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

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!”