Mr Pikes: The Story Behind The Ibiza Legend

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And then, from the terrace one evening, he saw a man approaching through the fields. The man walked uphill. But, for Tony, he “descended from heaven”. A book was recently released discussing the life and times of one of Ibiza's most prolific figures, a worthy tale not often told. Freddie Mercury would summon Tony to his room to debate the meaning of life while he spooned cocaine onto one of Pikes’ laminated menus. The hotel hosted Mercury’s legendary 41st birthday party. Tony invited 500 people – 700 showed up for a party that lasted three days. The front of the hotel caught fire, a wall collapsed, and Tony found himself playing tennis with “Freddie, Kenny Everett and the chairman of Colchester United”.

This leads us to the Pikes of 2018; a place where you were just as likely to find Tony partying on the dance floor late at night (“I’m the oldest one there but I have my moments,” he said in recent years) or quietly having a moment with one of his two beloved cats, Pikey and Blossom in the garden. A place where Tony continued to hold court with guests by the pool or over his favourite breakfast. “Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries,” he was cheekily quoted as saying on social media recently. He loved the staff of the hotel dearly, all of whom treated Tony like a family member and said he believed the hotel was in the perfect hands, knowing Dawn and Andy would respect his wish to preserve the heritage of Pikes.Right now, all over the world, there will be people doing their nine to five then going home and watching TV, seeing a more exciting world and thinking, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ Well, they can! They can! If I can do this,” he gestures to the hotel, to the dream he carved from the hillside, to the memories and the ghosts, “then anyone can do anything.”

When it came time to pen the sequel—which Pike wrote because he was “offered a lot of money, and I wanted to keep my publisher happy”—the author knew he couldn’t do the same thing as the first book, so he added a supernatural element to the game. “But because of my situation at the time, I was forced to write the book in less than a month,” he said. “I regret I didn’t spend more time on it. I would have made it longer—I had many more scenes with the demon girl and our two heroes in my head.” 7. Fall Into Darkness was basically a do-over of one of his previous books ... And by listening to this autobiography, you now have the chance to embark on this exciting journey.Midnight Club was written because a young woman who was dying in a hospital in the Midwest told me about a club they had at the hospital called The Midnight Club,” Pike explained. “They would meet at midnight to discuss my books. She asked me to write about them. I said I would but I couldn’t have them discussing my books. The idea grew from there. Unfortunately, none of them were alive when I finished the book.” 10. The Midnight Club is getting a Netflix adaptation. Learn how Mr Pikes became friends or “lovers” with the ‘A’ List celebrities; including Robert Plant, Kurt Cobain, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Jean-Claude Van Damme Boy George, Kylie Minogue Julio Iglesias, Mike Oldfield…the list goes on and on. Tony’s hand-built naughty boutique hotel helped thousands of the guests fulfil their wildest fantasies – an abundance of pleasure…an often drug-fuelled orgy of life. THE TIMES: Much-married, hedonistic hotel owner who partied hard with many a pop star and was known as the Hugh Hefner of Ibiza; John Donne may have written that no man is an island, but Tony Pike came close. For instance Known as Mr Ibiza, he was the embodiment of Balearic hedonism, a brash, hard-drinking, drug-taking philanderer whose way with women would have made even the love poet blush.

The basis was there for Pikes to become a playboy’s playground; all that was missing were the playboys themselves. In keeping with the ‘if you build it, they will come’ ethos he had been operating on, Tony called on his French connections and soon enough, the rich, famous and influential began to arrive on Pikes’ doorstep. They’d be greeted by Ibiza’s number one host with the most, in every sense of the word. Tony Pike’s big personality was perhaps the biggest part of the hotel’s charm. Drink, drugs, parties, girls, glamour; Tony would promise (and deliver) it all to those who wanted to partake. Of course, given that one of the aforementioned things happened to be illegal, he ended up in hot water with Ibiza’s police chief, earning a two-day stint in Ibiza’s prison as a warning. Word had certainly gotten out that Pikes was the place to be for a good time.

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Yes, the legendary Mr Ibiza has had a long life. But it STILL seems like he's lived 100 average lifetimes! It was always more about the stories for Tony. He hadn’t taken drugs for a year, when a stray line of ketamine saw him take a tumble. His doctor was unimpressed. They’d talked about the ketamine. And the fact that he’s 84 years old. Ibiza legend who founded legendary celeb hangout Pikes Ibiza and helped turn island into party paradise”

A week later, Wham! arrived. If you watch the Club Tropicana video, Tony is the straw-hatted barman. The night before the shoot Tony and George Michael had a few drinks and then, as Tony recalls in his memoirs, George made “tender and passionate” love to him. “I was surprised,” says Tony, “because I’m not gay.” As an octogenarian, doctors had called Tony a walking miracle. In recent years, years, Tony had been quietly battling cancer and was hospitalised with pneumonia just a little over a week ago. He cited the medical treatment he received throughout his life as amazing, and while doctors and nurses would continually tell him to slow down, Tony would insist on living his life to the fullest – even in his 80s, he was known to jump off the roof of Room 39 into the pool. “I’m an old man, but I don’t feel it,” he said of his behaviour. When recalling Freddie Mercury’s death, Tony once said: “Freddie was a very brave man. He partied to the end and he entertained to the end.” He could have easily been describing about himself.The sequel would have taken place at the characters’ 10 year high school reunion. “It was going well. But the file was accidentally destroyed when I was out of the country,” Pike wrote. “Oh well, maybe one day we can revisit Michael and Jessica. But I can tell you this much—they were already married and divorced when the sequel started. But still very much in love… [It] could make for an interesting story.” 15. Many of the iconic covers were created by Brian Kotzky. Feiwel asked to see the book without the supernatural elements, and Pike had to do “a ton of fresh plotting. Yet I think it turned out well.” In the published book, a group of teenagers on a ski weekend discover that one of them might be responsible for a fire that, years earlier, had disfigured one of the girls and killed her sister. “ Slumber Party is short and simple but I think it works,” Pike said. “I wrote it in my parents’ house. In my old bedroom.” 5. One of the characters in Weekend was inspired by an old friend. In 1951, Tony left the navy with dreams of emigrating to Australia. His strong work ethic saw him take on all types of work within the building trade – which would go on to serve him well when building Pikes in the late 70s – and after a year of saving, he found himself on a ship bound for Sydney; this time as a passenger rather than crew. It’s worth noting that his renowned exploits as a ladies’ man began at this point; despite much bragging about his experience with women prior to the journey, it was during a stopover in Yemen on that fateful trip that Tony finally declared himself “a man”. His work life in Australia was varied – he began working in millinery (where he met his first wife and the mother of his firstborn son), had a stint in the Australian Army, alongside labouring jobs and sales work. With his natural-born gift of the gab, selling was something Tony excelled at. Pike’s road to publishing his first book was convoluted. On Facebook, he recalled going to a writer’s conference where he met an agent named Ashley Grayson. “He was just starting out as an agent; he was willing to read The Starlight Crystal,” Pike wrote. “Ashley felt Starlight was a mess but he thought I had talent.” Eventually, Grayson called Pike with an interesting opportunity: Write two chapters for a “line of teen books that dealt with the supernatural.” The chapters were ultimately rejected; “the editor in charge of the series thought my book was too good for his series,” Pike wrote. Grayson then sold the chapters to Jean Feiwel at Avon, who soon left for Scholastic to head up the publisher’s preteen and YA divisions. Avon lost interest in the book, but Grayson, undeterred, took it to Feiwel at her new job. She commissioned a whole novel, which she named Slumber Party.