Always Loco
Introduction: The following is a feature I wrote for Mixmag in 2005 about a then quietly erupting storm that went onto become the defining club of its generation. This is my original edit, that I quickly re-edited today to remove the awful mid 2000s Mixmag-isms we were obliged to pepper our copy with at the time, (although I have left one or two remain so that the style stays somewhat true to the original version). At the time the club was wildly popular with a small set clique of ravers from various countries like the UK, France, Italy etc. Some of those like Jamie Jones, Shonky or Dyed Soundorom went onto become this decade’s biggest DJs. But outside of that network, it was still a million miles from the global powerhouse brand it is today. I hope this brings some memories back for the old school crew and for the newbies, don’t let anyone tell you it was better back in the day. This is your time. Make the most of it.
It’s where DJs hang out, where celebrities go to be unseen and where lunatics feel at home. For the first time ever Mixmag tells the story of 2005’s Ibiza Club of the Year, Circoloco at DC10…
Words: Gavin Herlihy
It’s a Monday afternoon in August and except for one small corner of the Balaerics, as usual, Monday sucks. 1,406 kilometres away from Ibiza, in the UK, eyelids droop in offices, roads are jammed with traffic, grey clouds roll across the horizon and once every 2.4 seconds someone somewhere will grumble about the weather. In Ibiza, life is much different but the dullness is much the same. Locals go about their lives, tourists grow fat and sunburnt by pools, boozers booze and dogs whine in the heat. That is except for one small slice of raver’s paradise hidden away in the shadow of the island’s airport.
Off the beaten track, down a dusty road as planes yawn over heard, Mixmag is in its happy place. The DC10 terrace. A ramshackle collection of whitewashed buildings surrounded by bull weeds and Balaeric nothingness unnoticeable if it wasn’t for the cars dragging up dust clouds in the four huge car parks nearby. And not to mention, the queue of club freaks in costumes, frazzled DJs and a bloke in a Biggles cap stretching for a quarter of a mile down the treacherously thin, hot motorway.
For twenty five euros (half the price of every other Ibizan club), you enter through the main door into complete darkness and absolute anarchy. As your eyes adjust to the darkness of the main room and exhuberant ravers loom out of the gloom, menacing techno rapes your ears until you make for a shimmer of sunlight in the corner to your left. Like a dream you follow it, emerging onto the terrace like a castaway onto an island of colour, chaos, and music that will change your life.
In 2001 this Mixmag writer described DC10, home to the now infamous Monday party Circoloco as the closing party for the end of the world. Six years on from its first party in 1999 the world still ends here each and every week. Our select panel of industry insiders, clubbers and island veterans have voted it Club of the Year in Mixmag’s Ibiza Awards for the second year running. An accolade it’s earned by showing no signs of relenting despite competing with some of the world’s best clubs.
Disco mafias and crazy clowns
Busier than ever, the regulars maintain Circoloco is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. This year’s season of madness almost never happened according to popular rumour. Jealous of Circoloco’s success the island’s other big clubs, the whispers say, had persuaded the island’s authorities to shut it down. Circoloco’s promoters insist these are simply rumours and that no frictions exist. Despite a wobble at last year’s closing party when police refused to allow music on the terrace (but bizarrely allowed music in DC10’s car park), on the surface at least, this season Circoloco seems at peace with its neighbours.
Rival club Amnesia’s dancers emblazoned with tiny T-shirts advertising tonight’s club night beam smiles and dance so ferociously on the speakers they’re oblivious to the stray breasts that keep sneaking out of their tops, much to the excitement of the camera phone wielding dancers below.
Overhead red tarpaulins stretch across the sky protecting the dancefloor below from Ibiza’s searing August heat. Huge fans blow cool air on the dancefoors and the precise soundsystem means every pin drop in a record is heard with clarity no matter where you are on the terrace. If your musical horizons only stretch to funky house or trance, don’t bother coming to DC10. You’ll hate it. Circoloco’s soundtrack is at times deep and minimal, at others visceral and violent. At peak times the crowd doesn’t just dance, it moshes like a rock concert.
The dancefloor is like a group photo of Ibiza’s premiership hedonists and overseeing the madness is the club’s iconic overseer. Where Studio 54’s figurehead was a silver moon holding a spoon to its nose, Circoloco’s is a freakishly out-of-it clown. As symbols go it’s uncannily accurate. Circoloco’s crowd is wildly debauched and just breathing the atmosphere on the dancefloor is enough to feel out of your mind.
Scrutinise any corner of the terrace and among the ravers you’ll more often than not find a model, a DJ on his night off or an IBiza club legend. Ziggy, one of Ibiza’s oldest and favourite hippies died here at the bar in June. He was 77. Pippi the Panda lady, a blissed out hippy who’s been on the island since anyone can remember is regularly seen dressed as a mermaid holding aloft her teddy to the dancefloor. No one in the club is quite sure if she’s the descendant of Argentinian royalty or an Italian TV star who lost it in the Eighties and never went back. Usually, everyone’s too mangled to enquire.
Club mentallists pepper the crowd. Some come dressed as entire flight crews complete with pilot, airhostess and mechanics. Others in drag, some simply in trainers and thongs. And they’re just the gay men. This afternoon the club received frantic calls from the nearby airport. A guy in a monkey suit was setting off fireworks from the car park directly into the overhead flight path before the club’s security stopped him. At the closing party in 2001, a man with no arms blagged his way onto the decks and mixed records flawlessly with his feet while the dancefloor below collectively assumed they’d lost it.
Everywhere, blacks, whites, gays, straights, Italians, French, Spanish, South Americans and the occasional English person stamp on toes, swap fluids, spill drinks and party hard.
Mondays here are where the DJs come to dance. When a random clubber vomited on my friend’s leg a few years back, a nearby dancing Danny Tenaglia helped wipe it off with water from his bottle. Carl Cox is regulary seen throwing shapes near the bar. And every big name DJ worth caring about has graced the decks usually for free and unannounced, such is the obsession Djs have with playing here.
And then cloaked in the madness are the celebrities. At the closing party in 2002, Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones stood on Mixmag’s toe at the bar. Mick Jagger’s been with his daughter Jade. Noel Gallagher has been three times wearing a wig. Skin from Skunk Anansie comes every week. Italian motorbike superstar Valentino Rossi, was here last week raving with Circo favourite, Timo Maas, and today P Diddy is sat on the DJ booth’s wall nodding his head to the music, the crowd oblivious to his celebrity.
There are no paparazzi in DC10 and no VIP rooms to hide away in. Instead the occasional celebrities get sweaty on the terrace like everyone else and unlike other clubs the dancefloor is too busy having it to bother them.
It’s an equation that adds up to Ibiza’s answer to the clubs you’ve always been told about but weren’t around to go to. It’s our generation’s Paradise Garage, a living breathing example of how a club can become more than just the sum of its walls and speakers. “A good club,” says one half of the club’s promoting tag team, Andrea Pelino, “is simply about music, a soundsystem and a good DJ. We don’t need to organise dancers because the other clubs send theirs to dance here and promote their nights. We don’t need to make costumes because the clubbers make their own. One time a guy came in with 100 clown masks he’d had made just to give to the crowd. Another with fake Euros with a clown’s face in the centre. This is amazing.”
Short, Italian and perennially wearing a baseball cap backwards with a pony tail protruding from the back, Andrea can usually be spotted gazing out from the DJ booth like a meer cat on look out duty. Every morning he gets up at 5 am, showers, smokes a joint and begins his day running Circoloco. His partner Antonio , a stocky, heavily tattooed native of Andrea’s hometown of Rome joins him at 9am and the pair rarely leave the dancefloor or DJ booth until 2am on Tuesday morning when the club’s inside room finally shuts.
Like most teenagers Andrea began throwing parties at 17. Unlike most teenagers his were some of Italy’s first raves. Much to the frustration of his parents who sent him to business school, Andrea spent his holidays in England checking out the rave scene. At the age of 19 he was the first promoter to book The Prodigy for an overseas gig in 1991. 3,000 ravers came,1,000 over what his licence allowed for and he was promptly arrested. “They said what they hell are you doing? You’re just a student,” he remembers. “It was my first investment, I poured four years of savings into it but it was the best rave I ever made.”
As rave exploded in Italy so too did Andrea’s career. A bootleg he produced with mates that cheekily nicked the theme tune to 80s video game classic, Tetris sold 20,000 copies in Italy on promo in just two weekends. “The bigger we got the more the government paid attention,” he says. “My last rave had 12,000 people.”
When the rave scene floundered, Andrea jumped into the club business, hosting a seminal after hours near Rimini called Club 909 before the police shut it down. Frustrated, he moved to Ibiza to start again and a chance meeting with his future partner Antonio, proved the catalyst to Circoloco. “I met him in 1999 and three days later we were partners.”
Don’t knock the DJ
It’s rave ‘o’ clock at DC10. The sun is setting. Cirillo is on the decks. The dancefloor is bouncing and Mixmag’s photographer, Andy, is so lost in the moment, he leans across the decks to grab a shot of a girl doing the splits and knocks the needle off the record playing. For an eternal second silence cuts the chaos in two. Andy looks nervously at Andrea expecting to be thrown out. Andrea laughs. The crowd roars in jest and Cirillo cracks a smile and later buys Andy a drink.
This doesn’t happen in most clubs. At least not in clubs where chaos is what makes the party work. Cirillo however isn’t most DJs. One of Italy’s great unsung legends, he is in his early forties and has the slight demeanour and dress of a school teacher. Balding around the edges with a permanent goldfish expression and smile, he speaks in a lazy Italian accent. He believes DC10 is the only conduit to the old days, “Back then the outdoor parties at clubs like Amnesia and Ku were how Ibiza started.”
It was through putting on raves that Andrea first met Cirillo in the early 1990’s. Circoloco’s resident and backseat promoter is the man usually entrusted with playing the closing parties closing set. The son of a doctor and teacher, Cirillo ran away from home to become a DJ in 1980, playing disco at famous Italian clubs like Peter Pan. When acid house hit Italy in the late 1980s he was an instant convert. Like other DJs following the call of this emerging phenomenon, Cirillo went to Ibiza in 1988 and found a small, secret hedonistic paradise. “It was much more of a psychedelic experience than now,” he tells Mixmag wistfully. “I was Djing in Pacha but my biggest regret was never going to Glories.”
Glories was DC10’s spiritual ancestor. An outdoor afterhours near Amnesia throughout the 1980s that was shut by the authorities the year Cirillo moved to Ibiza. “It was everyday in the summer and very mad. The crowd were always dressing up and the DJs would do silly things like wearing a towel as if they’d just got out of the shower.”
Eleven years after Glories, Circoloco began life at DC10 on July 18th 1999 as an outdoor after party for the locals. Antonio had brought Cirillo and Andrea there the week before to check it out. The same weekend they invited a then unknown bedroom DJ to play one of their villa parties. Her name was Tania Vulcano.
The beginnings of Vulcan-ology
Tania Vulcano speaks slowly with a husky Latin American accent, her voice gleaming with the past. “The first party was crazy,” she remembers. “The terrace wasn’t built yet, the sound system was terrible, there was only 300 people but slowly it began to work.”
“One day we were all sitting out back where they used to put the garbage and we thought we could do something with this space. That was the beginning of the terrace.”
One of the club’s most revered residents, Tania doesn’t make records yet (which these days is a prerequisite for Djing success). Through playing DC10 alone though, she’s evolved into one of the world’s most sought after underground DJs. When she was four months old her family move from their home in Uruaguay in South America to Sweden when a military coup threatened their lives. When stability returned, her parents, an accountant and artist, brought her back to live there at the age of twelve. In 1993 aged nineteen she made a chance visit to Ibiza and has lived there ever since.
“In 2000, DC10 started to really kick off,” she says. “Playing there was amazing and frightening all at once. I was only just learning to DJ and suddenly legends like Danny Tenaglia are on the dancefloor next to Mark Spoon and Sven Väth.”
Other then unknown DJs like Fabrizio and Ricardo Villalobos who made their names playing villa parties and clubs for the locals were residents from the beginning. At DC10 they were trusted with the music over the bigger and established DJs who began to party at DC10 once their weekends playing the bigger clubs were over.
“The first time I went was with Lottie and a few mates,” remembers Peace Division’s Clive Henry, now one of the club’s most revered residents. Clive was invited down by Charlie Chester, the infamous UK promoter and old friend of Cirillo’s who would became the club’s instrumental UK spokesperson and DJ booker in 2000. “Tania was Djing on crates, there were mattresses round the terrace and a few faces who shall remain nameless out of their brains. The girls said ‘fuck this’ and left but we thought it was blinding.”
Charlie’s partner Jo Mills, began Djing at DC10 in 2000, cementing a reputation as Circoloco’s chief UK ambassador. Charlie used his contacts to bring down the key music heads, UK guest DJs like Clive and X Press 2’s Rocky and later on, heavyweights like Pete Tong who would bridge the gap between the Spanish/Italian crowd and the Brits.
“Charlie started the stage diving,” says Clive. “Everyone had Elvis wigs on for his birthday one year. He and Manumission’s Elvis started dancing on the DJ booth wall and Rocky suddenly switched from dark tech house to playing Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday.’ They took one look at each other and dived into the crowd.” Since then only the club’s revered guests and friends have been allowed to stage dive from the booth, beginning a ritual that usually only takes place at the most special parties.
Diving into debauchery
There’s an hour to go on the terrace and even if it had a roof it would have been blown off hours ago. Night has almost fallen and the music has gone from dark and minimal to supercharged. Mixmag is in the crowded booth jostling for space with impossibly beautiful girls, DJs and friends of the promoters.
Tonight all is not well in the camp. The dancefloor is packed so tight its impossible to move in any way other than the way the crowd’s dancing. It’s a problem that has made August, Ibiza’s busiest month, almost unbearable due to overcrowding. Charlie Chester and Jo are also conspicuously absent after falling out with Antonio and Andrea.
Mixmag is talking with Loco Dice. the Tunisian born, Frankfurt bred rap convert who first came to the club as Timo Mass’s tour manager in 2000. Now he’s one of 2005’s hottest breakthrough DJs and the hands behind this month’s covermount CD. He’s also the only resident never to have stage dived.
“No way,” he pleads. We tell him it’s not right that he hasn’t joined the club’s illustrious ranks of divers yet but he is steadfast. Mixmag isn’t leaving DC10 without at least one stage diving photo, so it falls on Giacomo, Antonio and Andrea’s promoter friend from Rome to fill in.
Today we’ve seen everything. A high ranking coach at a Spanish football club throwing shapes on the floor. An Souther American in traditional dress with a staff praying to the crowd. The entire terrace sitting down during the breakdown of a track under the command of one of the clubbers only to jump back up en masse when the beats kick back in. The madness is endless.
Giacomo, we’re told is one of the Circoloco hardcore, he insists he was the first to stagedive and has done it more than anyone else. “Look I show you,” he says climbing onto the wall of the booth and eking his way along the ledge to the front. As arms and hands furrow forward on the dancefloor and intertwine to provide a human safety net, he stands tall before them, arms outspread like Jesus over Rio. Then with a perfect swandive he is part of the crowd. The walls seem to roar their approval, the needle skips on the record and the closing party for Armaggedon seems to end all over again.
DC10’s Top Ten Classics
Cirillo picks the records that never fail to rock DC10
1 Rolando ‘Knights Of The Jaguar’
2 Chicken Lips ‘He Not In’
3 Der Dritte Raum ‘Hale Bop’
4 Quasistereo ‘Acellerator’
5 Green Velvet ‘La La Land’
6 Renato Cohen ‘Pontape’
7 James Holden ‘A Break In The Clouds’
8 Amnesia ‘Ibiza’
9 Slam ‘Lifetime’
10 Nitzer Ebb ‘Join In The Chant’
