If I come back to the roots of this Truth page I remember that I have created it to be able to say what is that happened for real on the road and what the real truth is behind any adventures happening to me the road.
I remember being stuck forever in snow storms in Chicago in March and missed two gigs because of flight cancellations etc., and I wanted to find a medium to let people know exactly what happened and why I didn’t show up to those gigs, before they would presume a bunch of wrong things such as I am flaky or whatever they could possibly invent!
And now I am back again to the initial purpose of this page, as I want to talk about what happened two weeks ago when I missed my gig in Bodrum – Turkey.
The night before my trip to Turkey I decided I was going to go to Ibiza to hang out with my friends as on the same night both DJ Heaven and Christian Smith were playing in the island and it was going to be a great opportunity for a fun night out before a hard weekend on the road.
I don’t know whether it is because the residents of that island hate tourists or whether they are simply born rude and lazy like this, but I have never seen anything like that before in my whole life!
First thing I do when I arrive to the hotel is that I try to reserve a taxi for the next morning to be able to go to the airport and catch my flight. The lady at front desk tells me that it is impossible to reserve a taxi in Ibiza in August. I obviously don’t trust what she says and I make her call in front of us (Christian was there with me) and as soon as she says to the taxi company that she needs to reserve a taxi for the morning they hang up on her! So she passes me the phone to hear that they literally hung up on her, so I could believe her. Obviously I did, but I couldn’t believe it anyway!
A few minutes later while I was waiting for my friend Mal to come pick me up with a taxi at my hotel, I receive her phone call saying she was still waiting for a taxi and that she’s called 6 times to get one and the last time they said that if she needs to reserve a taxi she should call back in September!!
Still, I couldn’t believe it! How come an island busy like this one wouldn’t have a better system, better services and especially why are everyone so rude?!
Nevertheless I thought to leave it like that and call in the morning to order a taxi (not reserve it) and go and enjoy myself in a great night out. In my last post I avoided speaking about Ibiza clubs, I prefered staying silent on that one, and I will do the same this time. Talking about how the clubs were and how the people were in the clubs is somewhat an intense topic for me which I will keep on avoiding for now.. so I will keep on speaking about my story…
After my night out I head back to my hotel to pack and leave. I call a taxi and it never shows up! I wait in front of my hotel for about one hour, and nothing. The lady the night before had told me the taxi can take from 5 till 10 till 40 minutes till one hour, who knows, depending on how busy they are or how they feel, really…
Now I say, is there anyone normal on that island?
How is it possible that I try to reserve a taxi and I only get rudeness back, and that when I do as they say, call for one and wait for one it never shows up!? This is ridiculous! So I was there, stuck there in front of the rudest hotel I have ever stayed in, having to call Brian to let him know that I was not going to make my flight as I was still waiting for my taxi outside of my hotel in Ibiza! That was very embarassing. It sounds very weird, I know, but anyone who is in Ibiza in August and that lives with the taxi reality and not the limo reality, will be able to agree with me when I say it is literally impossible to get moving quickly on that island, and that what you find is rudeness wherever you go!
I do not particularly enjoy that place, it’s like everyone’s on crack or something. I mean, how can a taxi company hang up on a client? Or laugh at a client and say to call back in September? And that’s not all, but I must say stuff about this shitty hotel where I stayed at: Mollins Park. Anyone that reads this I suggest you don’t ever go there. Christian and I were stuck to go there last minute as the whole island was full and if we wouldn’t have taken that place we would have been homeless for that night. But I swear I am never puttimg my nose in there again! Has anyone ever been in the army? Because I felt like this hotel was like the army! I got screamed at by the lady at reception because my friends were going to come upstairs to help me with my bags! She didn’t want to and so I had to do everything on my own, and God knows how heavy are those records and those bags! And of course the hotel was so LOW that it had no lift, so I had to walk up and down two floors of stairs with heavy bags all on my own. How can people be so dramatic in life? But then again no, because at least someone that’s dramatic proves you to be a human being, and in that lady’s case – and I should say also in the whole island’s case – I don’t see any sign of humanity there!
I see that place like being some planet that’s not in this world, where everyone gets overly excited to be there as if it was something so special and so amazing, and everyone becomes someone else, and rude, and fucked up, and out of it completely! It’s like they’re all on crack!?
So on that wednesday night I finally end up leaving crack island to get back to Palma de Mallorca where I have been based for a month. My agency changed my flights so I could depart from Palma on friday morning to at least catch up with my Izmir gig in Turkey on that friday night. Palma is a very civilised island and when you call a taxi you usually get it within 10 minutes. I love that island and I’ve spent my last 4 summers there and it’s definitely like my summer home now. This year my crazy cackcomplementaryheads Clare and Malissa, have joined me for a week of madness in that cute little flat (Christian’s courtesy – thanks babe!!) in Illetas where we’ve literally tested every part of our body, and we can now say that everything is perfectly functional!
That was another type of army session that we had, but a fun one…
I do feel bad about what happened in Ibiza and about missing the gig in Bodrum. It is true that if I would have stayed in Palma nothing of all this would have ever happened, but then again that’s how it is, that’s where I was, and what happened is absolutely not normal in my opinion! I have the freedom to be wherever I want to be, as long as my job gets done, but when it is out of your control like this and you can’t do your job because of others, then you can only hope that people believe you. But it is, I know, an unbelievable story…
But what is believable about a crack island anyway?
After all this craziness I finally made it to Izmir on the friday night, and to be honest I have had better gigs. I played for this Camel sponsorship night, without even knowing it, and I had to stop the music every hour so they could present a 3 minutes brainwashing clip on Camel cigarettes! I didn’t particularly think that it was very respectful for the DJ: me and others, and I don’t think it’s right to not mention these things to the agency prior to the booking. I mean, who says I agree to promote Camel cigarettes?! I don’t even smoke myself!
So I get back to Palma the next day, after a total of 34 hours of travelling and 2 hours of sleep, and I continue my San Miguel sponsorzip tour with Beavis and Butthead. It felt nice to be back home again!
Last friday though I had a decent weekend at least! I played Code again in Birmingham and the night was fantastic. This time I was on my own, without Carl, and I really was wondering how the night could be good and busy when on one end there was Creamfields Festival in Liverpool the next day, and on the other end I am not the most popular DJ in the Birmigham area, even though last time the night went very well and people were saying very good things about it. Well, as usual I was stressing for nothing as the night was really cool. Quite busy too and I had a very good time playing in that perfect system again! I am very pleased to know that I will be back there almost every month from now on, as being somewhat a resident at Godskitchen for me is something quite different and unexpected, but very exciting!
The day after I was in Gijon, north west of Spain, where I’ve eaten the best seafood in my entire life! The promoters were fantastic, really nice people and very professional! The gig was great even though I almost killed the sound guy. I really wonder how come most of the sound technicians in parties are rockers and they have no idea of how to set up a sounds properly for electronic music?! They always fear that their system is going to blow up and they never give you enough volume, when they have another 20 000 Watts available to give you, and then the sound gets saturated and that’s when everything sounds horrible and can blow up! So what happened was typical: as soon as the sound guy saw me going on te decks he put everything down and for about half hour I had no punch in my music. He obviously thought “oh that’s a chick and she’s going to blow all my speakers up”. I had to scream at him really loud to get some sound back and when he finally gave it to me I’ve played an intense two hours of hard hitting techno. In that part of the world that’s how they want it, they like no candies!
In fact this makes me speak about the great gig I’ve had in the middle of the island of Palma de Mallorca with Carl 3 weeks ago! I don’t know what it is with the Spanish people but they all like it heavy and hard. That gig was incredible, it was in some kind of cathedral and it was absolutely packed! It was nice to see that the night was so successfull as it was a brand new night that Toni Palmer was starting in the island, trying to make something new and good again for the island. Toni is the man behind BCM in Magaluf (Mallorca), but since BCM became an extension of Great Britain and lost its musical spirit Toni wasn’t part of the whole thing anymore. And the club went worse and worse. I am confident that he will soon make his new night at Gothic become the hottest thing on the island, and I am very happy for him as he’s worked hard and he is a very kind man and he deserves his success.
So that was it for the month of August. It has been a very exciting month on a personal level more than on the work level, but that’s ok as this makes me look forward to more and better work situations in the near future.
I say that as of next week Montreal, Chicago and Ottawa will never be the same again…
And I say that I hope to get another San Miguel sponsorzip next year!
Until then, much love to the witches…
Barbara x