How to run a successful club night

Cormac Cashman knows how to party. As club promoter responsible for Mother, Prhomo and Sweatbox, three of Dublin's most popular gay club nights, Cashman knows how to put on parties and keep them packed week-in, week-out. Like many people who work in music, Cashman fell into club promoting.

“I hadn’t a clue what I was doing,” he says of starting Prhomo, his first club night in 2009. “I was in the LGBT society in Trinity College and there were no gay nights with drinks promotions. My mates in college were doing €2 Tuesdays at Citi bar but on the gay scene, I was going out and paying 6 quid for a pint on the supposed student night.”

Prhomo was born with a remit to provide gay students with a good night, cheap drink and good music. “Play pop music that people know,” is how Cashman describes the rudimental music direction at the time. It worked, and Prhomo has grown from a 100-capacity to 400 people Thursday night party that has moved from Dublin bars such as AKA, Wilde, The Dragon and 4 Dame Lane to its current home, The Hub in Temple Bar.

The Hub is also home to Sweatbox, a club run by Cashman, Philly McMahon and Buzz O’Neill, which caters to a “tops off, sweaty dancefloor” underground house music-loving crowd. On the night, Cashman usually operates and sets up the clubs himself.

“I’m basically in charge of everything except serving the drink. Get the lights on, get it looking okay, check the equipment, promote it, fill it, and then do the accounts.”

One thing he learned was not to drink at every one of his club events. “You have to treat it like a business or it won’t last as one.”

Cashman has found it difficult to hand over the club's operations to anyone else if he's on holidays but he trusts his friend Cathal Horan to keep the clubs in check. "If I go on holidays, I need text messages every 45 minutes to an hour so I know it's all running the way it should. An otherwise perfect night can be tarnished for someone, if one thing goes wrong. Cathal is the only one I'd leave any of my clubs with. He's been with me since Prhomo and I've known him since I was 14. If Cathal is there, I can switch my phone off."

The Mother ship

Mother is the most well-known club that Cashman promotes. It was originally conceived as a weekly club to help raise funds for GCN magazine. It runs weekly out of the Copper Alley Night Club, which is “the function room of a hotel essentially”. It operates a disco, electro and synth-pop music policy, something that was lacking in Dublin clubs when it started in 2010. “Your options were pop nights and heavier dance options but nothing like Mother.”

Since starting, Mother has grown from as weekly basement club to a main highlight at festivals such as Body&Soul and Electric Picnic. He reckons Mother's success is down to resident DJs Ghostboy, Rocky T Delgado and Ruth Kavanagh. "Club nights are very much based on your team and what you're doing. You become a little family. The DJs are the reason it works at festivals. We've been lucky to work with them because it's brought the brand forward and into a wider circulation of people who wouldn't have seen it if it was a regular gay night. We wouldn't have a straight demographic who come down to dance to the music if it wasn't for the DJs."

A weekly night comes with its own challenges of keeping the audience interested and engaged, which Mother addressed by bringing in occasional guests. "We rotate the three DJs, and get guests like Billy Scurry and Kelly-Anne Byrne in monthly. It's always a little bit different. In the gay scene, it still offers something different. We're the only offering other than The George that plays good music."

Yestival

Mother has now expanded to one-off events and mini-festivals. This Saturday, they will put on Yestival at the Tivoli Theatre, featuring performances from Peaches, Thisispopbaby, Mother DJs, Rubberbandits, Prodijig, Wyvern Lingo, Will Dempsey and Tonie Walsh.

The party marks the one-year anniversary of the vote for marriage equality, a night Mother celebrated with a major party in the Tivoli. “We thought last year it was going to be a special day going forward and that weekend and date will always be remembered,” says Cashman. “It’s an historic thing for Ireland so we want to mark it every year.”

Pride Block Party

Mother's Pride Block Party, the promoter's biggest event of the year, is also returning on June 25th to the grounds of the Tivoli, with music from Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, Little Boots, Panti Bliss, Kelly-Anne Byrne and the Mother crew, with a crowd of more than 3,000 expected.

Last year’s Pride party has some queueing issues that lead to online complaints. Cashman is keen to address them with better management this year. “It was fine for a lot of people but when you have customers who aren’t having the best time they could be having, and they’re complaining, it crushes me because I put everything into the Pride event.

“This year we put a lot into site design and got an event management team on board to do the logistics of where to put the stage, the bar and speakers, etc. It’s been six months of planning for every eventuality. We knocked down a wall, opened up a space for more portaloos and are getting a bigger stage.”

Cashman goes on to detail licensing, court dates, sponsorship and security before catching himself. “I’m really making parties sound not fun, amn’t I?”