Club crisis - ain't that a kick in the Balearics?

YOU join us this week in Ibiza as the tumbleweeds congregate outside the superclubs and the giant billboards advertising "Superstar DJs" are torn down to be replaced by another equally useless product. It wasn't a good year on the techno tourism front, as the Balearic Beat took a bit of a pounding and maybe, just maybe, the Sharons 'n' Darrens have charter-flighted away for the very last time.

It was always faintly ridiculous that a musical sound could be so inextricably linked with a geographical location. Previous to house music, the island was known as a hippy dropout place in the 1960s, graduating to an LSD-fuelled location in the 1970s - when prog-rock reigned supreme among the bored aristos and pre-New Age charlatans who took up residence here.

All it ever amounted to in its ecstasy-addled heyday was a bunch of chancer DJs somehow convincing themselves and the dance hordes that the records they spun in dank South London clubs sounded that bit better when played on a Mediterranean island.

For what seemed like an interminable time in the 1990s, Ibiza was invaded by the musical yoof - shouting "on one!", "sorted!", "largin' it!" and "havin' it!" in the best traditions of a Viz cartoon character. "The biggest musical explosion since Punk!" hyperventilated the now-defunct dance magazines about the Ibiza scene. Which is fine, if your idea of musicality stretches to paying a small fortune into a poxy nightclub to hear car-alarm music. And all those ridiculous categories: house, deep house, progressive house. As if people out of their tiny minds on cheap drugs knew the difference. The only discernible difference really was that some of the car-alarm "tunes" being played featured someone blowing a whistle; others didn't.

Techno tourism was hoist by its own petard. Arriving in Ibiza airport (like the one at Knock, but without the glamour), you'd be assailed by flyers, ads, special offers and giddy news about whichever overpaid lout had deigned to fly in from London to play other people's records for a king's ransom.

The Darrens 'n' Sharons loved it - Amnesia, Pacha, Space et al offered up the same old disco music with bells and whistles and somehow the experience was supposed to be qualitatively different from that which you could get from an average club night in Aberdeen, Norwich, Wexford or Sligo.

BBC Radio 1 followed slavishly out each year with their preposterous roadshow, and about 850 million compilation albums were released. British dance club promoters - being pretty dense people - raised and raised the admission prices, pissing off the locals and severely trying the patience of the flown-in audience. What was supposed to evoke the spirit of some sort of hippy rave (yeah, right) just became another commodified experience.

The graffiti on the walls beside these clubs said it all: "Stop Disco Mafia". It was widely alleged that the people behind the superclubs pressurised the authorities into closing down some of the local club-bars on spurious legal reasons so people would have no option but to frequent their VIP-tastic superclub.

This rising anger with the dance imperialists, coupled with the prima-donna antics of the superstar DJs, has meant that Ibiza has now lost its position on the dance map. It's been a self-inflicted crisis for dance music, and watch how some of its apologists are now running crying back to "real" music while others are, rather hilariously, trying on the "Burkina Faso is the new Seattle" line.

Another huge blow was the downturn in popularity of ecstasy. In tabloid shorthand, Ibiza was Ecstasy Island. Taking the drug out the equation meant taking away what was (for many) the sole reason they visited the island. And you really had to be off your bin on ecstasy to listen to car-alarm music for ten straight hours. And what a girlie drug it was anyway. Why these people couldn't get by on a mixture of lager and cocaine the way the rest of us have to, is a mystery to me.

Venezuela, apparently, is the new Ibiza. Let the pillaging begin.