SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS
Ibiza Rocks The Ibiza Rocks brand has undoubtedly changed Ibiza from a solely dance destination to an island of music. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with amazing performances by The Libertines, Rudimental, and Ed Sheeran, Louis Henry Sarmiento II and Jonathan Tessier chat to the power couple behind Ibiza Rocks, founders Andy McKay and Dawn Hindle. Can you describe the experience of entering the Ibiza Rocks hotel for a concert? Andy: You walk into the hotel, go down these stairs, and the last thing you expect is an amphitheatre for 3,000 people! What I find interesting is the people that have lived their whole life in Ibiza, and they never knew it existed. Obviously over the years, more and more locals know that there’s an outdoor venue the size of Privilege (Ibiza’s biggest nightclub) in the middle of this hotel, and it’s a working rock and roll venue. How did the idea for Ibiza Rocks come together? Andy: The whole thing about Ibiza Rocks is conflict: it’s rebellion, it’s punk; and if you look at it, when we started the concept of Ibiza Rocks, it was like oil and water: because Ibiza does not rock - that was the thought pattern back in the day - it was a real conflicting thing at the time. A lot of what we do is conflicting: the biggest and best rock and roll venue on the island 09 HEADLINER
shouldn’t be in the backstreets of San Antonio, but it is. There are a lot of conflicts and contradictions that makes Ibiza Rocks a rebellious brand, a disruptive trademark - and I quite like that. Dawn: I think it came out of what Andy was just discussing. The fact that Ibiza didn’t rock, and it came out of the heritage we had of throwing giant house parties. Andy: It came out of Manumission (one of Ibiza’s most notorious parties from 1994 to 2009) because while we were doing it, we started playing with the band thing, and really enjoying it. I remember The Rapture, Juliette Lewis, and LCD Soundsystem played in the backroom of Manumission over 10 years ago - that was some show. I grew up going to see bands, and then there was a period in 2005 on the island where nobody did bands. They just dropped off, and that’s when we realised we wanted to do guitar bands. People at that time were so used to a clean digital sound that the angular sound of guitars was physically hurting their ears; they were so unused
to it that they found it unpleasant to experience. We knew it was a step too far for Manumission to do, so we launched the brand ourselves. It was a great name also, because 80% of the people we knew were so horrified by it that they didn’t even want to come to our shows. So we filtered the crowd to almost nobody, and the little that came actually loved it! How has Ibiza Rocks evolved over the last decade? Dawn: By scale, I think we’ve gone from 100 people up to 3,000 people; and in venue size, we’ve grown from a tiny bar that held 200 people maximum – we had bands like Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian playing on stages that were the size of the drum risers – to a fully functioning working stage. And now the width and breadth of the music we offer has changed; we’ve opened it up to quite a lot of different genres, whereas when we first started, we wanted to push something that was very guitar-based and rock-based.
Andy: It was the indie invasion of Ibiza! In 2007, we had some of the biggest bands in the world playing that tiny little venue, and I remember one day I was searching the word count on Google and comparing the monthly searches for DJs (Tiësto, Paul Van Dyke, Sasha, Carl Cox) and bands; and the bands we were booking had 10 times more monthly searches online than the DJs. Also, we’re tastemakers in a way: Ed Sheeran started with Ibiza Rocks on a small stage, now he’s touring the world playing mega-shows every night. Dawn: I think that’s also key: helping new acts on the way up, and trying to select people as they’re coming through, then they literally stay with you when they become stars. And from what I’ve observed, a lot of the support acts that play for us grow up to become headliners, which is amazing. Andy: When Professor Green played a show for us at Ibiza Rocks London, organised by Zane Lowe at the Sin Club near Charing Cross Road, we paid