Sunil Sharpe gives us his ten events that shaped a decade in the dance music scene. Sharpe is a dj, producer, label owner and monthly 2FM resident. He works at Dublin's Spindizzy Records, teaches DJs at BIFE, and is a driving force behind the Give Us The Night campaign (www.giveusthenight.com).

The following are ten events or developments that stood out for me in the last decade of the club scene here - some for different reasons to others. Some are very much from a Dublin clubbing perspective, and even at that, it's impossible to get a full picture of everything in ten points. I tried my best not to single out individual people or promoters and more so concentrate on actual happenings or highlight events. Between this, and the accounts of Aoife, Al, Trev, Cian, Niall, Arveene and Stevie in Part Two, hopefully most happenings of the last decade will be covered or touched upon, directly or indirectly.

Richie Hawtin at Mono: July 6, 2000
This was the epitome of Richie Hawtin the DJ: three decks, 909 drum machine and various other gizmos. It might have been better had Hawtin not perfected this way of doing things, as once he took the next step towards laptops and Final Scratch, his dexterity as a DJ was not as visible anymore (even if he did help to pioneer the digital dj-ing movement). Another gig at Mono and two big ones at The Ambassador followed, but this was the one where more sweating was done.
 
Creation Warehouse Party: April 28, 2001
This was directly after the ie-dance party that managed to sell out the Temple Bar Music Centre (the local techno scene was a bit bigger back then). The Gardai were astonished to come across a production of this quality in a dusty old warehouse down the quays and one even congratulated Cozzy and Matt on their organisation. They said that the music should be off by 8am (when they would be calling back), which seemed reasonable enough with the few thousand people that were there! There were many Creation parties after this that are legendary in their own right, but this was the daddy.  (pic below Creation in Donabate and (below that) Francois plays to the first Creation Warehouse rave)
 
 

The end of The Kitchen: May 2002
It felt like a loss at the time, but with Switch hosting better nights around the corner and the difficult door staff intent on running The Kitchen into the ground, the eventual closure of the venue was a pretty low key affair. Even promoters that had previously worked at The Kitchen were refused entry on the last night, which in a way couldn’t have been more fitting. While apparently earmarked to become The Clarence Hotel’s gym, some say that the venue still remains intact and completely unchanged. If any venue could make a comeback, this could be it, but there’s no sign of it so far anyway.

Altern 8 at Temple Bar Music Centre: May 24, 2002
How many times have they played here since? Anyway, this time it was the whole crew and the first time they had played a “Live PA” since the Mansion House in the ‘90s. Old Skool nights were becoming big in Dublin at the time as the scene tried to ‘re-invent’ itself the way the UK was doing, and sensing the necessity of bringing back these old legends, Bassbin and Electric City put on what was, in a way, a seminal gig. Not a bad result for a few guys miming to a minidisc, pretending to play a keyboard grabbed out of Eamonn Doyle’s studio that evening.

 

The rise and fall of the Super Club
With big venues like The Ambassador, Mono, Red Box and even Temple Theatre  competing with each other on the same nights, it came the turn of  Spirit in 2002 to bring a new type of pizzazz to the club scene and herald a short lived super club war in town. Not too long later and all of these venues have either stopped hosting club events, been renamed or moved more of their interests to live music (a concerted move by many venues in this direction happened almost overnight). A number of attempts to hoist Tivoli Theatre to super club level were in vain, but part of the Influx/Peter May period there worked well, especially when they were making full use of their theatre license closing times.

DEAF at The Guinness Storehouse: October 2002/2003
The initial multi floored, multi genre gigs at The Storehouse were maybe even more of a high point than UR’s eventual DEAF appearance in 2005. The problem with The Storehouse was that the management had very strange ideas about how gigs like this should be run, not allowing people to move from floor to floor at certain points of the night and being just a bit too over-protective of their precious building. It still was an awesome venue for this kind of thing though, and a real eye opener to how things ‘could’ be here.

Clubs in Pubs
Sick of the high priced, bad value of bigger clubs, a new phenomenon began to take effect with pubs like Bodkins, Molloy’s, The Legal Eagle and eventually McGruders, hosting regular club events and international guests. The biggest early ‘victory’ came when Andy Weatherall dropped down after supporting Death In Vegas at an early show, to shake the crammed upstairs floorboards of Thomas House with some proper robot electro. The fire officer would have loved this one.

Kraftwerk at The Olympia: March 15, 2004
This was a gig that joined many generations together in one night, all turning up to pay homage: it was full of people that looked like my uncle, as well as ravers, nerds and ex-ravers. You no doubt know what a Kraftwerk set is like from Youtube or if you’ve seen them already, and to see this for the first time was mind-blowing. The funny thing about this gig is that it was sold out, yet some of the touts couldn’t even get face value for their tickets on the night for some bizarre reason.

 

Irish DMC Championships – what happened?
A competition that introduced many people to names like Mek, Glen Brady, Splyce and Tu-ki, has fizzled out. There have been other strong new turntablists that have arrived since, but other than club gigs - where many will only get to display part of their skills - there aren’t any officially recognised battles (with a larger international final) going on anymore. Granted the global dj battle scene has been suffering an overall demise, many countries still have DMC and ITF heats on each year. Olan, why don’t you organise them or something?!

Give Us The Night: 2004 -present
The lead up to this, for me, was the demonising of nightclubs and nightlife in general by various newspapers, as well as anti-alcohol campaigners who would prefer everyone to be tucked up in bed with a glass of milk by 9pm. Our initial petition against Garda plans to cut closing times in Dublin was a success at the time, but managing to extend the times is still an ongoing battle. The Dáil demonstration (pic above) marked the beginning of more sympathetic media coverage – but getting Dermot Ahern to feel the same way hasn’t been as easy so far. His email is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   if you feel like trying to talk some sense into him.

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.