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Unbound is crowdfunding for a "classic counter-culture memoir" by club promoter and co-founder of Ibiza's iconic "cavern of chaos" club, Claire Manumission.
The Motel will tell the story of the weekly Manumission events that she and her partner Mike (both pictured top) hosted, which have been attended by more than 1.5 million people, earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for biggest weekly party.
In their fifth year of events, the couple took over an abandoned brothel on the outskirts of Ibiza town, turning it into a 24-hour party destination, and named it The Motel. The memoir promises to lift the lid on the "drug-kissed" 1990s hedonism on the Mediterranean 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 home to a wild menagerie of DJs, supermodels, international pop stars, bestselling writers, New York strippers and ask-no-questions drug dealers – the whole of Bohemia was there," the synopsis explains. "At its heart in Room 10 was Claire and her partner Mike."
"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," said the author.
"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.
"This is the story of the Motel – but also it is the story of the 1990s when for a few brief years a generation decided to throw off the shackles of the past and be free to do what it wanted to do."
Author Irvine Welsh, who was a regular attendee of the club, 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, added: “The Motel is a classic counter-culture memoir in the same spirit as Howard Marks’ 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.
"I am delighted that we can play a part in bringing Claire’s story to the world and we welcome her into the Unbound family."
The Motel will go live on the crowdfunded publishers' website on 14th January at 8 p.m.