No promotion: Underground is back for another season as Ibiza's best-kept secret

Sandwiched in between two of Ibiza’s largest superclub venues, Privilege and Amnesia, Ibiza Underground is like David surrounded by a world of towering clubland Goliaths. Factor Pacha into the equation, the global clubbing giant located approximately a mile or so to the east, as well as Ushuaïa and Hï, situated in the nearby clubbing Mecca of Playa d’en Bossa, and you begin to wonder how Ibiza Underground, a 600-capacity renovated finca that doesn’t advertise its parties, has managed to survive at all in such an increasingly competitive industry.

The answer comes in the form of Spanish venue owner Don Juanito. Juanito has been visiting the island since 1982. He worked for nightclubs in Switzerland and Miami, before hosting a full summer of weekly parties at Privilege back in 1994, headlined by Danny Rampling.

“The owner of Privilege, Jose Antonio Santamaria, asked me to do a party there,” Juanito explains to Mixmag an hour before the 2017 Ibiza Underground opening party gets underway. “We did one year and it went okay. The trouble was that the venue was just too big. To promote something with quality was very hard. You needed major money.”

By the turn of the millennium, Juanito admits to feeling “a little bored” by the rampant commercialism of the scene. Together with his brother Jesus and Englishman Nick Fry, he came across a restaurant in San Rafael which he thought could be better utilised as a nightclub. At the time the site was being used, rather unsuccessfully, to stage local music events. Prior to that, in the mid-1980s, controversial movie director Roman Polanski ran a restaurant there, again without a great deal of success.

Looking around the courtyard at 1am, you can see the history pouring out of the venue. The garden, full of plants and trees and water features, is low-lit with red and purple pixie lights. The 200-year-old house – which contains the club itself – looks a lot like the Privilege garden did 10 years ago, with tall glass panels separating the dancefloor from a swathe of illuminated cactus. Outside, there are still plenty of chairs and tables available. Inside, the club is filling up quickly. People crowd around the DJ booth to listen to Romanian DJ Calin. The atmosphere is relaxed, but the undercurrent is as close to the early days of the scene as you can get – raw, stripped back, yet exceptionally friendly. Clearly the priority for the majority of the ravers who are here tonight – mostly Spanish and Eastern European heads in their mid 20s – is to find a spot on the dancefloor and dance.

“In the beginning we didn’t have much money to invest,” Juanito explains. “Everything was done step by step. We had so many promoters telling us they liked the venue. But I didn’t want them here. I like to cooperate with people, but not if I don’t like their music. Instead, we decided to stick to our guns and keep the club the way we thought it should be. We never did one single poster, one billboard or one flyer. It’s always been word of mouth. Although today we do have Facebook. But I think that’s normal. If you do big publicity campaigns hyping yourself up, saying you’re the best club in the world, obviously it’s bullshit. Right from the start we did everything by ourselves and to our surprise we found it was working.”

In the years that followed, Ibiza Underground became a sort of training camp for young underground DJs and producers looking to develop a strong understanding of the scene. “Jamie Jones used to play here in the beginning,” Juanito continues. “At that time he was playing very experimental music. And I met tINI before she was even a DJ. 10 years ago she used to come here as a client. Now that she is well known, she stays here because she says the venue is important. Matthew Jonson often says to me, ‘Juanito, you stick to what you’re doing, because Ibiza needs something like Underground, something outside of this massive machine.’ In the early days, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai used to come here as a client. He used to run around with a microphone. He used to sing. One day, he said to us, ‘when you become well known, you will change the idea.’ And I said ‘no, never.’ Of course, there are people who don’t understand why we work this way, but it is the way I am and I cannot change it. People ask me why we don’t make more promotions. Well, we don’t want to make more promotions. The residents, like Rhadoo, don’t give a fuck about doing more promotions and neither do I!”

Peeking behind the DJ booth at 2am, it’s clear to see that nothing has really changed. Where Jamie Jones, Rossko and Archie Hamilton once stood and studied the scene, now a core crew of Eastern European DJs are doing the same. Speaking to Calin after his opening set, it becomes apparent how passionate he is about the venue. For the most part, it’s the only club he plays in Ibiza and he tells us that’s the way it will always be. He prefers to play unreleased music, otherwise he gets bored, and there’s just nowhere else on the island he can get away with dropping unreleased tunes for two hours straight. Underground is the place to DJ, he says, if you don’t want to be inhibited or influenced by club politics or commercial prejudices.

“I’ve seen it so many times,” says Juanito. “When the DJs get famous they become more commercial. They have a few big years and then people don’t care about them anymore. They get lost and they lose their taste in music along the way. That’s what happens to those who sell their soul to the machine.”

Interestingly, machines don’t seem to work too well in Ibiza Underground. Our mobile signal cuts in… and then it cuts out again. When it returns, shamefacedly, we try to use Shazam. But here’s the thing: the resident DJs who power Underground always drop exclusive, unreleased tunes, a move which renders Shazam completely ineffective. It becomes apparent that Romanian DJs like Rhadoo, Raresh, Praslea, and Calin and Naza who are playing tonight, are passing the tunes we’re hearing around between themselves, leaving the wider world beyond the four walls of Ibiza Underground largely oblivious to this dissident wellspring of house and techno music. That’s why it’s customary to spend the entire night at Underground without hearing a single track you know.

“People ask me why I have so many Romanian residents here,” Juanito concludes after completing his extended back-to-back set with Naza at 6am, “but it’s not about where they’re from; it’s the fact that they approach music in a different way. The way they produce is different too; it’s not so obvious. When you hear their music it makes you think. I play vinyl – I have more than 10,000 records in the back – but now I also play with Traktor because the Romanian guys have given me so many unreleased tracks. So, like I say, it’s not about where the DJs are from or even who is on the line-up. The people who come here to Ibiza Underground know that we’re going to be playing good music. It doesn’t matter whether it’s me, tINI, Rhadoo or Nastia playing it, you’re going to hear house and techno music you’ve never heard before.”

Check out Don Juanito’s Ibiza Underground opening party playlist below