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Two Ibiza dancers find it hard to kick the high life

The night it all started, Anne-Marie and Simone didn't even have enough money to get in. Archaos in Glasgow is supposedly the biggest club in Scotland, but somehow - God knows how - the two 18-year-old school friends from Stirling managed to sneak in. And once they were in they started dancing, dressed in their hot pants and fluffy bras. They loved it.

That night, the club choreographer spotted them. He needed trapeze artists and stiltwalkers. Were they interested?

It turned out that learning the trapeze was extremely hard. By then, Anne-Marie was at drama college; Simone was doing marketing at uni. They had to train three times a week. The toughest part was building up their muscles to work the trapeze. But by the end of it they were earning money on the trapeze - and they started dancing on stilts, too.

It was Anne-Marie who thought of the name. Simone and Anne-Marie: Chicks on Sticks. That was seven years ago. The two of them have stayed close - like sisters, really. Ibiza was the best time. In 2000 they booked into a cheap hotel in San Antonio for a week, rushing round to all the promoters, trying to get work before their money ran out. Manumission was the first club to book them. It was held on Monday nights at Privilege and had one of the best reputations on the island; it had made its name with live sex acts, as the most daring of the clubs. They got up there in their... well, quite minimalistic clothing, and danced. Being a performer, it's like wearing a mask - being someone else for the night, with 2,000 people looking up at you, cheering you on on your stilts. It was amazing. The whole atmosphere. Incredible.

Once promoters knew they were working at Manumission it was easy to fill the other nights of the week. The money wasn't much - £40 a night, seven nights a week - but it was enough. They could get into the clubs for free and didn't have to pay for drinks. They rented a villa, spent their days on the beach or taking boat rides to Mallorca, and then, in the evenings, danced for an hour-and-a-half. There were the parades, too, when they'd walk around the town on stilts while the promoters handed out fliers.

On Ibiza they spent so much time on stilts it was like they became part of their bodies. They'd feel strange when they took them off. We're small now. It feels weird. Like we're missing something from our legs.

Ibiza was great. Even now if she hears 'Beachball' by Nalin & Kane it takes Simone right back there. They went back for two more years, working the winters at home in Archaos. The first time they came back to Scotland it was snowing. In Ibiza they'd been on the beach every day. People at home seemed so depressed.

Ibiza was a bubble. Everyone was on holiday, everyone was having fun. But after three years they felt they had to leave that bubble. They were getting too old for it, they said. So they've moved on; they've got back to reality, you know, buying cars and houses. Simone's in marketing now, and Anne-Marie is an insurance advisor.

In a way they do kind of miss it. Anne-Marie enjoys insurance, but she's never had a job where she's put her heart and soul into it, like she and Simone did with stilt-dancing. But at weekends they're still doing it, working at the clubs in London - Pacha, and CC Club in Piccadilly.

At 26, Anne-Marie sometimes feels quite old, looking down at the fresh-faced crowd from her stilts. Maybe she's growing out of clubs. Maybe she's just jealous she's not 18 any more.

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