EVERY SELF-RESPECTING music scene needs a venue to call home. When there are a number of acts on the rise at the same time in a city, they need a room where they can learn the ropes, ply their trade, play to the public and keep an eye on what everyone else is doing.
Hilly Kristal’s CBGB club on New York City’s Bowery, the sweaty dive where Talking Heads, Blondie, Television and The Ramones did their growing up in public in the 1970s, is one template for how a venue and a scene can coalesce.
Of course, hindsight often means forgetting about any personality clashes or musical differences that might have occurred when bands were coming of age and a venue was simply striving to pay its rent and bills. Looking back, everyone concerned tends to focus on the success stories rather than the friction between the people who made the music and those who sold the tickets. A venue may never be as famous as the bands it gives a home to, but it is often an important part of the narrative nonetheless.
CBGB enjoyed a repeat turn in the limelight in the 1980s when a bunch of hardcore bands, such as Bad Brains, Gorilla Biscuits and The Misfits, played there regularly and made it the epicentre of a different scene. But it was the acts who made a noise on the seedy side of the Bowery in the previous decade who ensured the ongoing lucrative global market for T-shirts featuring the venue’s logo. This is a revenue stream and a fashion trend that still endures today, even though CBGB closed down in 2006. The space is where the fashion designer John Varvatos now sells his clobber at prices the club’s original musicians could never have afforded.
Despite the best efforts of venue owners who invest in a couple of hundred Fruit of the Loom T-shirts to sell behind the bar, there’s not quite the same demand for branded merchandise featuring the names of Irish venues. Some of us might have been there and seen plenty at such one-time iconic Dublin venues as the Underground, McGonagles, the Baggot Inn, the New Inn, the Funnel, the TV Club, and the Rock Garden, but we didn’t buy the T-shirt.
Most of these spaces have moved on from the business of live music and are now home to a variety of other enterprises, from lap-dancing clubs (the Underground) to apartments (the New Inn). The Baggot is still in the business of hosting bands, albeit on a scale much reduced from its heyday, when it featured Irish and international acts, including Christy Moore, Aslan and David Bowie, seven nights a week, upstairs and downstairs.
Inevitably the venues of that time became synonymous with certain acts. In the mid-1980s Jeff Brennan’s tiny Underground bar on Dame Street was the place to see Dublin bands such as A House, Something Happens, The Real Wild West, The Subterraneans, and many others. As these acts developed and pulled in bigger crowds, they naturally moved on to other venues, but it was the Underground that provided them with a start and attracted the next wave of bands, such as Whipping Boy, who began the process all over again.
Similarly, the long-gone Funnel on Dublin’s City Quay was an important staging post for a growing number of indie acts, such as Redneck Manifesto, Decal, Pet Lamb, Wilt and many others, in the late 1990s.
But scenes can sometimes tar a venue with a reputation that’s difficult to shake off. For years in the late 1990s and the early part of the following decade, Whelan’s on Wexford Street was viewed as the place to go to see emerging Irish singer-songwriters. Of course, the venue also put on other gigs– it couldn’t survive only on earnest young men and women with acoustic guitars – but it became linked in many minds with the likes of Glen Hansard, Damien Rice, Mundy, David Kitt, Gemma Hayes and other solo acts.
Such acts were booked because they were popular, not because the venue was pushing an agenda. Yet when newer indie rock acts began to appear and attract audiences, it wasn’t easy to coax them to Wexford Street.
All of these fixtures from the gig-listings columns of old have now been replaced by a new set of names. From the Workman’s Club, which celebrates a year in business with a week of special events from September 5th, to the Grand Social to the Mercantile, Dublin’s stock of small rooms for new bands to make a noise in has been replenished once again.
The Workman’s Club is in a building that is enjoying its second lease of entertainment life. The venue, on Wellington Quay, was formerly home to the City of Dublin Working Men’s Club. After lying vacant for seven years it was transformed into a 260-capacity venue in 2010, with local act Halves the first to play to a paying audience.
Instead of private club members enjoying subsidised ales, a game of darts and covers bands, this Workman’s Club attracts hipsters and a new generation of music fans to its bands, art exhibitions and club nights. While there have been full houses for acts from out foreign, such as Anna Calvi, Gold Panda and Baths, it is local acts who are the Workman’s Club’s bread and butter, ensuring attendances week in and week out.
It is still too early to say what kind of a nascent scene is preparing to emerge from the cluster of acts who have already played at the club, but an open-minded booking policy augurs well for providing any such movement with a clubhouse.
We’ll just have to wait and see if there’s a future market for Workman’s Club T-shirts.
