Manumission: the story behind Ibiza’s house of hedonism

Backstage at a giant Ibizan venue, at the opening of a fresh incarnation of a club night created by a gang of expat British promoters, the evening’s lead performer explained the onstage routine to her hesitant and inexperienced partner.

“We both wear black sexy underwear, we go on to the platform in the middle of the swimming pool,” began Renata, a 6ft blonde from Amsterdam with a “do-anything” attitude. “We start to kiss, and then we move down to the floor. I have my period! I pull out my Tampax, swing it around over my head, throw it into the crowd. Then you come and fuck me from behind with the strap-on.”

Renata paused for a beat.

“You good with this?”

Claire Davies, a 20-year-old runaway raver and former business student from suburban London, replied with a gulp and a lie.

“Yes,” she said.

And at the epicentre of this cavernous club, in front of what Davies describes as an “amphitheatre of eyes”, some 4,000 people: showtime.

Claire Davies is 51 now and a married mother of three. She is describing to me her memories of the 1995 opening of Manumission, the club night that would eat Ibiza, then the world and then almost Davies herself. “When I come to there’s 8,000 eyes looking at me,” she says, recalling the moment. “And there’s Renata leading. She’s like a Bond girl. She’s powerful. And it’s fluid, because there’s no rehearsal when you do that kind of a performance. You’re totally in the hands of the other performer.”

For 10 minutes the couple got down to it, naked, “and Renata does what, ah, she said she was going to do”.

Watching from the sidelines was Mike McKay, Davies’s boyfriend. McKay and his brother, Andy, both of them Lincolnshire-born and bred, launched Manumission in Ibiza in the summer of 1994, having relocated the night from its beginnings in Manchester’s Gay Village. Mike’s vision was Manumission-on-the-Mediterranean, a nightclub as circus maximus, a place of “magic, drag queens, sex, dwarfs and art”.

And so, there, on opening night, was Mike’s gung-ho girlfriend Claire, delivering on the sex and perhaps the art, too.

“I remember standing next to Lil’ Kaz, the little person,” McKay says of Karen Anderson, the London raver who was one of the troupe of performers asked to help bring the Manumission vision to life. (“Little person” was both her preferred and the correct appellation.) “We’re both dressed in doctor’s jackets,” McKay goes on, “and both of our jaws are wide open. I’m thinking: ‘Hang on a second – they look like they’re having way too much fun.’ I literally felt sick to the stomach, like you just walked in on your woman with another man.”

Three decades on, Davies has written a book about the history of Manumission, The Motel: High Times in 90s Ibiza, which is credited to Claire Manumission, the name by which she became known. (McKay and his brother were Mike Manumission and Andy Manumission, respectively.) The Motel is an eye-watering, ear-bleeding, nose-running chronicle of high risks and high ambition, of creating a clubbing brand that became infamous for its live sex show, often involving Claire and Mike, but which also reinvented, in Ibiza’s largest venues, what a nightclub should and could be, and of making a club night that lived up to meaning of its Latin name: freedom from slavery.

Davies’s book covers a five-year, Med-for-it saga, but it focuses on the Manumission Motel, the residential house-of-hedonism that the trio ran in a former brothel over the 1998 summer season.

“It was for the Hemingways and Picassos and Fitzgeralds of our time,” Mike says. “That was the idea. I was always a huge fan of Paris in the 1920s. So I was like: why can’t we make a place where those equivalent people of our times can hang out together?”

One of those people, the author Irvine Welsh, who DJ-ed at Manumission and regularly “lost” nights there, once told me, “I thought: ‘This is great, you’ve got 10,000 people here.’ But nobody’s watching the DJ box. And I realise it’s because, looking down, I can see Mike and Claire shagging on one stage and [well-hung contortionist performer] Fernando [Leone] sucking his own cock on the other stage. I’m thinking: ‘Well, I can’t really compete with that!’”

Davies’s book is a no-holes-barred account of a no-holes-barred time. Britain’s club kids and celebrity set flocked to Manumission in the 1990s; eventually the BBC, Sky’s Ibiza Uncovered reality series and the salacious sizzle-merchants of the tabloids followed in pursuit. It opens with a coked-up Davies and McKay being threatened by a pistol-packing “friend” to whom they owed money, and closes with a naked photograph of the couple in their golden 90s prime. The intervening pages are filled with a pills, thrills and bellyaches picaresque featuring the Happy Mondays, Kate Moss, two Jaggers (Mick and Jade), Roman Polanski, Diego Maradona, a sex performer called Otter (she of the “fire breathin’ pussy show”) and thousands and thousands of deliriously happy clubbers.

The book also marks a rapprochement, personal and business-wise, between the McKay brothers, whose relationship became one of the casualties of the club’s 2008 crash. And finally, Davies’s reclaiming of the club’s good(ish) name also tees up its return.

Later this summer, Manumission will ride again for one heady weekend. Its many delights will unfold across Ibiza’s 100,000 sq metre venue 528, an indoor/outdoor playground that’s one of several properties owned by the Ibiza Rocks Group, Andy’s company, which grew out of the younger McKay’s launching of live music in Manumission’s back room.

Which is how and why, one sunny late afternoon in June, the easygoing, thoroughly down-to-earth trio are gathered at Pikes, the old-school boutique hotel in the hills above San Antonio, legendary as the venue for Freddie Mercury’s 41st birthday bacchanal, and as the location for Wham!’s Club Tropicana video.

Pikes is also part of the Ibiza Rocks Group portfolio. Andy lives nearby. Claire and Mike have long resided in the mountains outside Barcelona, raising their children – now 21, 23 and 25 – “off-grid” on a farm.

I ask Davies why she wanted to write the book.

“The history had been polluted,” she replies, as aware as anyone of the damage done when Ibiza Uncovered managed to film inside Manumission. (Mike: “That should not have happened.”) “For years we refused to do interviews,” Davies says. “Then somebody will come in and do an interview for you. And it’s not just about somebody else taking credit for what you did. It’s the wrong somebody taking credit for what you did.”

Davies worked on the book with the help of Mike, now her husband, for the best part of a decade. She wanted to explain how there were “reasons behind everything that we did”, those reasons involving a desire to bring theatricality, spectacle, conceptual art and counter-culture transgression to club rooms in which the normal entertainment was a standing DJ – usually white, usually a bloke – playing records. “It had to be told, for future generations. I wanted young kids now to understand how something like Manumission could happen.”

The couple interviewed some 80 “friends of Manumission”. Recollections vary – because it was the 1990s, because there were drugs. Scenesters from the era include Welsh and Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook. The latter’s contribution is a postcard from his pre-sobriety past: “Later that night we returned to the Motel when things were properly kicking off,” he wrote, “though most of my memories are somewhat hazy. I definitely remember Zoe [Ball] asking me if she should try the liquid acid that was being passed around. I told her ‘no’, which I think may possibly have saved her radio career…”

To be clear: Davies and McKay never set out to participate in Manumission’s sex shows. But the team were determined to make them part of their club’s USP because, as Davies writes, “at a time when violence was acceptable but sex was not, everybody present was convinced of the absolute importance of this act of defiance”. Andy, who is 55, says, “I’ve much more of an appreciation for it than I did at the time. It was something I couldn’t watch, for understandable reasons. Even then, though, I did appreciate there was a whole message behind it.”

“One of our beliefs from the very beginning was that we were hands-on,” replies Davies, of her own participation. “We wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything we wouldn’t be prepared to do ourselves. So I didn’t feel I could say no… But I remember looking at Mike, thinking: ‘You’re supposed to say no!’”

“Why?” I ask Mike, 57 now, sitting across the table from Davies. “Why didn’t you say no?

“Because the sexual element in the party was the cherry on top, the spice in the recipe,” he says. “We had all the bits – the dwarfs, the music, everything. The sexual element was something we knew would take Manumission to another plane.”

Reinvention was constant; nothing ever stayed the same, lest it become boring. In 1997, their fourth year, they decided to make a documentary. True to the gang’s maximalist form, Manumission the Movie was presented as 24 hours in the life of the club, but comprised footage from 14 parties shot across the 14 weeks of the summer season. Each was directed and soundtracked by a different filmmaker, DJ and producer team, each themed on a male 20th-century icon (Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious, John Wayne) and each of them was represented in artwork by a female drag king.

As if that wasn’t enough, Ibiza Uncovered also broadcast that summer. As Davies writes: “Every Thursday, Sky served up fresh rations of Manumission to the British public… enticing wide-eyed teenagers to make Ibiza their ‘don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it’ destination of choice. We had been filling the club with a rebellious international crowd for three years, but this TV overexposure meant we were drawing in thousands of young British youths, fresh out of school, bringing the dance floor to a standstill, waiting for the performance.”

Badly pixelated TV footage of Davies and co sparked a firestorm of “out of context” coverage in the British press. Unhelpfully, Davies’s grandmother was able to identify her. “That was really awkward,” she says quietly. “It caused a huge rift in the family. The worst thing was my mum standing up for me. I felt guilty for putting her in that position.”

Chastened but not chaste. In 1998 they decided to go smaller, relatively speaking. Alongside the mother club, they created what Davies describes in her book as “The coolest, most-talked-about, de-puta-madre, rock-and-roll Motel in the history of mankind.” In a former brothel painted pink, time would stand still, the press would be banned and the friends of Manumission could party 25/7. “The Motel was pure uncut Manumission,” Davies writes. “Drip, drip, drip went the liquid acid. Dab, dab, dab went the powdered MDMA. Chop, chop, chop went the rock of cocaine, the mescaline, the ketamine…”

Davies and McKay lived onsite at the Motel, surviving on three hours’ sleep for weeks at a time. Radio 1 DJ Lisa I’Anson, who once flew in from Bali to present The Breakfast Show live from Ibiza, went AWOL when she was due on air alongside Ball; the BBC given the excuse by someone from the Motel that she had been “kidnapped”.

Meanwhile, while Radio 1 also broadcast its dance music show from Manumission, the Daily Mail weighed in. It wondered whether it was “appropriate use of licence payers’ money to promote an event whose reputation is founded almost entirely on pornography”. The pornographers-in-chief? They were Davies – “wearing a white bikini so brief it could have been made from two paper napkins… In other circumstances, she might be likened to an English rose” – and McKay, a “shaven-headed man with a thick, dark beard and the look of a Hells Angel on his holidays”.

For a while, the couple were able to ride the wave. “It really suited me, living in the Motel,” Davies says. “It was my doll’s house and I was this crazy Barbie running around in it.”

“I loved living intensely in that world,” McKay says. “But there was no getting out of it.”

And so, eventually, the wave subsumed them. “For the first time in our lives together we were off balance,” writes Davies, describing a cataclysmic argument during which she yelled at McKay, “You turned me into a slut!” She admits now that she cried as she worked through those passages. “It has been really difficult writing this stuff and coming to terms with those things.”

By the 1999 season, the sex show was over, not because the couple were in too dark a place, but because dance music magazine Mixmag had said, “You’d be guaranteed a sex show by Mike and Claire,” McKay says, and “we thought, ‘Fuck that, you’re not guaranteed anything at Manumission!’”

Into the new millennium, with the couple’s first child born, there was a “reawakening” of Manumission, a new iteration that included sets by superstar stage designer Mark Fisher. Then, in 2008, it ended. Andy set up Ibiza Rocks. Mike and Claire set off for mainland Spain. And that seemed the end of Manumission.

In 2026, though, the club, and the brothers, are back. On an island now dominated by mega-clubs, VIP bottle service and oligarchical DJ residencies, Andy McKay looks forward to September’s Le Weekend Manumission “reconnecting Ibiza to its magic. To the energy that we all feel when we land here. It’s going back to what is uniquely Ibiza, rather than what is generically globally cool.”

Or, as Irvine Welsh frames it: “Manumission elevated the clubbing experience into something much more heightened, liberated and more about the history and spirit of Ibiza. This predates acid house. Ibiza is a place where freaky people came to live life in a different way. These hippie ideals of free love, meditation, spirituality, the rejection of crass values of consumerism – it was trying to integrate all that into an acid house-powered paradigm for a new generation. Claire and Mike were way ahead of the curve.”

They’re still pushing boundaries now. Collaborators on Manumission ’26 include the creative directors from Glastonbury Festival’s own late-night “naughty corner”.

“I thought it’d be easier, because it’s only one event,” admits Davies of the conceptualising and building of Le Weekend Manumission. “Then we remembered: you have to do the same work for one event as you do for the whole season, because everyone expects the most from Manumission. It’s a massive production.”

“It’s basically as if the book has come to life,” Mike says. “If we succeed, it’ll be like stepping into 1998, into that Motel world. But it’ll be fresh, and for now. If we pull it off.”

“Will there be a sex show?” I ask.

“You’ll have to wait and see,” says Claire.

“But it definitely won’t be us,” says Mike.

The Motel: High Times in 90s Ibiza by Claire Manumission (Velocity Press, £25). Save 10% at observershop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25.

Le Weekend Manumission is on 25-27th September. For information and tickets,  go to manumission.com

Stephane Cardinale - Corbis and PYMCA/Avalon