LIVING

This club scene, which some describe as an offshoot of, others as a parallel scene to, Valencia’s ruta del bakalao, was based on merciless electronic music, drugs—and the assumption that the party never ended. It was the era of the after-hours club.

These clubs sprang up in and around Barcelona in the early Nineties. Places like Ocho, Psicódromo, Cholita, Chikita and KGB (which would rise to fame 10 years later with the residency of DJ Amable, who was then still playing at L’Hospitalet’s Depósito Legal and would become one of the faces of the Barcelona after-hours club scene) attracted people with their stomach-churning bass from dawn ‘til dusk.

Barcelona started to develop a reputation as a party capital, and revellers from all over the world moved in. The opening in 1997 of the after-hours Sala Matinée gave rise to the formation of the Matinée Group, which caught and channelled the spirit of the hedonistic (and gay) party scene—and became one of the driving forces of the Barcelona afters scene. In 1998, this group opened La Madame in what until then had been the club Luna Mora (and today is Catwalk). A year later, they opened Salvation in Ronda Sant Pere and, in 2000, Le Soleil in what is now Shoko. (In fact, many of what are now tourist-touting, posh lounge clubs around the Puerto Olímpico were once after-hours clubs; Fritz Mar was another popular one.)

In 2001, Matinée Group got a contract to run the Thursday morning sessions at Space in Ibiza. That same year, the group opened what for many years was to be Barcelona’s number one after-hours club: Souvenir, located in Viladecans and flanked by the Madness Group’s Merci.

Carlos García, a former employee at Discothèque in Poble Espanyol (now The One) and founder of a forum to commemorate Barcelona’s legendary clubs, nostalgically recalls the parties of those days. “When we got out of La Terrrazza or Discothèque, the Matinée Group coach would already be waiting. Entering Souvenir was like stepping into another dimension. It was like a big family, it was all about the good vibe and the music made you vibrate. It was impressive to see hundreds of people with their hands in the air singing along to ‘Searching for the Golden Eye’ or ‘Desert Rose’. It would give me goose bumps.”