Manumission: the return of Ibiza’s naughtiest, most notorious club event

Manumission is often remembered as Ibiza's wildest club event — although there was a lot more to it than just sex shows and outrageous behaviour. Now, 18 years after its last edition, the White Isle's most radical party is back.

Le Weekend Manumission takes place across three venues over three days at the end of September, and is set to write its own set of mythical bacchanalian tales all over again.

The stories have become so ingrained in dance music folklore that they now stand in for Manumission itself. They’re all true, and descriptions like Cirque du Soleil on acid or a Queer Disneyland after dark are all fair enough.

But speak to the people who created it and a different picture emerges. Beneath the nudity, chaos and tabloid headlines was something more ambitious than a club night: Manumission was an attempt to create a world of its own.

A place where social status dissolved, where drag queens, DJs, artists, strippers, club kids and runaways partied as one, and where freedom was a way of life, not just a line on a flyer.

A few weeks before its first event back in 18 years, we ask Mike and Claire — who adopted “Manumission” as their artistic surname — about what the party meant to them.

It's telling that they barely mention the sex that became so emblematic of its story. Instead, they talk about creativity, community, queer culture, risk, and the temporary world they built in Ibiza during the 1990s.

A world that, for a brief period, truly operated on its own rules. “Very few people understand what we were really doing,” says Mike, who started the party with Claire and brother Andy McKay.

Manumission’s roots were in Manchester, where it emerged from the city’s queer nightlife and countercultural scenes before making the leap to Ibiza in the mid-1990s, first at Coco Loco Bar, the gay epicentre of Ku Club that would later become Privilege, then at Amnesia from 2007.

Its name, derived from the Latin word for 'freedom from slavery’, was its mission statement. During its heyday, Manumission became the defining, defiant symbol of Ibiza’s second golden age and helped transform a part of the island from just another place to dance into something much closer to a cultural phenomenon.

Ibiza in the 1990s was not yet the hyper-commercialised destination it would later become. Among the emerging superclubs and package holidays was a loose network of artists, drifters, seasonal workers, musicians, performers and escapees who had come to the island in search of something different.

It still felt like a refuge for outsiders, so the timing was perfect, and Manumission was able to thrive. There was an unspoken etiquette that governed those circles.

You didn’t ask people what they did for a living. You didn’t arrive carrying a CV. Whatever identities people had in London, Manchester, Berlin or Amsterdam mattered less than who they were in that moment.

Decades on, nightlife often revolves around status. VIP sections, social media visibility, expensive table and unspoken who-knows-who one-upmanship. Manumission always pushed in the opposite direction and demanded real participation over voyeurism.

Self-expression and acceptance were the currencies that made the Manumission world go round.

It’s no coincidence that so many people remember the atmospheres of those early years more vividly than any particular DJ set. The music mattered, but Manumission emerged just before the real age of turn-of-the-millennium DJ hero-worship.

The crowd was every bit as important as the people behind the decks and roaming performers, drag artists, dancers and costumed characters transformed the club into something like a living theatre production.

The boundaries between audience and cast blurred until they almost disappeared, and it was no surprise to see Jean Paul Gaultier, Howard Marks and Irvine Welsh in the crowd, or Zoe Ball bursting out of a cake on Fatboy Slim’s birthday.

Beyond the vaudeville of the club parties was something even more central to the Manumission philosophy: the Motel. In 1998, Mike and Claire took over a run-down, 15-room former brothel on the outskirts of Ibiza Town and transformed it into one of the most mythologised locations in club culture.

Painted pink and crowned with neon signs, the Manumission Motel quickly became a permanent gathering place for the weird and wonderful cast of characters who orbited the party.

DJs got lost there for weeks on end. Writers stayed there for inspiration. Drag queens flourished there. Strippers, artists, performers, musicians and assorted misfits all drifted through its doors at all hours of the day and night, but journalists were largely kept out.

The resulting vacuum only fuelled the legend, and stories have circulated endlessly ever since. The definitive account of what went down has now been told by Claire in The Motel: High Times in 90s Ibiza, a vivid and first-hand chronicle full of the chaos, colour and characters that made for such jaw-dropping tales.

With contributions from more than 80 DJs, artists, performers and audience members, it is an attempt to reclaim a narrative that has too often been flattened into a collection of sensational headlines.

The comment speaks to a broader frustration shared by both Claire and Mike. While Manumission is routinely referenced as one of Ibiza’s defining institutions, they feel much of its deeper significance has been lost and credit has not been duly given.

For Claire, Manumission always carried a political dimension, even when it appeared to be at its most outlandish. “It has always been a social commentary for us," she says.

A way for us to kick back at the establishment using storytelling and design. At the heart of Manumission is a family. That family extends to every performer, every designer, every set builder, technician, musician and artist involved.”.

She pauses before underlining the point of the sex parties, which so often got written about without any real understanding of why they were so important, and without giving the culture beneath the attention it deserved.

Those ideas feel particularly relevant when viewed through the party’s origins in Manchester’s Gay Village and the queer communities that shaped its early identity.

Long before corporations wrapped themselves in rainbow branding every June or July for Pride, Manumission was drawing heavily from queer performance traditions, drag culture and spaces built around self-invention.

That openness remains one of the reasons Manumission still occupies such a unique place in Ibiza’s history. Its ending, however, was considerably less ideal.

Like all great nightlife institutions, Manumission eventually became too large, too influential and too complicated to remain untouched by politics and power. In later years, the sex shows went and were replaced by performers from the De La Guarda aerobatic dance spectacular.

Sponsorship deals were signed, and brand values were suddenly more managed, but people kept coming in serious numbers all the same. “It came to an end for a multitude of reasons,” says Mike.

A cultural movement still in its peak as the door closes is, poetically, culturally, somewhat beautiful. “In later years,” remembers Claire, “the same club owner responsible said his biggest feeling about what he had done to Manumission, what he had inflicted upon Manumission, was regret.”.

By then, Mike and Claire had spent more than a decade immersed in a project that consumed virtually every aspect of their lives. “Claire and I had worked flat out for 15 years,” says Mike.

We wanted to take a break and be there for our kids when they grew up. Spending time with them, I will never regret.”.

The fallout that followed has become part of Manumission's mythology in its own right, but Claire now views the distance more positively. “On the Manumission family fall-out, it is almost like we had to have time apart so Mike and I could spread our creative wings and Andy could grow his empire.”.

The couple took flight into the world of screenwriting, including something that Andy Serkis agreed to star in and direct, but was later shelved when he instead went on to direct the second Venom movie.

For years, rumours of a comeback have circulated, and there was a serious attempt in 2014 when Pacha approached the team about a 20th anniversary edition, but it never happened.

This time, however, the stars have fully aligned, in part because Andy’s empire now includes some of Ibiza’s most celebrated independent venues. Among them are Pikes and 528, which, alongside Ibiza Rocks Bar, provide the settings for Manumission’s monumental return across the weekend of 25th - 27th September.

528 is open to the Azure blue Balearic skies, nestled into the tree-lined landscape and is somewhere you can explore and get lost with a freedom that harks back to the golden age of Ibiza.

Across one weekend, 528, Pikes and Ibiza Rocks Bar will become a living recreation of the summer of 1998, with entire environments lifted straight from the pages of Claire’s book and brought to life in ultra HD.

The Manumission Motel will return in all of its original neon-soaked glory. Le Théâtre Pink Pussy will reappear to marry New York with Ibiza. So will the infamous Insane Asylum hangout, Hellfire in the Hong Kong Hot Tub where Detroit techno and Balearic ecstasy meet in cold showers with hot beats, plus a host of other iconic locations that once made up the original Manumission universe.

The scale of the undertaking reflects how seriously they are taking the challenge: creative teams from Glastonbury’s famously spectacular Shangri-La and Boomtown have been enlisted to build the full-size facade of the Manumission Motel.

Choreographers from London, drag artists from Barcelona, costumes from Milanese designer DiLiborio and the vintage emporium Hol! Ibiza and set builders are all involved, too.

That sentiment gets to the heart of why Manumission will matter all over again this summer. Because, despite all the changes Ibiza has undergone, the rise of VIP culture, influencer marketing and an ever more professionalised nightlife, the secret desires, kinks and fantasies that powered Manumission all those years ago remain.

People still crave spaces where normal rules are suspended, where they can escape the grind and feel something different. “The world has not changed for the better,” says Claire when musing whether the original Manumission would stand up to the socio-political landscape of today.

The enduring appeal of Manumission was never really about the sex shows, the celebrity guests or even the music. It was about the possibility of stepping outside ordinary life and into something stranger, freer and more imaginative.

For a few precious hours (or in many cases, days) Manumission delivered that more completely than any other party. Despite that, few have ever tried to replicate the magic.

Le Weekend Manumission takes place at Pikes, 528 and Ibiza Rocks Bar over the weekend of 25th-27th September.

Want more? Read DJ Mag’s feature celebrating 50 years of Amnesia, an Ibiza clubbing institution, here.