“It is never too late to give up our prejudices,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. Little did I expect a nightclub to make his case.

Last year I swore off Privilege. One night too many being groped by Italians while wandering fruitlessly around the dancefloor in search of some atmosphere and I decided the World’s Largest Club isn’t for me. Give me the sweat-dripping walls of DC10 or Amnesia’s sci-fi splendour any day.

If it weren’t for my friends Helen and Nikki who are promoting hip-hop trio Sophisticated Funk (playing the second room) at SuperMartXe’s Friday night party I wouldn’t go anywhere near the place.

I do, though, but with vertically-challenged expectations. Especially after popping to Underground for a drink and discovering it’s empty at 2AM. Only walking up the road to Privilege do I realise something is happening. A traffic accident, I assume, from the massive tailback of cars trailing out of the drive and back down the carretera.

Pushing through palm fronds and pebbles towards the main entrance I can’t figure out what’s going on. There are these people, everywhere, scrambling through the underbrush, shouting at each other in Spanish or Italian, smoking, grumbling. “This isn’t the freaking queue?” I groan. Oh yes it is. Forty stifling, elbow-riddled minutes later my friends and I stumble out of the crush and through the entrance into another crush - a gloriously OTT swirl of bodies, lights, thumping house music and grinning faces.

SuperMartXe is reputedly a Madrileno gay night with a heavily Spanish following. In fact, it is completely mixed in every sense. And what a blinding show it makes: couples of every persuasion; gangs of friends chattering in a assorted languages as they struggle for space on the dancefloor; the white-hot blaze of the glittering SuperMartXe logo in lights across the stage; dozens of perfectly sculpted, expensively enhanced dancers wearing imagination-defyingly tiny outfits (a baby oil sales exec’s dream come true) and a staggering stage set - the whole display a glorious triumph of pomp over seriousness.

My friend - a Privilege virgin - is standing goggle-eyed: “Now this is what I expected an Ibiza club to be,” he says reverently. And he’s right. I’ll be back. Without prejudice.

Photos and text By Cila

(Cila is an occasional/regular contributor to the blog and Ibiza NOW magazine.)

Clubbing in Ibiza is big business and I always assumed it was run like big business. Men in suits. Offices. Power lunches (possibly). Faxes. Secretaries making notes. You know, organised.

How wrong I was. Turns out Ibicenco club deals are done on a basis that makes the Sant Jordi Saturday market look like Selfridges. It may (but is by no means guaranteed) to involve: endless hours of waiting, linguistic muddles, chupitos, gay discos, bad wifi connections, cutthroat negotiating, midnight meetings that start in one club and end hours later in another, 4AM cross-island dashes to “check out the competition” - all played out in a haze of booze, hash, thumping kick drums and financial desperation.

That is roughly how unlikely bedfellows SuperMartXe (Spanish gay spectacular) and Sophisticated Funk (a hip-hop/R&B outfit) came to share Friday nights at Privilege. Given they are replacing Manumission and one wrong move in the World’s Biggest Club equals the World’s Biggest Flop the level of barely controlled chaos is either insane or admirable. But very, very Ibicenco.

Cila