Sad, a part of my youth, too.

That's sad. I still think of The Colour of Spring as a required album.  Great musicianship.

Andre Previn

I'm in shock. One of the great conductors and all-round decent chap. His Shostakovich in my opinion was quite superb.

RIP

RIP Andre

One hopes for an afterlife where he can play with Eric and Ern again, not full time though !

Tony Pike just passed as well. Not a big name but,boy was he up to his neck in it with some of musics finest.

The colourful life of Tony Pike.

Anthony Pike was a British-born Australian, and would go on to own the most notorious hotel on Ibiza, and probably the world.

Pike lead a colourful life. He was in the military for a while, he was also a hat maker, and a yachtsman who had shipwrecked himself in the Caribbean. He had been married three times already when he arrived in Ibiza in the late 70s. Tony bought a crumbling 15th-century mansion in the countryside just outside of San Antonio, and began converting it into a hotel so he could live his dream. He didn't know whether it would be a success as a hotel. If only he could have known what was to come.

Just as the last bathroom was being finished, the hotel received a guest named Bo Palk, who happened to be the Managing Director of MGM Studios. Bo's friend Simon Napier-Bell paid a visit to the hotel, and the rest is history. Napier-Bell was looking for a location to film a music video for the band Wham, and realised immediately that Pikes hotel was it. The video for Club Tropicana was filmed in and around Pikes swimming pool, with Tony Pike himself appearing reluctantly as a barman at one point. Pike became good friends with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely. This lead to many more celebrities arriving at the retreat to taste the high life. A chancer who fancied being a hotelier was now the first name on the lips of everybody from George Michael to Freddie Mercury to Def Leopard to Grace Jones to Jon Bon Jovi.

The 80s at Pikes Hotel were a time of unrivalled excess and debauchery. Party followed party, money was no object, neither was cocaine. Day blended into night, and night into day. The almost constant drink, drugs and orgies eventually attracted the attention of the island's police chief. The legendary singer Julio Inglasias went to the police chief and invited him to the hotel for dinner. The chief obliged. Following the police chief's visit to the villa, never again was Pike bothered by the authorities (something tells me that wasn't the last time the chief visited the hotel while off duty!).

Freddie Mercury had just found out he had AIDS when he booked the whole hotel for his 41st birthday party. On 5th September 1987, Freddie arrived with somewhere between 500-700 guests, 350 bottles of Moet, and a huge cake in the form of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia Cathedral. Guests that evening included Julio Inglasias, Jean Claude Van Damme, Grace Jones, Bon Jovi, Boy George, Robert Plant, Kylie Minogue, Spandau Ballet, Nigel Benn, Tony Curtis, Naomi Campbell and many more. The firework display was watched by people on nearby Majorca. There were so many black and gold balloons it took three full days to inflate them. And of course the cocaine ran into kilos. It was said to be '..the most incredible example of excess the island has ever seen'. The bill was presented to Queen's manager Jim Beach, and I'm gutted we don't know what the bar bill was.. but it included 232 broken glasses. Freddie became very close to Tony Pike, returning again and again, the hotel becoming a sanctuary for him to come to terms with his impending death.

The 90s was a different time than the 80s, and the star was beginning to fade for Tony and Pikes Hotel. By 1998 Tony had put the hotel up for sale. A fraudulent scam saw Tony lose £50,000. The scammers were trying to take over the hotel on their own terms. Pike's son Tony Jr, was sent to Miami in an attempt to find the perpetrators and resolve the situation. No sooner had he arrived, Tony Jr received two bullets in the head for his troubles and was dumped in a remote woodland. The Miami police dept investigated German tennis professional Thomas Heinz Knott for the murder, which lead them to Italian TV producer Enrico Forti, who was charged with both fraud and the murder of Tony Pike Jr. Forti is currently rotting in a Florida supermax for the crime.

A memorial in the garden of the hotel reads:

'In loving memory of my eldest son Dale. Here a portion of his ashes are laid to rest, while the remainder flow with the currents of his beloved Pacific Ocean. May his spirit strive no more but rest within this tree in peace and tranquility. I loved you my son'.

Tony Pike senior is not doing too well these days, a few decades of excess catching up with him. I suppose while the celebs turned up to party occasionally, Tony was on one constant party, as one celebrity walked out the door, another was on the way in!

The hotel was sold in 2008 to the Ibiza Rocks chain, who have attempted to retain its features and charm. It currently costs around £160 a night of anyone wants to re-live the Club Tropicana video.

I would do anything to be transported to one of those parties in the mid-80s!

Now Tony has gone to be with his son.

Shocked
RIP Keith

I'm very saddened to hear this.

He seemed to have things very much back on track after battling depression - I read he gave up drink and drugs in 2006 when he got married.

I believe that the EDM was actually expressing "disgust and outrage" at the billboard campaign promoting “Smack My Bitch Up.” not Keith & co. per se.