The Unhinged Hedonism of 'The King of Ibiza'

Danny Gould has seen it all. After coming up tough on a council estate in Essex, he found escape in Ibiza, where he co-founded the legendary club night Clockwork Orange. However, his taste for late-night debauchery—Danny’s unhinged and relentless hedonism made him legendary on the island in the 1990s—led him into a trap from which he very nearly never emerged.

Here, he talks us through the feral party lifestyle he carved out for himself during the island’s glory years—and his dark spiral into addiction.

It’s 8AM, and someone is pouring BBQ lighter gel all over the furniture and floor of our Ibiza villa.

As he sets it ablaze, another pal goes outside, and unleashes a spray of tear gas at us through the window. Then another mate throws an air bomb firework into the room. People are coughing and spluttering; there’s smoke and fire everywhere. This is my cue to direct everyone to the nine lines of gear on the table: It’s go time.

In case you’re wondering, the point of this is ‘fun’. This scenario was just a regular afters at the Clockwork villas. Every single night in our gaff was madness: it was all about how far we could push the craziness. We were addicts, getting fucked up every single day of every single season for the best part of a decade. If you didn’t die, you had a story to tell the next day.

How did it get to this? Well, you could say it started when I first got drunk—age eight. On the day of the 1980 FA Cup Final my mum left me home alone, as usual, to go to work, telling me expressly not to touch the three green cans in the fridge. Obviously, I settled down to watch West Ham and drank them all. I was allowed to go wild throughout my childhood. I didn’t have a dad and my mum was an alcoholic who’d send me out to steal things like milk or food if we didn’t have any—we lived in a council estate in Essex with debt collectors always knocking at the door.

The more I look at it, I was clearly ADHD or on the spectrum: I didn't concentrate at school and spent the whole time messing around. I had child psychologists during school, and child psychologists after school. I was one of those kids who always had three times as much energy as anyone else, so when I started properly drinking and huffing aerosols at 12, that's when it all took off. By the age of 14, I was going out with the older boys and into school the next day with a hangover.

After school, I was ducking and diving, doing various jobs. I was working on a building site on the estate where I lived when I was 20, but I fucked that off after I came back from Ibiza. I remember I was living with my mum and this guy knocked on the door. My mum said, “This man’s the pension man; I’ve arranged for you to start paying into one for when you’re older.” I told him to fuck off, I was only interested in earning money to pay for the summer to come on the island.

My first time in Ibiza I was 17, but it wasn’t until I was 22, in 1993, that I launched Clockwork Orange club nights with my friend Andy. Imagine a young alcoholic being given a book of 50 drink tokens at the beginning of the night—obviously, I drank most of them myself. It was like a wonderland. If I wasn’t the most fucked out of the 3600 people in there, I felt like I’d failed. At this point, me and my friends didn't have enough money for cocaine—it was mainly booze and acid—but as we earned more money, our life of excess spiralled.

By the mid-90s, we were getting two ounces of gear each week for the villa, plus endless pills and weed. If we didn’t have a party to put on, we’d put on our own kind of party, routinely doing two or three-day benders without sleep. The longest bender was probably Wednesday to Sunday, then four hours kip and straight to Space to carry on until Monday. We got on it every single night and day, the entire time we were in Ibiza—well, except the one week each season when I’d be so sick I couldn't get out of bed because my kidneys hurt so much.

This was all happening on a normal residential street, too—the police would come round at 3AM midweek and we’d all be dressed in women’s clothes, having a pool party, and I’d go and speak Spanish and pretend it was my birthday. They’d say keep it down, while my drug dealers sprinted off over the walls of the villa and away, into the darkness of the hills.

The dark side was there in other ways, too, as our addictions steadily grew. At 26, I started seeing things in psychosis, fighting with imaginary characters, and getting so paranoid I’d search the house every night with a knife. Me and my friends would hide in the pitch-black rooms, peeking out of the curtains thinking there was someone there, or I’d spend hours frozen to a chair: our home became like a crack house. A year later, friends of mine began to overdose and flirt with death at parties, and we’d all just carry on when they woke up—it was hardcore.

I finally left Clockwork and Ibiza in 2001 when the scene changed and everything just imploded. I still continued to get on it in England, though: whatever money I had went on drink or drugs. The moment I realised I couldn’t do it any more was when I went back to Ibiza in 2003, aged 31, to party. After a big night, I just broke down and rang my mum in tears, using someone else’s phone because I had no credit—the former ‘King of Ibiza’ without even a penny to his name. I got on a flight the next day.

The day I got home, I went to V Festival and announced to all my friends that I wasn't getting on it any more, but they didn’t believe me, so I ended up pressing the ‘fuck it button’ instead. I went mental, caused a load of trouble—necking this, smoking that, taking this – and it all just culminated in a pain in my head so bad it felt like it was literally going to explode. Then, somehow, I woke up the next morning, opened one eye, and just knew that was it: my addiction had gone. I’ve been sober for 21 years now, and haven’t once touched drink or drugs again.

The easy part was waking up and realising the addiction was over, the hard part was going to AA for eight years, every week, three or four times a week. From the seminars to the retreats, it was eight years of hard work. When I was nine years sober, I was finally ready to start throwing parties again with my Clockwork business partner, and ever since, we’ve been doing festivals and nights that are far more successful than when we were under the influence.

I finally made peace with Ibiza when we relaunched there in 2014. For a long time, I’d blamed the island for my addiction but, of course, it was all me. Now the island is a spiritual place for me. When I landed before, I was only thinking about what we were getting on and where we were going to party. But now, I drive through the countryside, I see the local people, I listen to Spanish music, I buy the Spanish food, I stand in my Spanish house that overlooks the sea and I'm in heaven. I don’t regret anything about how I got here: Everything that destroyed me, brought me back stronger.

As told to @becky_burgum

Danny’s story will also be told as part of Ibiza Narcos, available to watch on Sky Documentaries and NOW.