Sure we had talked about this film before, but apparently not

Good work over at Thump once again about this seminal Ibiza 1990 film.

Coming of age in Britain towards the end of Thatcher’s long and tedious tenure was a particularly grim prospect for working class teenagers. In the wake of the miner’s strikes and the Poll Tax riots there was little to aspire to, or to inspire. Excluded from the aspirational lifestyle afforded to a privileged few, many turned to music, most notably acid house, as a means of escaping their respective realities. The soundtrack of a generation was accompanied by the legends and mythologies created on a picturesque Mediterranean island out in the Balearics and portrayed with characteristic insouciance in the documentary A Short Film About Chilling, a film depicting the first wave of British DJs, promoters and bands in Ibiza, prior to the subsequent mass invasion of clubbing tourists.

In 1990, Kevin Sampson was running a small production company and like many other independents based around Soho and Clerkenwell, he was chasing commissions from Channel Four. A temporarily transplanted scouser, he had immersed himself in a vibrant London scene and was keen to capture it on film. “At that time I was living the whole thing full throttle – clubs every night, Michiko, Duffer, white Levi’s, crew-cut from Cuts in Soho, vodka jellies, Guarana, cheeky halves.” Concurrently he was managing a (then) little known Liverpudlian band called The Farm, getting them gigs at some of the cooler clubs in the capital, including Nicky Holloway’s Milk Bar and Charlie Chester’s Flying, cementing valuable connections along the way. The Flying Records impresario proved particularly pivotal to the eventual process of making the film. Already a regular visitor to Ibiza, Chester’s promotions at that point were largely Londoncentric, but in 1990 he hatched an idea to bring three bands and more than twenty DJs to Ibiza. The DJs included Terry Farley and Harvey; the bands selected were 808 State, A Man Called Adam (who had to persuade their label to give them five hundred pounds to go on the trip) and The Farm. Ever the opportunist, Kevin began to propagate a plan. “I began thinking we can put all this together. I’d get Channel Four to commission it; The Farm could be in it. That’s how it all started.”

Angus Cameron, a young filmmaker who was cutting his creative teeth making music videos for the likes of Primal Scream, came on board as director, a union that came to fruition largely through geographic serendipity. Kevin was living in Vine Hill in Clerkenwell. His local, the Duke of York, was underneath his flat and frequented by an eclectic assortment of creatives. “Creation Records was opposite me. Jeff Barrett and Heavenly were just round the corner, all these dudes were drinking in the Duke of York, and Angus Cameron was in the thick of it”, Kevin remembers. The connection proved both fortuitous and symbiotic. Amongst several shared interests, the pair bonded over a common love of Super 8, terming it their “rediscovered medium.” Angus recalls getting the go ahead via the receipt of a pencil written note in the post. “A scrap of paper torn from a pad arrived with a message from Kevin saying that he had got the rights to cover Ibiza 1990 for television, adding: ‘We’d better get our heads together to turn this splendid wheeze into a bit of TV magic.’ At that stage we didn’t have any money to make the film, but Kevin managed to persuade a friend to stump up the necessary cash.”

Even with the financing in place, crafting a film of this nature was never going to be easy, especially with little in the way of a shooting script. “Often we wouldn’t really have a plan,” says Angus. “We’d just go with the flow or arrive somewhere having made a loose arrangement to meet someone. Of course, most of the time they wouldn’t turn up”. In retrospect, this unorthodox approach helped to lend the film a sense of ingenuousness, an organic innocence that could not have been crafted with slick planning and high production values. The seeds for the chaotic shoot were sown before the plane had even landed. “Everyone met at Gatwick, with most having been up all night at Charlie Chester’s club, Flying, and there were some proper sights in the departure lounge. The flight itself was chaos,” Angus remembers. The challenges were not restricted to the hedonistic bent of much of the cast and crew though and an array of other hitches had to be overcome.

Pacha and Amnesia were adamant that filming would not take place on their premises, Ku (now Privilege) and Es Paradis were more accommodating, even so, filming in clubs came with obvious problems, not least shooting with film at night. And of course with the night came the temptation to join the pleasure-seeking subjects that they were there to capture, though Angus maintains that the majority of the crew managed to uphold a professional approach. “In the clubs, it’s hard to film when all around you people are off their heads, but we couldn’t and didn’t take drugs. I needed to be pretty bloody minded and at times it did get pretty tense.” However, some were not quite so restrained. Kevin got stuck in on occasion and recollects the after effects of consuming a particularly potent tablet in the port one night. “After a drink in The Rock Bar, I necked a Dove and headed down to Es Paradis and then onto The Star, where my pill started coming on wildly, absolutely intense, overwhelming, with profound insights gushing through my tiny little head. I marched up to [Andrew] Weatherall and pronounced that he and I were geniuses—geniuses for fuck’s sake—and we’d be celebrated as maestros of our scene in years to come,” a chemical induced epiphany that he recognises as being at least half right.

There were also a few cultural hurdles to overcome. The local police seemed somewhat uneasy with the presence of a foreign film crew on the island. On more than one occasion, equipment was confiscated by the constabulary—once just hours before shooting a party up at Harvey Bassett’s hilltop finca. The charismatic DJ appears in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment and apparently spent much of the shoot holed up in an old house in the hills with a posse of likeminded individuals, “There were rumours of all sorts of shenanigans going on up there,” says Angus adding to the enigma. At one point The Farm had their van impounded, which Kevin saw as an opportunity to film in the police station when they went to collect it. This resulted in the camera being confiscated and one of the crew getting a slap from an overzealous officer. At that stage the project appeared to be on shaky ground, but despite the setbacks, or perhaps due to overcoming them, the crew felt that they were onto something special.