The Motel

The Motel is a love letter to a lost paradise - Ibiza in the 90s. It's a celebration of all those people from around the world who came to a small Mediterranean island and became part of the swashbuckling adventure that was Manumission.

In 1998, with Manumission going into its 5th year, Mike and Claire borrowed a large amount of money from an armed German cocaine dealer and against all odds took over an abandoned brothel on the outskirts of Ibiza town and turned it into a 24-hour party destination – the most notorious venue of the decade - The Motel. 

"The Motel was a pink abandoned roadside brothel Mike and I acquired in the summer of 1998. We lived there with a team of NYC strippers, a sex performer from New Orleans, a flow of international DJs and a bad tempered Irish dwarf who guarded the door from members of the Hells Angels and the press whilst opening it for the best of the gay scene, tattooed Tahitians in dirty blue jeans, ex-cons and outlaws, porn stars, drag queens, film directors and the international set - the counterculture who lived on Salinas beach all day and partied all night, all summer long - the faces, the scene, the friends we hung out with; the people we called 'the island'.”

Under the neon glare of a sign that promised Bar, Bed and Breakfast for one lost summer, this doll's house on acid became Mike and Claire’s home. . . 

What could possibly go wrong?

This is the story of the Motel but it’s also the story of Manumission. Over its 14-year history, over 1.5 million people attended the club, it was the biggest weekly party in the world earning it a place in the Guinness World Records. On the dancefloor young ravers rubbed shoulders with supermodels, rock stars, fashion designers, drug dealers, and the sporting elite -  sharing a universal feeling of ecstasy - with zero violence - everyone partying in complete harmony. 

With much of club culture currently under the spell of VIP service, corporate sponsoring and branding, The Motel is a timely reminder that life wasn't always that way. 

Claire Manumission said:

“During the second mother-of-all-lock ins (the first being in the Motel, the second being the fuck up of the 2020s lock down) banished from the physical realm of nightlife aided and abetted by our extensive archive we took the painful, shocking, hilarious, embarrassing! - 'let's go for a walk in the garden to get some fresh air... did we really do that!?!?' - trip back to the memory Motel.

The result is a memoir that takes a heady and honest look back at a time that no longer exists and perhaps provides an answer to the question, 'what happens when you say yes to everything?...' 

The story draws from all my years in Ibiza, weaves back and forward through time: from the carefree early days when I met and fell in love with Mike - on his quest for universal freedom - how together we transformed Manumission into the biggest weekly party in the world, the sex shows, the controversy, betrayals and finally the abolition of Manumission but it’s told predominantly from The Motel, on the long wild weekend of my 24th birthday – the weekend when Norman Cook met Zoe Ball and Lisa I’Anson missed her Radio 1 broadcast and was subsequently very publicly fired on the BBC News at Six. The Motel is a darkly humorous look at hedonism in drug-kissed 90s Ibiza."

Irvine Welsh said:

“The Motel was a cavern of chaos where the fun just never stopped. You literally did not know what sort of a day you were going to wake up into. Or if you were going to wake up. Or even go to bed at all, ever again. All you could be assured of is that you'd be talking about it for years to come.”

Mathew Clayton, Head of Publishing at Unbound said:

“The Motel is a classic counter-culture memoir in the same spirit as Howard Marks’s Mr Nice (no surprise that Howard was a regular at the Motel). A group of extraordinary people collected around Mike and Claire at the Motel, it was a 90s Mediterranean version of Warhol’s Factory or Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus. Mike and Claire consistently took creative risks that no-one else at the time was doing whether it was making a feature film or opening the Motel, championing sexual diversity, or having a giant blown up image of Noam Chomsky on the wall (something you would never have seen at the Ministry of Sound!)."

The front cover image of Claire at the Motel is by kind permission of the photographer Franck Sauvaire.