pacha

Mark Broadbent: How To Get Booked At Space Ibiza (interview)

July 15th, 2010 |

We Love (click on the picture for more)

Ten years after he became the head booker at Ibiza’s most credible and critically important party (We Love) at the island’s most influential venue (Space), Mark Broadbent ‘s advice for landing a gig is impressively (if deceptively) simple.

“Make friends with us,” he recommends, “reach out.”

Well aware of We Love’s career boosting potential he’s equally conscious that every new booking means an established player loses out, a side of his job he admits continuing to find more than a little tricky.

“It’s a terrible thing to have to do to tell someone you’re no longer booking them and over the years I’ve dropped quite a few acts who were mainstays of our programming back in the day,” he admits.

‘You’ve got to remember that most of these people have become friends but at the end of the day you’re not doing anybody favours by just booking them for the sake of it. Everybody can tell when a booking has been made for those reasons. Still, it’s the worst part of the job and it keeps me awake at night sometimes,” he admits.

Mark Broadbent

Pursuing a policy of mixing big name ‘underground’ names (this season’s stars include Carl Craig, Claude Von Stroke and Joris Voorn) with rising talent (notably Deepgroove and Berghain’s Marcel Dettman this season), We Love is broadly centred around techno, though Mark’s keen to avoid being pigeon-holed by genres.

“We book acts from all four corners of the globe and given that we have six rooms to program you can often find lesser know genres like dubstep, for example Appleblim – being played in the club at the same time as big room house, for example by someone like Steve Lawler,” he points out.

“Music is our passion and we hunt it out in the best venues and parties and try to replicate what we experienced through our programming here at Space. This has also helped keep our parties very cosmopolitan in terms of our customers.”

He’s also impressively unflustered about the actions of rival Balearic clubs such as Pacha who made a dramatic move this season in signing minimal/ deep type Luciano for a season of Sunday night affairs.

“After 15 years living and working on Ibiza I have found that people who like to go to Pacha will go there but on the same token, if you don’t like Pacha for one reason or another, no DJ booking is going to make you go there,” he says.

“I think maybe we have lost the odd soul to Luciano this summer but if you’re a regular customer of ours, there is no competition really.”