OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION: MARK BROADBENT
Mark Broadbent, who with his wife Sarah programmed the peerless We Love parties at Space Ibiza, has retired, but will be sorely missed...
“Dance music sounds better on drugs,” says Mark Broadbent, the man who, until recently, co-programmed the mega-Sunday, We Love parties at Space in Ibiza.
“The thing that got me into all of this in the first place was taking acid at an indie club in 1986, in Manchester, and finally understanding the ‘dance music’ section of the night when the DJ would drop four or five tracks in a row.”
That same year, on “the last bus home from town” one night, Mark met his wife-to-be Sarah. “I had been involved in something that left me bruised and bloody and she saw an opportunity to come to my rescue,” he says. “It’s something she’s been doing since on regular occasions — both metaphorically and physically — this past 27 years.”
Mark and Sarah started working together in the summer of 1997, in partnership with Darren Hughes, “running shit in Ibiza” doing everything from “handing out flyers in the port” to decorating the venues for the parties for his then-club brand, Cream.
It was the late 1990s, the height of the superclub era, and Liverpool, and Cream, where two of the hypest words in clubbing. And this legend extended to their parties in Ibiza.
“I was a shop-fitter/refrigeration technician by trade before I started working in clubs,” says Mark. “There are a few bars in Manchester that look and work all the better for my involvement in their cellar cooling systems and chilled line dispense, but nothing as glamorous as the heady heights I reached in the last job I'm afraid.”
He says “last job” because Mark and Sarah hung up their smiley face bandanas last summer and resigned from their post as programmers of Space’s We Love; ending on a flourish with a now-infamous after-party at Pikes hotel on the island. During their 14-year stint they booked music-makers as diverse as Grace Jones, Aphex Twin and James Zabiela.
“Sarah and I recently bought an old house in Sa Penya, next door to the one we’ve been living in the last seven years, and we are in the process of turning it into guest houses, to hopefully show a side of Ibiza that we both love,” says Mark. “The last vestige of the ‘real’ Ibiza experience, maybe.”
