem, but you can read all about that anywhere, well, as long as you read the right articles or books. I also knew, quite rightly, and as I proved when I successfully gave up methadone twenty years later, that it's a simple matter of perverse determination. Without that, the clearest and most concrete plan can go awry, such as the tried, tested and failed ones of burning one's address book in the fire, isolating oneself at one's parents' for a week, or even moving abroad. 


Part of my no clear plan — no clear, not nuclear, that's just what it wasn't — was taking the rest of that week's script with me, and seeing if I could get over it when it ran out. I therefore landed with a nice hit for Nina and I knowing, love or no love, that's half the reason she was looking forward to seeing me — we were addicts after all — and enough Physeptone tablets to 'hold me' for a week or so. I also went to the unnecessary bother of smuggling a piece of Wee Johnny's nice red seal black hash, unaware that the island was a smuggling haven, and awash with good fresh Moroccan hash. After I'd been there about ten days, Nina received word that her mum was terminally ill, and we managed to get her on a flight home, ironically the day before I should next have picked up a prescription, if I didn't burn my boats. Well it didn't last, but for two and a bit glorious months I burned my boats, bridges, the lot. I did the decent thing though, inasmuch as I said I would do Nina's job for Jenny while she was gone. We got a lift to the airport, and Nina's plane home took off at about 3am. I had no money left, which was ok because I now had a job and a place to live, but right then also no cab fare, so it was about 5am and dawn by the time I'd hitched and walked back to San Carlos. 

Back to my arrival ten days earlier, at 1am on a still, humid night. I'd barely been on a plane before, and hadn't been anywhere hot except Provence on holiday with my parents about thirteen years before, in fact exactly thirteen years before — it was 1970, the year Chelsea won the FA Cup, and I watched the winning replay in a café in Périgeux. After waiting ages at Ibiza airport after everyone else had gone for my guitar to emerge on the conveyor belt which, having my underpants full of drugs I could have done without — it was simply that they put the flight case in first and it came out last but...The other reason I could have done without it was that I had had to travel out there on a false passport, being technically wanted by the police. However, this had been the case since May 1980, and it was for historic shoplifting offences, so it was really just a case of not falling foul of the law for something else, and I wasn't exactly what the Flying Squad term 'active'. 

Applying for a passport, though, was definitely not a bright idea. However those were the days when, with one piece of proof of identity, you could get a one year passport in any main Post Office for £1, which enabled you to travel anywhere in Europe. My, how things change! Now this was one of the more inspired instances of thinking on my feet. I had a good friend at and after school, a fellow musician called Martin Woloszczuk, whose date of birth I could recall. I was also aware of his mother's maiden name, a key fact in being able to bespeak a birth certificate, which I knew how to do from my days as a legal clerk. Furthermore, I knew this because Martin's mum had recently got divorced, and they both hated his dad, so he'd reverted to his mother's maiden name of Hickey alongside her. Therefore: conscience clear, I could get a passport in his name because he wasn't using it any more himself. Best of all, who would forge a passport in a name with such a spelling? So, up to St. Katharine's House in Kingsway, where the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages then was, back to Twickenham Post Office, job done, a pound well spent, possibly plus the fee for the birth certificate, but I probably told them to bill my grandfather's solicitors' firm. 

Walking out of the Ibiza arrivals hall with Nina, I smelled for the first time the now familiar smell of red clay earth and pine, and heard the crickets rubbing their little legs together in what I took to be a welcoming chirrup. Nina was with her, and very soon our friend Collette, a great girl from Canada. Her car was a battered maroon Renault 5, and the back door was held on by a bunjy, the first time I'd ever seen this. Strangely enough, a friend gave me a lift recently in his car where the door was also similarly affixed, and it brought that night right back. I was in wonderment as the pine wafted in on the warm night air and the crickets sang. The power of the island is such that I have now done that drive scores of times and the wonder never ceases, despite my now knowing what I'm anticipating. When we got to the bright lights of Santa Eulalia, the girls had a quick conflab, it was 2am, Collette had a three year old son who she'd left with a babysitter, covered by Nina's taxi fare — that's Ibiza for you, no-one was earning, no-one was losing out, just two people helping each other — and Nina asked me if I fancied a drink. Collette was living then in a Berber square-shaped yurt on a piece of land outside San Carlos. Her son Pablo now runs a successful plant nursery in Canada and Collette works with him, so maybe that gives you an idea of the inspirational power of Ibiza; that's why so many great painters and sculptors have always gravitated there. Anyway, the girls took me to a bar called La Villa with a lovely garden full of big palm trees and what Nina always calls 'expensive sounding pebbles'. 'This is only because it's a special occasion, Auntie' they said, 'we can't afford to go in places like this usually.' Well, I had ten weeks of special occasions, each one special in a different way, most of which I can remember, and some of which I shall tell you about.