Keane To Help Ibiza Rock

Keane is the latest addition to Andy McKay’s Ibiza Rocks season, which is attracting 800 punters a night to the island’s Bar M and a very positive response from the U.K. media.

Apart from five weekly half-hour television specials to be broadcast on Channel 4 beginning August 26, serious papers including The Guardian and The Times have reported how such bands as We Are Scientists, Dirty Pretty Things, Editors, The Streets, and Boy Kill Boy have all converged on the San Antonio beachfront bar to play their shows and enjoy two- or three-day holidays.

In the same way NME has drawn British youth’s attention to Benicassim Festival, which is on the Spanish coast and a three-hour ferry trip and a one-hour car drive away, The Independent ran a piece detailing how McKay has transformed the holiday island’s image as a haven for “hedonistic clubbers, ravers and acid house freaks” to one of “Europe’s top indie nightspots.”

“Most of the crowd is British but this year I’ve noticed more people from the European mainland, particularly from Germany, France and Italy,” McKay told Pollstar as the 2006 Ibiza Rocks season entered its second month.

With some financial backing from Sony Ericsson, he has managed to come up with guarantees competitive enough to tempt acts to play more intimate shows in a venue that’s much smaller than the ones some are used to filling.

Coming off the back of a successful U.S. tour and a No. 1 U.K. album, Keane’s August 23rd performance is the major coup of this year’s Ibiza Rocks – although the British papers have obviously used more ink on Pete Doherty’s canceled (and rescheduled) show.

Having told a London magistrates court he was intent on going through with his rehab this time, Doherty had to pull Babyshambles‘ show in order to return to the Portuguese clinic he walked out of earlier in the year.

Realizing he’d be out of there within a couple of weeks, he rescheduled the show for August 14th and told the U.K. media that “Ibiza Rocks is a fucking noble and praiseworthy mission and I can’t wait to get back.”

McKay said Doherty is deserving of another chance to allow his talent to get the better of his drugs, and is quick to point out that – prior to this year’s understandable rescheduling – he’s never had a problem with him either turning up late or not at all.

The July highlights included Dirty Pretty Things and Editors, which has had a busy summer festival season on the back of topping this year’s European Talent Exchange Programme in Groningen, Holland in January.

The rest of this summer’s confirmed lineup includes Kasabian, plus The Fratellis (August 11-12), Babyshambles and The Futureheads (August 14th), and Keane (August 23rd).

McKay also runs the island’s Manumission Nightclub, a 10,000-capacity mega-disco believed to be the biggest in the world.

– John Gammon