“The problem was it left a lot of water residue on the floor afterward,” explains Whincup. Jane Bussman, the author of “Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House,” and a visitor to Amnesia in its early espuma days, claims the mostly British tourists back then would “flail around like very drunk puppies in their first snowfall.” “The fire department would literally go into the street, put a hose into the hydrant, and run it through the club and upstairs until you filled the whole dance floor below,” recalls Robin Whincup, who first encountered a foam party while on vacation in Ibiza in the mid-1980s. The then-open-air terrace club started foam parties with basic fire hoses. It started with much more humble origins.Įspuma, literally meaning “foam” in Spanish, started in Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, the birthplace of acid house music and the oldest nightclub on the island (having opened in 1976).
Now, the idea of injecting foam into a club may seem pretty strange, as it did when it was introduced in the early 1980s, but it would create an immediate local sensation, then form a cottage industry of nightlife that, remarkably, still prevails across the globe today. The nightclub industry, in fact, seems built on club owners not really knowing what they are doing - beds in bars, for example -but surely hoping they accidentally stumble upon the next gimmick that will get partiers into their bars.
