This Is What It’s Actually Like To Spend An Evening In Ibiza’s West End

A bald man in an MA1 flying jacket with the face of a prizefighter and intimidating muscles clearly capable of inflicting extreme pain stares at me intently.

"Why are you writing notes in my bar?"

Behind him, a robustly-constructed flunky whose appearance suggests he'd be pretty tasty in a ruck too looks on. Even the toilet attendant is gazing at me like I've just dropped a hot log on a picture of his mother.

"You been asking my girls questions all night."

"No, I haven't"

"It's illegal, you know that?"

I'm fairly certain that some barely-decipherable scribbling in a battered notebook is not going to lose the Guardia Civil much sleep. But arguing would be imprudent. I nod.

"In a place where girls are getting their tits and fannies out you can't take notes."

I don't see how it's an issue. But this guy is serious. I stare at the bulging vein in his forehead, wondering how soon he's going to put a bin bag over my head and take me to a deserted farmhouse out in the hills where I'll be chained to a radiator and subjected to slow, unanaesthetised dental experiments with screwdrivers and pliers.

It's Friday night and we are in Desires, the strip club on Carrer de Santa Agnés in the heart of San Antonio's West End. For the uninitiated, this street — and those that surround it — is the reason why a great many people in the UK think that Ibiza is an endless loop of permatanned Geordie Shore muscles, scintillating teeth and binge drinking. It isn't — the rest of the island is actually pretty cool — but, largely due to Ibiza Uncovered, Sky TV's 90s tits-and-pukeathon, this particular area looms large in the public's imagination. I have come here for the night to find out what, if anything, can be learned by partying with Ibiza's most enthusiastic blue WKD-gluggers.

Here's a tip: if you ever find yourself working undercover on a story about Brits on the lash abroad, don't take notes in a strip club. They don't like it. They really don't. In the end the bouncers let me off in exchange for a couple pages ripped from the notebook and I wander back into the club. Here a chubby guy, almost naked but for a thong and a complicated-looking bondage strap is on stage, wild-eyed and insensible with drink. He's on all fours. A girl in lingerie and heels is on his back, riding him. Every so often she whacks his arse with a crop to the raucous cheers of the audience, mainly made up of his stag-do mates. I head out into the street.

It's only 11.30pm — early in Ibiza terms — but already the long narrow strip is busy. There are neon signs everywhere: for bars, clubs, olde-English-style pubs, strip clubs and fast food joints. Avicii's peculiar brand of redneck rave. There's a pervasive stench of stale beer mixed with piss. For 2000 years this whitewashed town was a fishing village. Tonight people are still fishing here, but in a different way. The promo crew are fishing for punters, the lads are fishing for girls and the sex workers are fishing for eighty euros for a quick bunk up with flaccid, beered-up customer services advisor from Coventry in a "Polite As Fuck" t-shirt.

I check out The Highlander Scottish Pub, where "the party goes on until 6am with a resident DJ". Deafening EDM blasts from its traditional interior onto the street at a group of lads in denim shorts and striped polo shirts with Inca tattoo sleeves up to their superlatively-developed biceps. A hen party with matching t-shirts that say "Alicia's Messy Bridesmaids Rock Ibiza 2015" hang around nearby. The groups don't talk — not yet, it's too early for that. I can smell old tobacco, sugary alcopops and vomit. I buy a drink. The DJ mixes a Calvin Harris track into Erasure's "A Little Respect". People seem to like it. They dance.

I see a guy wearing a Primark vest with "Ibiza" and a picture of a sunset on it. He must have been looking forward to his holiday when he was back home and bought the vest in anticipation. It's an entirely redundant vest. I don't go around at home wearing a "Bermondsey" vest. Why would I? But there's something poignant about it nevertheless: his thinking about the holiday, his buying the vest.

Now DJ Otzi's "Hey Baby" comes on. A corpulent Scottish fella careens into view. "Heyyyyyyyyyyy-eyyyyyyyyy baby!" he bellows. He stumbles into a table of drinks, knocking it over. Razors of glass and blue, heavily-processed alcohol flies everywhere. Girls scream.

"By the way, I'm a fat cunt," the Scottish guy states needlessly.

Perhaps. But what kind of cunt am I? The kind who writes snotty articles poking fun at ordinary British holidaymakers out having fun? Because isn't that what everyone who has ever written an article about this place, or Magaluf or Malia or Faliraki or any of the other European party resorts doing? I pass Godfather's Bar, where "Animals" by Martin Garrix blares out. I don't want to be that kind of cunt. Let me be any other kind of cunt than that.

I walk towards Tropicana, the neon-lit disco dive. People throng past me in a carnivalesque whirl, shoving, shouting, whooping. Ancient Spanish rose sellers in floral dresses, their hair tied up in buns, press thorny flowers on me as I pass. A Steven Berkoff-lookalike in a "Motherfucker" t-shirt lingers outside next to an amphetamine-eyed promo boy. That's the problem, you see — there's so much life here to record that I can't resist. I pull out my phone, tap in notes. Don't be a cunt, I write. But how seriously can you take a place where a drunken, muscled Welshman with a Michael Jackson tattoo on his shoulder glides up and down a stripper pole to a thundering house mix of "In Da Club?"

"Where are you going tonight?" a girl working for a bar demands.

I'm coming into your bar. I'm not a cunt, honest.

In Tropicana a titanically-built holiday rep, handsome like he's carved out of marble, marshals a throng of holidaymakers on the lash. They're kids aged seventeen, eighteen, probably away from home for the first time. A girl in a too-tight red dress sips on a putrid pink beverage while her friend lies slumped with her head on the bar, either succumbing to alcoholically-induced narcolepsy or trying to ignore the amorous attentions of the guy in the "I Love Mandy" vest who hovers over her.

"Let's get on the booze!" the DJ bellows. "Who here in Ibiza likes to drink? For the next thirty minutes all shots are one Euro!"

Everyone cheers.

I chat to a bloke whose mates introduce him as Nutbag. He's wearing a tight t-shirt with a neck so low it forms a huge arrow pointing directly down at his crotch. What does he like most about the West End?

"We come here every year," he intones, his eyes dull from booze. "It's the bollocks."

Has he ever been to Space? Amnesia?

Nutbag looks at me blankly.

"What's that? We just follow the sluts," he says charmingly, before leaving to down another brace of evil-looking shots with the lads.

I consider criticisms of the West End. They're not really about class at all, but taste. Why — when you could be hearing some of the world's finest DJs playing interesting, challenging electronic music — would you limit yourself to these few bars in these few streets listening to "My Head is a Jungle" for the ninety-millionth time while sucking down brain-cell decimating goo better used for killing rodents? But the people who come here don't care about "quality" music, or what's underground or not, or whether a mix has been performed live rather than pre-recorded.

The Club 18-30 lot leave and suddenly the venue is bereft. If a DJ plays Galantis's "Runaway" and no one hears it, does he really exist? Out in the street, a man with a spider's web tattoo on his head, beery breath and a lamb kebab in his huge fist regales me, unprompted, with an anecdote.

"I once hired a boat on the med. Me and the missus. When we're out at the sea, the captain takes me to one side and says 'so, do you want me to fuck your wife?'"

Seriously?

"Yeah. He just comes out with it, like. Did my fucking nut right in. I nearly smacked him. But then he tells me: 'Over 90% of men who come on board want to see me fuck their wives'. Fucking mental, right?"

Mental indeed. And as he spins away from me the street seems suddenly awash with candy colours and plastic sounds. It's like taking acid and walking through London's M&M Store. A couple smooch by the bins round the back of Kilties Scottish Pub. A fella spews in front of the Funky Box disco. Nearby, a middle-aged man watches as his plump wife falls into the gutter. Two shirtless blokes trying it on with a girl in a top hat outside the Bodega Pitango off-licence. In Play 2, an underground palace of mirrors and smoke, a beautiful girl at the bar tries to push a shot on me. In the Temptations strip club, a very ugly Northern Irish Bloke tries to push another shot on me. It's as though everyone is conspiring to get me drunk; as though the environment itself, built on intoxication, cannot tolerate anyone who is anything less than entirely fuck-faced.

There's a brothel next to The Eighties Club, an old hostel that has been overtaken by sex workers. It's mainly staffed by Eastern European girls in tiny ripped-denim skirts and white leather jackets who stand around the entrance, catcalling guys. I pop in for a drink. Upstairs, in a dim red bar that looks like a Hopper painting, more girls sit around chatting, checking the time on their fake D&G watches. House music—– ubiquitous all over the island from shops to taxis to supermarkets to bars — plays on CD. Two young lads with Scouse accents enter, pissed and chatting to the girls one-by-one, buzzing to be in what they think must be some ultimate pleasure palace.

"You want to go upstairs with a lady?" the manager asks as I'm leaving. He has tight curly hair and wears a white shirt. There's a pair of glasses hanging on a string round his neck. He looks more like a geography teacher than a pimp. I politely decline.

I reach Kappa's Bar towards the bottom of the strip, a sausage-fest fuelled by Sex on the Beach and Tequila Sunrises where lads in fisherman's caps and footie shirts dance with one another and the few girls present shimmy together to the top forty tunes. I'm tiring of the scene — all those built bods squeezed into floral tees, all the tattoos, all the girls in silver face paint — and yet I have to admit there's something admirable about these people. There is no place for existential angst or self-doubt. In the land of the buff and blind-drunk, the pie-eyed man is king. If you want a vision of the future of this world then imagine Pitbull stamping on a human face – forever.

But just then something cool happens. The DJ plays Oliver $ and Jimi Jules' "Pushing On." Everyone's dancing, lads with lads, girls with girls, no aggro, just crazy, excited, fluid movement. Then the breakdown comes: "'Til the rivers run dry, I've got to try try try, I'll keep pushing on". When the kick drum finally drops back in everyone cheers, whoops, shouts. A bearded bloke in a sparkly dress hugs a man in a Millwall shirt. You can feel waves of love rush through the venue, coating everyone, and you can see happy, smiling faces everywhere. And that raw emotion caused by the power of music is the same whatever club you're in, whether it's DC10, Sankeys or here.

This is what we all want, isn't it? Loud, joyful house tunes, people dancing, drinking, sweating, colliding and celebrating the sheer fucking joy of being alive. It's the essence of club culture. The one thing a night in San Antonio taught me? Don't be a cunt.

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