Before the crap ecstasy and Paul Oakenfold, Ibiza was something else entirely: a sleepy Balearic island known for being the favoured holiday destination of famous, wealthy hippies hoping to escape the exhausting stresses of making music for a living. There was, however, a short period of change between the boho years and the Ibiza Uncovered era – a span of time that last roughly from the mid-1970s until the late-80s.During that time, instead of being overrun by English tourists getting dressed up in their best pair of shorts to hurl £15 at a luminous bottle of drink in Pacha, Ibiza Town was full of beautiful European people wearing weird clothes and dancing around in open-air nightclubs. It was a bit like Berlin was in the 2000s but with glorious, blazing sunlight and sandy beaches rather than Arctic winds and stern Soviet architecture.Photographer Derek Ridgers happened to be on a family holiday in Ibiza in 1983 when he came across all these European club kids, and fresh from photographing London's skinheads, he trained his camera upon them. For whatever reason, no publications would buy his photos at the time, so they'd been sitting around unseen for decades until he dug them out and put them on display this month as part of the ICA's "Ibiza: Moments in Love" exhibition.I gave Derek a call to chat about his pictures.Read the rest on VICE
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