Here's What Happened When We Threw a Party With W.A.R! at the Ibiza Rocks Hotel

Arriving in Ibiza for the first time is a little like finally getting round to watching that really amazing film that nobody can believe you've never seen. You've heard so much about it, a peripheral cultural touchpoint it's something you feel you know, only the years of hype have mangled it into cliché, leaving you with a half-baked understanding of what it's really about. The same goes for the White Isle, you might be full of expectation (or even reservation), but nothing can really set you up for the reality of the place.

As our plane rattled down, our first look out of the window was one of rain bouncing from the wings. Not quite the sub-tropical arrival we'd hoped for, but in many ways the perfect red-herring, setting our sights low only for them to be completely blown out of the water. We were headed for a special THUMP presents edition of W.A.R! – a newer feature on the Ibizan landscape that has set out to showcase the best of British electronic music, every Friday from the Ibiza Rocks Hotel. Ibiza Rocks itself now has an illustrious history, currently celebrating its 10th year on the island, it has had a refreshing influence – gaining and retaining the 'youth vote' year on year.

Probably best to level with you: our evening at W.A.R! started with nerves. The sort of nerves exclusively reserved for two fresh of the plane journalists compiling their first ever Ibizan DJ set. Sweating over the USB we dragged the sort of tracks we'd have described as "chunky floor-fillers" or "scorching slammers", had we not been so focused on the fact our selections were about to spill out of speakers bigger than most family's cars.

Fortunately for us, the THUMP DJs were in the poolside warm-up slot, playing to a more than affable crowd of gradually building early-evening drinkers. As we bounced from Paul Johnson to Romanthony, the sun gradually edged behind the hotel walls and the smell of freshly slapped aftershave began to fill the air. Even if we say so ourselves, you'll never feel cooler than pulling off an outrageous vinyl spin-back into "Summer Jam" as the evening disappears into your first night out on the Balearic islands.

Set with the unenviable task of following our monster of a session on the ones and twos, was Preditah. Of course, he was more than up to it. There's something immediately refreshing about watching Preditah owning a crowd, along with his brother-turned-hype-man C4. Easily on a trajectory set to take him well beyond the realms of grime into that of a main-stage selector in the dance arena. His dexterity, flitting between grime, garage, and his own brand of basement-bred house, is a sign of where main room club music is heading going forward. It's a testament to his spinning that he took a relatively sparse crowd, and built them up to a sweaty crazed mass.

It was then Chris Lorenzo who took this crowd and sent them sky high. Another selector who has no problem shape-shifting. Crunching house, touches of garage, some deeper screamers and even a few blasts of old school hip-hop made a set that was heads-down, shamelessly, and brilliantly, focused on getting people as wild as possible. It worked. We were in absolute admiration of the Ibiza Rocks crowd, finding poetry in their puerility. Sure, it might not be the spiritual experience of the Island's original parties, but what we saw was pure poolside abandon — the sort of suns out, 'taps aff' hedonism that BBC3's commissioning editors could only dream about. We will never forget the indelible image of an absurdly muscular man, who closely resembled Phil Brown; wiling out, sweat glazed, eyes glazed, exuding the animalistic ooze of a lifetime spent 'on one'.

Then it was the turn of DJ EZ, a selector now held in such high esteem he barely needs an introduction at all. The moment the peak of his baseball cap bobbed into sight, W.A.R! was guaranteed the conclusion it deserved. Sailing through an anthemic course of UK garage, the crowd were practically liquid, unanimously rippling with every banger from "Flowers" by Sweet Female Attitude to Tina Moore's "Never Gonna Let You Go". It was a set of bangers – every set was – but to get in any way fusty about this would be to miss the point of W.A.R! altogether. Since its genesis four years ago, the night has been about the DJ as a rockstar, the selector playing sets from a stage to a gassed, engaged crowd. It's not right for every club, but in the setting of the hotel, with the showcase of tunes on display, it created an almost unmanageable energy. An achievement you can't help but succumb to.

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We are cruising through the club-dotted scrubland of inner Ibiza, skimming the shore—look, there's Space! That's Amnesia! Oooh, it's the big dome at Privilege!— in the back of a taxi that's blasting thudding tech-house at Ushuaia volume. I'm clutching a rapidly warming paper cup of Dutch lager, sipping occasionally as I slip into a state of fatigue. I'm ready for bed, but this is Ibiza and you don't go to bed at 1am in Ibiza. You can't go to bed at 1am in Ibiza. So I tune into the radio, feel my fingers voluntarily tap out a hi-hat pattern on my thigh, try to tune back into conversation too, try to instill within myself a buzz that I thought'd engulf and envelope me the second I stepped off the plane the evening before but so far has come in fits and starts.

The taxi rolls through Playa d'en Bossa and stops us just outside the night's final destination: Sankeys Ibiza. The Balearic incarnation of the Manchester institution is the home of Shelter, the official W.A.R! afterparty. Shelter is seen as an opportunity for the W.A.R! to stretch their legs into some deeper, after-dark territory. Busses run between the sites ensuring that a steady stream of party people boarding at the Ibiza Rocks hotel rattle straight from their balconies to the backrooms of the club with total ease. As you enter Sankeys, you're immediately struck by the odd intimacy of the space. In the best way possible it feels like sneaking into a basement your mate's converted into a kind of rave-cave, rather than a three room, 1500 capacity pleasure palace that's seeing Shelter bring in everyone from Green Velvet to Tiga, B.Traits to Boys Noize. It's a low-ceilinged club that's intimately sweaty and sweatily intimate. Structurally supportive pillars lend a sense of the utilitarian to the main room. This feels like a place built for dancing rather than listlessly refreshing an Instagram feed in.

And dance we do. Chunky US house mainstay Doorly's behind the decks when we make our way to the booth, smashing through an hour or so of the kind of bass-centered house we've heard rumbling round the hotel all weekend, except it's now soundtracking serious hedonism rather than cocktail sipping and suncream application. Smoke machines pump harder and harder, with figures emerging from the spray like warehouse wraiths as the music gets harder and harder too.

Chris Lorenzo, (not so) fresh from his set at W.A.R! bumbles about amiably boothside before sticking in a USB and rocketing through a set that gets incrementally steelier and tighter and more claustrophobic as it goes along. Hands are sucked into the air, and we nip upstairs for a smoking area breather. While up there, admiring the stars, bemoaning the price of water, we bump into two boys who've seen our W.A.R! set earlier in the evening and want to tell us how good it was. I think they said 'good', anyway. We thank them and descend back into the heaving throng where Shadow Child is thumping through fan favourites and everyone around us — and, in the interests of fairness, everyone including us — seems to be having the time of their lives.

Feeling slightly worse for wear after rattling through pints at a mum-alarming rate, we make an executive decision to head back to the hotel just before 5am. By the island's standards, this is a cop out, but this is our first time here. We're tired, yet we're already looking forward to the next time we find ourselves squeezed onto a plane. We might not have fully uncovered Ibiza but we've definitely had a very, very interesting peek at things.

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Find out more about W.A.R! here.