The Secret DJ relives memories of post-gig euphoria in Ibiza

Despite the labyrinthine ways into the bowels of Space Ibiza (RIP), leaving is like stepping out of the office. Push some huge fire doors and a savage blast of light and heat denotes that it’s both unbelievably daytime and steaming hot again. You know you should go to the hotel. You want to.

But it isn’t going to happen.

Too many times you’ve tried and failed. It’s not just the high you’re on from performing; your body clock has been flipped. The flight is some hours away. Better to carry on than pace around a room on your own. A location for the carry-on is always found. The promoter drives us to a dreary dive that’s clearly some sort of brothel. Ibiza has been party central for a very long time, and beneath all the glitz it has a seedy underbelly.

Weave through the sad, tired, fading ‘girls’. Nod to the two ancient locals sitting on stools and emerge out back onto a terrazzo complete with plastic lobsters in fishing nets, false palm trees and rattan – and a couple of hundred panda-eyed veterans of the previous night. It’s a buzz you can almost touch. It’s great talking to people after the isolation of the booth. A crowd may cheer, but sometimes it’s better when an actual person thanks you afterwards – more real. It’s not you they were cheering back there anyway. It was the music, the party. If you think it’s you, well, that way madness lies. So it’s great to meet the people from last night. In a way you were just one of them, but denied any contact. The boy in the bubble. Mad faces and grinning loons come at you. Even if you don’t think the night revolves around you, many of them do. And if someone had a bad night it’s your fault too. It’s so easy in these moments to lose perspective. To believe the hype about you. I excel at it.

Then the high subsides, and physical fatigue starts to encroach. Now it really is too late to get back to the hotel and get anything more than two hours’ bad sleep or some lonely masturbation. It’s about now you start to think ‘fuck it’ and you do a little something “just to avoid the crash”. Everyone has their own species of excuse. Stay up for 22 hours travelling and working and then tell me about tired. Bad decisions are inevitable then. As the drugs marry the exhaustion in the Vegas of your guts it all makes sense. Everyone stops seeming weird and needy, and you remember: these are your people.

“What’s your name? What are you on? Where you from?” …it’s the litany of the afterhours, the false economy of friendship-from-a-bottle. We believed it wholeheartedly for a while in the 1980s. I still do in these moments. There’s a weird sense of triumph in the air: that we made it. That the world is just waking up, yet we’re still here. We are the emperors of everything right now. Glittering idiots spouting golden nonsense. When sober, this kind of thing makes make me feel old. As redundant as a fat reference book in the age of Google; as sad as a brown Christmas tree on a street corner in February. Now, I laugh at my own thoughts. We play on words badly in several attempted languages. There’s a lot of laughing. Always a lot of that. If there ever was a situation where the combination of volume, incoherence and exhaustion means no-one communicates at all, it’s this. The irony is everyone thinks there is meaning and even depth. There is none at all, just people wafting about and quacking and barking absolute drivel. This is my world. And I love it.

Then you’re playing records again just to keep going. While you’re at the controls everyone is kind of holding you up, willing you forward. Everyone is talking a foreign language, especially the ones from your own land. This is where those who can afford to miss their flight home will do so with relish and glee. It’s the Switzerland in the war of common sense: the neutral moment when you pull the cord and leave... or stay on and willingly weave your wobbly way into the unknown with people you’ve only just met. You manage to stagger to the hellish bathroom. A small epiphany is squeezed out. This is what it’s all about, innit? A binary decision about who you are. Are you a player, or the played? Are you about television, burgers and smartphones ...or are you about adventure? Do you subscribe to the propaganda of Instagram übermensch and their vacuous smiles, or do you participate in human reality? I am on my own, full of internal questions, surrounded by a random parliament of extreme characters from all over the globe. It feels like home.

Then I make my biggest mistake of the last 24 hours. I ask someone the time.

This feature appears in the July 2017 issue of Mixmag