The Motel
By Claire Manumission
A memoir of misdaventures in 90s Ibiza.
Publication date: TBC
Support this projectTHE GREATEST DANCER SILVER DISCO PLEDGE
PLUS:
- "Ass, Cash or Grass. No-one Rides for Free" dog tag.
- Commemorative 25th anniversary signed bookplate with a message from Claire and Mike.
- Digital poster that you can print out and frame.
- Signed first edition hardback.
- Have your name immortalised in the back under Mike Manumission’s guest list.
- Playlist selected by MANUMISSION, CARRY ON & MOTEL regulars. So you can get on it wherever you are.
- The ebook
IBIZA PAST & FUTURE
PLUS:
- The Motel Audio Book. A groundbreaking sonic delight designed by M&C with original score by Mark Sayfritz. An homage to the classic radio play with a pumping 90s dancefloor twist. Stunning and evocative sound design by ex-Goldie producer turned Hollywood composer (Motel regular) Mark Sayfritz. And full emotive narration by Claire with contributions from Mike and all the major players who will join us in reliving their Motel adventures as they tell the tale in their own iconic voices.
- A piece of digital artwork designed by M&C.
- Your name printed in a book as a supporter.
CLUB CLASSICS
PLUS:
- The classics pledge comes with a playlist selected by MANUMISSION, CARRY ON & MOTEL regulars. So you can get on it wherever you are!
- Have your name immortalised in the back under Mike Manumission’s guest list.
- The ebook
SIGNED CLUB CLASSICS
PLUS:
- The classics pledge comes with a playlist selected by MANUMISSION, CARRY ON & MOTEL regulars. So you can get on it wherever you are!
- Have your name immortalised in the back under Mike Manumission’s guest list.
- The ebook
LOVE LETTER
PLUS:
- A valentine's themed digital artwork - created by Mike & Claire from their personal archive
- Your name listed in the book
- The ebook
WALL OF NO SHAME
PLUS:
- You and a friend get to choose how you are listed as your fantasy vocation: Are you a Sex Performer, Drug Dealer, Crooked Policeman, E'd Up Raver or are you The Nose!?
- You will also receive a digital artwork collage designed by M&C and a digital file of a scene from Manumission The Movie
- Two tickets with access to the patrons area at an M&C Event.
- Your name printed in the IBIZA POSSE list
- The Motel Audio Book. A groundbreaking sonic delight designed by M&C with original score by Mark Sayfritz. An homage to the classic radio play with a pumping 90s dancefloor twist. Stunning and evocative sound design by ex-Goldie producer turned Hollywood composer (Motel regular) Mark Sayfritz. And full emotive narration by Claire with contributions from Mike and all the major players who will join us in reliving their Motel adventures as they tell the tale in their own iconic voices.
- A Manumission bookmark from our record-breaking year in Privilege - when the crazed club owner forever closed the doors on Ibiza’s most successful night.
- The ebook
HOTEL / NIGHTLIFE PRO LEVEL
PLUS:
- An A2 art print of the book cover
- A digital artwork collage designed by M&C
- A digital file of a scene from Manumission The Movie which premiered on the night of Claire’s 24th Birthday.
- The Motel Audio Book. A groundbreaking sonic delight designed by M&C with original score by Mark Sayfritz. An homage to the classic radio play with a pumping 90s dancefloor twist. Stunning and evocative sound design by ex-Goldie producer turned Hollywood composer (Motel regular) Mark Sayfritz. And full emotive narration by Claire with contributions from Mike and all the major players who will join us in reliving their Motel adventures as they tell the tale in their own iconic voices.
- A Manumission bookmark from our record-breaking year in Privilege - when the crazed club owner forever closed the doors on Ibiza’s most successful night.
- The ebook
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
PLUS:
- The Motel Audio Book. A groundbreaking sonic delight designed by M&C with original score by Mark Sayfritz. An homage to the classic radio play with a pumping 90s dancefloor twist. Stunning and evocative sound design by ex-Goldie producer turned Hollywood composer (Motel regular) Mark Sayfritz. And full emotive narration by Claire with contributions from Mike and all the major players who will join us in reliving their Motel adventures as they tell the tale in their own iconic voices.
- A Manumission bookmark from our record-breaking year in Privilege - when the crazed club owner forever closed the doors on Ibiza’s most successful night.
- The ebook
STUDIO BOSS
PLUS:
- The Motel Audio Book. A groundbreaking sonic delight designed by M&C with original score by Mark Sayfritz. An homage to the classic radio play with a pumping 90s dancefloor twist. Stunning and evocative sound design by ex-Goldie producer turned Hollywood composer (Motel regular) Mark Sayfritz. And full emotive narration by Claire with contributions from Mike and all the major players who will join us in reliving their Motel adventures as they tell the tale in their own iconic voices.
- A Manumission bookmark from our record-breaking year in Privilege - when the crazed club owner forever closed the doors on Ibiza’s most successful night.
- Ten ebooks
Sold out!
MIKE'S EDIT
IBIZA POSSE
Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I get my book delivered to?
How do supporter names work?
Will the book and rewards that I receive look the same as the images shown on the Unbound website?
The Motel is a love letter to a lost paradise - Ibiza in the 90s. It's a celebration of all those people from around the world who came to a small Mediterranean island and became part of the swashbuckling adventure that was Manumission.
In 1998, with Manumission going into its 5th year, Mike and Claire borrowed a large amount of money from an armed German cocaine dealer and against all odds took over an abandoned brothel on the outskirts of Ibiza town and turned it into a 24-hour party destination – the most notorious venue of the decade - The Motel.
"The Motel was a pink abandoned roadside brothel Mike and I acquired in the summer of 1998. We lived there with a team of NYC strippers, a sex performer from New Orleans, a flow of international DJs and a bad tempered Irish dwarf who guarded the door from members of the Hells Angels and the press whilst opening it for the best of the gay scene, tattooed Tahitians in dirty blue jeans, ex-cons and outlaws, porn stars, drag queens, film directors and the international set - the counterculture who lived on Salinas beach all day and partied all night, all summer long - the faces, the scene, the friends we hung out with; the people we called 'the island'.”
Under the neon glare of a sign that promised Bar, Bed and Breakfast for one lost summer, this doll's house on acid became Mike and Claire’s home. . .
What could possibly go wrong?
This is the story of the Motel but it’s also the story of Manumission. Over its 14-year history, over 1.5 million people attended the club, it was the biggest weekly party in the world earning it a place in the Guinness World Records. On the dancefloor young ravers rubbed shoulders with supermodels, rock stars, fashion designers, drug dealers, and the sporting elite - sharing a universal feeling of ecstasy - with zero violence - everyone partying in complete harmony.
With much of club culture currently under the spell of VIP service, corporate sponsoring and branding, The Motel is a timely reminder that life wasn't always that way.
Claire Manumission said:
“During the second mother-of-all-lock ins (the first being in the Motel, the second being the fuck up of the 2020s lock down) banished from the physical realm of nightlife aided and abetted by our extensive archive we took the painful, shocking, hilarious, embarrassing! - 'let's go for a walk in the garden to get some fresh air... did we really do that!?!?' - trip back to the memory Motel.
The result is a memoir that takes a heady and honest look back at a time that no longer exists and perhaps provides an answer to the question, 'what happens when you say yes to everything?...'
The story draws from all my years in Ibiza, weaves back and forward through time: from the carefree early days when I met and fell in love with Mike - on his quest for universal freedom - how together we transformed Manumission into the biggest weekly party in the world, the sex shows, the controversy, betrayals and finally the abolition of Manumission but it’s told predominantly from The Motel, on the long wild weekend of my 24th birthday – the weekend when Norman Cook met Zoe Ball and Lisa I’Anson missed her Radio 1 broadcast and was subsequently very publicly fired on the BBC News at Six. The Motel is a darkly humorous look at hedonism in drug-kissed 90s Ibiza."
Irvine Welsh said:
“The Motel was a cavern of chaos where the fun just never stopped. You literally did not know what sort of a day you were going to wake up into. Or if you were going to wake up. Or even go to bed at all, ever again. All you could be assured of is that you'd be talking about it for years to come.”
Mathew Clayton, Head of Publishing at Unbound said:
“The Motel is a classic counter-culture memoir in the same spirit as Howard Marks’s Mr Nice (no surprise that Howard was a regular at the Motel). A group of extraordinary people collected around Mike and Claire at the Motel, it was a 90s Mediterranean version of Warhol’s Factory or Ken Kesey’s Magic Bus. Mike and Claire consistently took creative risks that no-one else at the time was doing whether it was making a feature film or opening the Motel, championing sexual diversity, or having a giant blown up image of Noam Chomsky on the wall (something you would never have seen at the Ministry of Sound!)."
The front cover image of Claire at the Motel is by kind permission of the photographer Franck Sauvaire.
Quick select rewards
THE GREATEST DANCER SILVER DISCO PLEDGE
PLUS:
- "Ass, Cash or Grass. No-one Rides for Free" dog tag.
- Commemorative 25th anniversary signed bookplate with a message from Claire and Mike.
- Digital poster that you can print out and frame.
- Signed first edition hardback.
- Have your name immortalised in the back under Mike Manumission’s guest list.
- Playlist selected by MANUMISSION, CARRY ON & MOTEL regulars. So you can get on it wherever you are.
- The ebook
SIGNED CLUB CLASSICS
PLUS:
- The classics pledge comes with a playlist selected by MANUMISSION, CARRY ON & MOTEL regulars. So you can get on it wherever you are!
- Have your name immortalised in the back under Mike Manumission’s guest list.
- The ebook
