Inside MANUMISSION, the brothel-turned-nightclub and debauched epicentre of '90s Ibiza

Before the turn of the millennium, Ibiza was a tale of pure hedonism and liberation, a pleasure-seeking wonderland where nights would bleed into days and nights again. At its centre, there was MANUMISSION, a club night founded by brothers Andy and Mike McKay, Dawn Hindle and Claire Davies (AKA Claire Manumission) in Manchester that made its way to the White Isle by 1994, where it would take a new, exuberant form.

First launched at Ku Club – Ibiza’s largest venue which would later become Privilege, and more recently [UNVRS] – each MANUMISSION event quickly filled to capacity and laid the blueprint for free-spirited, ecstatic Ibiza clubbing. After establishing itself as a queer haven, partners Claire and Mike purchased a former brothel in Ibiza’s outskirts to host a more intimate version of MANUMISSION, nicknamed The Motel.

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Featuring the same MANUMISSION ethos, The Motel hosted non-stop, 24/7 parties where the likes of Kate Moss, Shaun Ryder, Irvine Welsh and Jean Paul Gaultier would frequent, and DJs including Carl Cox, Fatboy Slim and Alfredo would hit their stride. It birthed a radical and excessive era of clubbing where all judgement was left at the door.

Claire Manumission has now recounted the early days of the legendary party in her new memoir ‘The Motel: High Times in ‘90s Ibiza’, set to be released by Velocity Press on July 31. It’s an unfiltered look at the fleeting era – a coming-of-age one for Claire, who recalls the many stories and scenes of MANUMISSION in its fledgling days. 

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"The Motel is written from my perspective as a 23-year-old woman in the eye of the storm of ‘90s Ibiza," she says. "I took myself back to the wild, barefoot years and tried to write without judgment. My hope is that it may serve as a handbook to freedom and transformation."

Ahead of the release of The Motel: High Times in ‘90s Ibiza, we've pulled an exclusive extract from the book which you can now read below, alongside photos from the early days of MANUMISSION at its brothel-turned-nightclub home.

In this chapter titled 'The Sleep Demon', Claire Manumission recounts the opening night of The Motel, the former brothel she purchased alongside her partner Mike, and the chaotic club night they launched. Check it out below

They say marijuana is a gateway drug. What about success? Artistic achievements must be built on, and bettered. Not necessarily in size, but in power and sheer audaciousness. I was 20 years old when I persuaded Mike to return to Ibiza and give MANUMISSION a second chance – with me by his side.

Mike opened my eyes to art: Winters in the metropolis, the blood-stained reality of Brooklyn’s Classon Avenue, the graffiti in Keita’s sprawling urban apartment, hip hop, B-boys, super fly girls, posters, stickers and ‘I ♥ New York’ T-shirts on the street corners of Soho, video art, art openings, chilled white wine, the Guggenheim, the gift shop, the work of Jeff Koons’ ‘Made in Heaven’, where the artist lay naked with Italian porn queen and his future wife, Cicciolina. The work of Andy Warhol, Kurt Vonnegut and Milan Kundera. We read silently in the New York library, ate Breakfast at Tiffany’s, watched classic movies, blue movies, musicals and masterpieces. We danced sensually in Juicy and Jackie 60s, where our search for Otter the legendary sex performer began. That was where we first heard DJ Jerome spin and booked him to play alongside Balearic Godfather Alfredo at MANUMISSION.

Mike and I designed the first of 1,000 pieces of poster art: a nod to the classic ‘I ♥ New York’ logo, with a punk twist placing our naked selves in the centre of a heart of nudes on a baby pink and baby blue union jack flag. Now here we were, four years later, with our own baby pink slice of Americana, a living billboard, an art installation pulsating with the energy of two of the most exciting places in the world: NYC meets IBZ. It was only a week since we had been given the keys to the pink abandoned brothel, incurring a hefty debt to the armed criminal. 

The Motel was like a doll’s house on acid. The Pink Pussy Strip Joint was the playroom – in various shades of pink, the deep crimson stained wood dripped over the stage. Mike and I designed it to resemble the alluring curves and folds of its namesake. I loved the 1950s, rock ’n’ roll and the movie Grease; Mike was a great admirer of cultural provocateur Hugh Hefner who, as well as pushing sexual boundaries, had published works in Playboy magazine by Roald Dahl, Henry Miller, Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, Gabriel García Márquez. The list goes on. 

The Pink Pussies, the name we gave our crack team of New York strippers, was a MANUMISSION melange of The Pink Ladies and The Bunny Girls. 

Mike was also a fan of American social satirist and stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who said ‘it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness’. And as John Cleese noted, ‘in ’63, you caused a riot if you said “fuck”. It all seems a bit arbitrary to me. What matters is that we try to be kind to people, which is the basis of all religion. If we try to be kind, we don’t have to worry about particular words, because words get their meaning – which is what really matters – from a context.’

Back in ’92 when Mike had previously been living in New York, he frequented good parties at places like Nells, The Tunnel and Club USA. ‘It was a super creative scene,’ he told me. ‘Club USA was a theatre with a slide going down to the stage, it had a metal room upstairs designed by Thierry Mugler and a rooftop above where you could look out over Times Square’. 

Mike looked down over the rooftop at the neon holy-mess and he loved it. He would find himself sitting next to Heather Hunter, the famous porn star who had starred in Tupac Shakur’s music video, and regularly saw party legend Michael Alig with his entourage of club kids. Alig was a good promoter and curator – he ruled New York... of course that was before he went to prison for killing his drug dealer in a narcotic psychosis, putting him on ice in his bathtub, chopping him into pieces and dumping him in the Hudson.

My parents had not wanted me to go to New York with Mike. ‘I don’t think you can stop her,’ Mike told my Dad. ‘She wants to come with me... but I promise I will look after her’. 

I loved New York. And I loved Mike, and now here we were in 1998 – I was 23, he was 28 – engaged to be married standing in our very own Pink Pussy Strip Joint on El Cruce de Jesús, having taken over the abandoned brothel and turned it into a 24-hour party destination for ourselves, a New Orleans sex performer, five New York strippers, a bad tempered Irish person with dwarfism, some of the world’s coolest and most badly behaved DJs and the international scene – the people we called the island – but not the press. To create an environment of absolute freedom, the press would be banned. What could possibly go wrong?

Naked but for stilettos and a microphone, Otter stepped onto the stage. That was her territory, up there with her 1940s cerise-pink bouffant, red lipstick, the tip of her tongue touching her white teeth as she dipped into a backbend, flaunting her ivory nakedness. She reached her right arm down behind her back and her middle finger appeared between her legs, flipping the bird and perfectly covering her sex, which was framed by the tattooed outline of a heart on fire, the flames of which reached up and licked her navel and cradled her hot backside. ‘Welcome to the Pink Pussy Strip Joint’.

She was bouncing on Fred’s of Hollywood heels, in a manner that would cause nipple tassels to spin had she been wearing them. ‘Mikey!?’ she teased in her New Orleans drawl. ‘Get up here and take all your clothes off... he likes it...! He loves it...! He wants more of it!’

Mikey obeyed, passing the joint he was smoking to a very slick-looking Vaughan, dressed in chic robes and leopard print top hat as he threw a ‘Yo! Afrika’ to everyone, and Nick the Greek, who contemptuously racked a line and snorted it directly off the bar. Not something he would’ve done in his own establishment, The Rock – unless he’d been trying to get the place shut down.

My eyes wandered to find young Stuart Price of Les Rythmes Digital, Richard Norris of the Grid and Derek Dahlarge (named after the porn star) leaning on the smooth sculpted crimson bar that appeared to drip with the vulva above their heads. Everything undulating, curving in various shades of pink. Spanish artist and queer icon Tirry Tiriticco, AKA Tirry ‘Master or Servant’, wearing nothing on his slim, tanned torso, tight leather pants so low they revealed the cleavage of his buttocks; a tattooed Tahitian in dirty blue jeans; Italian queen of gay bar Dôme, Ana Maria, garbed in a shocking pink ensemble. A smattering of aristocrats, artists, dealers, ex-cons and outlaws. A louche bohemian crowd bathed in soft pink light that lit up as DJ Jerome transitioned from vinyl to CD walkman, dropping ‘It’s All About the Benjamins’ – the soft NY hip hop sound going down exactly as we had hoped. Turning her sarcastic showbiz smile at me, Otter called out: ‘Y’all wanna see Miss Manumission naked, don’t ya! You perverts.’ Fuck, I thought. 

The MANUMISSION performance. The sunrise sexual uprising has become so important – yet there is no stage management, no set design, and nothing but complaints from ‘the office’ – but the ticket sales, they are not rejected, I mused.

It was a punk rave theatre experience... left entirely up to me.

Blindfold the male victims, tie them to chairs... what’s their poison… that gives me an idea, I figured as the excitement smouldered in the strip joint and Coffee smiled, ‘Brown Sugar’, and teased the Babydoll off her dark shoulders, now entwined with the pole as DJ Jerome filled the Pink Pussy with the surge of D’Angelo’s electric organ. 

What about props? My resources were limited to whatever I could find at the Motel. It was dire. But on the other hand, we had an ensemble cast coming together. Our New York strippers ‘The Pink Pussies’: Coffee, Blueberry, Vanilla Ice Cream, Popcorn and Butterscotch; Jade had expressed an interest, as had my little sister Lois... We even had a couple of volunteer show contenders from the Wall of Sound record label: Stuart Price AKA Jacques Lu Cont, and DJ Derek Dahlarge.

To fulfil my plan I needed two two-litre plastic bottles of milk, I calculated as I blinked and noticed that half the port had followed us back to the Motel. It was good to be in this brand-new bubblicious world, so tasty and sticky that you never wanted to leave. I scampered up the stairs and jumped on the waterbed, our little Ibiza street dogs Chuli and Chicken rocking either side of me. And was I in the mood for a party! This was it, this was going to be everything we had thought it could be. And more.

Mike was at the bar when the urgent message came that he was needed at the door. The man standing outside was anxious, something about his demeanour didn’t fit with the party that was going on all around. He said hello and told Mike he was our poster girl’s father. ‘Great, nice to meet you, come in,’ Mike smiled. But the man didn’t smile back. He was troubled but holding himself together. He wanted to speak to his daughter, he said, and with his next words all sound left the world.

Mike tried to find a comforting word but there were none. Soon after, our poster girl and her father were gone. 

As the night billowed on and I asked after our sweet poster girl, Mike told me there had been a family emergency. I didn’t understand and I was angry he wouldn’t explain. Of course, Mike couldn’t explain, he knew I wouldn’t have been able to bear it. So much depended upon the smooth running of the production. He knew I wouldn’t be able to do that if I knew the horrendous truth. Her sister had been murdered.

Mike stood in a daze as Butterscotch took to the stage. The control of her toned backside was unsurpassed. I watched Mike as he watched her. Her throbbing torso shook as she threw her head down to her feet and fell into a drop split, bouncing on the crimson stage – the house went wild as my blue-green felines narrowed. Was it at that moment that everything changed?

Fuck you, I thought, looking at my reflection in the mirrored door Derek had dismantled in Room 10, sniffing the first of many lines of Ralf ’s white powder. I threw my Barbarella hair back triumphantly and said to Mike in my head: You want to see what I can do?

The Motel: High Times in ‘90s Ibiza, written by Claire Manumission, will be released on July 31 via Velocity Press. Grab your copy here

Gemma Ross is Mixmag’s Associate Digital Editor