Mr Pikes: The Story Behind The Ibiza Legend

Product Information

Dale flew two days before Tony. When Tony arrived, police met him on the plane, explained his life was in danger, dressed him in an airport worker’s uniform, drove him to a hotel and told him that Dale was dead. He had been shot and found naked on a beach. Tony didn’t believe them. They took him to identify the body. It was Dale, but he wasn’t naked. On his wrist was a Pikes bracelet. In 1995, a girlfriend told Tony she had Aids. Tony was tested. He had it too. He was to join the friends he’d started losing, fallen comrades in a war of debauchery. Doctors gave him five years maximum, and he decided to sell up to pay for his care and provide for his children accumulated over four marriages. TheRansomNote left a wonderful review which you can read here. It’s a great thing to see the story of Tony being spread far and wide.

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.

Customer reviews

Tony remains touched by his time with her. “One night at Ku, Roman Polanski asked me if I could fix him up with Grace. I said I was her lover. He said, ‘But I’m famous!’ But she chose me. She was wonderful, she had an aura like a rainbow.” That’s where Tony sits now, on a stool worn through the decades to fit him. He likes to sit here and lose himself in the past. Sometimes it’s tough. Dale. His childhood. The friends lost along the way. But mostly it’s the good times. George, Freddie, Grace and all the others. Lounging by the pool with the drinks flowing. Pike recalled that when he penned the book’s final words, “I want people to remember me,” things got spooky: “Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Goodbye, we’ll meet some day.’ This absolutely happened. I jumped so high I almost hit my head on the ceiling.” He felt that “it was like a person was done telling me their story and they were moving on. Like they were saying goodbye and thanks.”

He spent years trying to get the book adapted, including writing a script for a movie that led to a cease and desist letter from Pike’s publisher. Now, finally, his adaptation—a series co-created with Leah Fong, which will cover not just The Midnight Club but other Pike books—will debut on Netflix on October 7. 11. Something spooky happened when Pike finished Remember Me. At night he lay and watched the stars through a hole in the ceiling. He thought about his previous lives. He thought about the brother who had abused him. Then he got up in the morning and worked even harder. HE was the sex-mad playboy who provided a tropical retreat for A-list celebrities to indulge their wildest fantasies.” Ibiza legend who founded legendary celeb hangout Pikes Ibiza and helped turn island into party paradiseThe 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. The story, much like Tony’s life, hits the half way mark before he we even hear of Ibiza. It is at this point in which he decides that the white island is where he wants to settle down and set about building his very own private paradise, much of it with his own hands and sweat. All of it straight from his legendary double-aorta heart.

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”. 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. 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 Independent: Tony binged a 24-7 lifestyle of sex, drugs, and excess. Now, this legend of the Ibiza party scene recounts the ups and downs of his years in paradise.

We have created a facebook group Here you will find pictures not posted anywhere else, and funny stories from friends of Tony throughout the years. July 4, 1980 was the ‘official’ opening date of Pikes. Over the years, Tony would continue its transformation in the off-seasons, adding more and more rooms, turning old stables into the reception area, adding the swimming pool that would go on to become emblematic of the hotel and the freedom it stood for. Finally, he put in a tennis court that was rarely used – except by Pike and his favourite tennis partner, Freddie Mercury. He’s been credited as creating the original blueprint for the ‘boutique hotel’ trend, prior to Ian Schrager staking claim to the title. But knowing Tony, he wouldn’t have cared less for a title. “I didn’t see myself as an interior designer but somehow I ended up being both,” he once said. They just kept coming. Spandau Ballet, Led Zeppelin, Jon Bon Jovi, Boy George. George Michael based himself at Pikes for his European tours. Tony dipped in and out of the benders then rose early, threw himself in the pool and served breakfast. “There were times when I was on another planet,” he concedes. “But you can hide anything behind sunglasses.” Not many have lived life to the fullest as the hedonistic playboy and iconic hotelier Tony Pike, the original owner of the legendary Pikes hotel. In his uncompromising memoir Mr Pikes: The Story Behind The Ibiza Legend, he discloses all the dirt and a whole lot more going on behind the scenes of his life and the legendary hotel.

Mr Pikes: The Story Behind the Ibiza Legend by MT INK is one of the greatest books of all time to read. 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.” For me, Remember Me was a gigantic leap,” Pike wrote. “I knew when I was writing it that it was special and when I finished it—I was high as a kite for weeks. I knew I had finally written something beyond me—a book that would last forever.” The author said that it didn’t even feel like he wrote it; it was his first time writing in the first person, and he also had no idea what was going to happen next, “when in all my other books I knew where I was headed.” 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”. He also drew the Apartment 3-G comic for a while—the strip was initially drawn by his father—and more than 100 covers of The Hardy Boys Casefiles. 16. You might notice the name Ann in a lot of Pike’s books.

Heard It Through the Grapevine

DeepHouseAmsterdam too called Tony’s book a fitting memoir to the life of an amazing man, can be found here. I looked at that broken down old thing,” says Tony, “and I thought, ‘This could be the greatest place in the world.’” It’s murky and confusing. To this day, Tony is unsure if he knows the full story. What is clearer is the grief and guilt he has battled ever since. He “cried for months”, then scattered Dale’s ashes around the olive tree at Pikes and decided the show had to go on. The roll call of Pikes hotel guests reads like a magazine gossip column at times: Mike Oldfield (who stole Tony’s girlfriend at the time), Joan Baez, Frank Zappa, Boy George, Kylie Minogue, Spandau Ballet, Brigitte Nielsen, Robert Plant, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Kenny Everett, the English football team, Bon Jovi and even Tony Curtis (who Tony Pike refused to lend his car to!). There were the iconic songstresses he famously romanced, Sade and Grace Jones, (this gentleman did indeed kiss and tell in his memoir) and the many superstar DJs of the world who passed through the island as Ibiza cemented its reputation as the clubbing capital of the world. In between romancing his glamorous guests over the years, Tony also committed to two more marriages, which in turn produced two more children.