For a generation of Dubliners, The Workman’s Club on Wellington Quay, which has gone into examinership, was a habitat at some stage. Of course nobody who made it their community hub would have dared say they were doing it purposefully. They weren’t “creating culture”. That would have been too earnest, too self-important. The regulars preferred to feign apathy ironically. But in their Doc Martens and thrifted faux furs, over Zaconey and Cokes and under tarps sagging with Dublin rain, passing bags of Amber Leaf around, they were constructing the DNA of a city’s creative generation.
It was a space that could be anything. “I’ve had sober nights, drunken nights, great gigs, sh**e gigs, kissed princesses, kissed toads, and had a panic attack when my girlfriend dumped me in the smoking area. The Workman’s Club was the start of everything,” says Andrew McGurk of the band A Lethal Black Ooze. “It was home for us. We went, over and over.”
Opened in 2010 in the shell of a down-at-heel Liffeyside building, Workman’s arrived at a time when other venues had become, in the minds of some, greatest-hits bars masquerading as an alternative stronghold. Gavan O Huanachain, a DJ at the time, recalls, “The idea behind it was to take on Whelan’s.”
The founders were people who felt let down by what they saw as other venues’ restrictions. So a vagabond team assembled and attempted to fill the perceived vacuum with rough edges and sticky floors. The risk paid off quickly because Workman’s won Hot Press’s Best Venue award within its first year.
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By 2011, it was flooded nightly by artists, musicians, theatre kids and anyone cosplaying as same. It wasn’t designed as a queer space, but it was one in practice. It wasn’t marketed as a creative incubator, but it was that too. The smoking area acted like Dublin’s creative CERN where people crossed social divides. Here NCAD students flirted with IADT designers, Dramsoc kids argued with Players playwrights.
Dublin winemaker Killian Horan recalls having great nights with the Trinitones. Theatre house techs met sound engineers. The cultural collisions reverberated far beyond its walls. The Cellar became a refuge for creative experiments. “It felt like the only place you could try something without having to be polished,” remembers Aiesha Wong, who waitressed there during college. “The upstairs bar was where I accidentally landed my first modelling gig after chatting to a photographer about his camera. Things like that just … happened.”
You could turn a corner and see trained ballerinas doing the worm on a Wednesday night. Plays were conceived in that smoking area. You could see the same people ad nauseam and still find the place unavoidably compelling. Relationships started and ended. Bands were formed. Friendships were forged. It was where actors met musicians, comedians met poets, and everyone knew the bartenders (Christina, Daragh, Karl, Ciarean) and the bouncers (Ivan was one) by name.
Everyone was “a creative”. Everyone was discovering 1980s synth pop for the first time because they were born in the 1990s. Entire Facebook groups were devoted to regulars, like Saul Philbin-Bowman, whose popularity led to the creation of the Facebook group “Ohmygod you know Saul too”.
It became a surprise hit with celebrities of a certain ilk. You would be unlikely to catch Beyoncé, Britney Spears or other mainstream pop stars. But Grace Jones appeared. Jake Gyllenhaal allegedly sipped a Guinness there in 2012, triggering an early viral Twitter storm as punters hurtled down the Liffey quays hoping to spot him.
There were sightings of Foals, Franz Ferdinand, Michael Cera, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Alt-J, Miles Kane, Simon Harris, Robert Plant, Happy Mondays and the most millennial star of all time, Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe. DJ Claire Beck recalled in an interview a few years ago playing an Interpol track one night and being interrupted by drummer Sam Fogarino himself standing in front of her. There was even a bloke from the US version of The Office, and Hank from Breaking Bad.
Morrissey created the biggest stir. Everyone had a story to tell about being there when he was, but they were all on different days, and at different times. McGurk recalls, “Morrissey … who was staying in The Clarence one night, even came to see my band Spies. That was surreal.”
Claiming to have seen Morrissey in the venue back before Workman’s was ubiquitous became such a trope it ended up in listicles and spawned memes. Trevor Dietz, formerly The Workman’s clubnights manager and its Somewhere? Wednesdays originator told Golden Plec in 2015 that The Smiths frontman had been in on “four of five occasions”, which may explain the confusion.
Of course the celebrity sightings added an air of legitimacy to the place but it also built a reputation for being the place to see bands before they were famous. Bastille performed their Dublin debut in Workman’s to just 25 people. Aiesha Wong says: “At the time, it felt like a magnet for Dublin’s artsy, alt, ‘let’s-start-a-band’ crowd.”
Breakout bands Fontaines DC and The Murder Capital were regulars at Workman’s in their early days; both on stage and as fans. In fact, Murder Capital frontman James McGovern reminisced in a Far Out Magazine piece, that “Workman’s is where it all started for us,” describing how in the years before their 2019 debut album the band hung out at Workman’s with all their mates in other young bands, “cutting our teeth”. Journalist Callum MacHattie called it “the university of indie music for Dublin bands”.
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Though Workman’s was predominantly a music venue, it didn’t limit itself to just one form of art. The vintage room hosted, and hosts still, a wide variety of stand-up comedy, theatre, fundraisers and the occasional open mic night. It hosted a release party for Emilie Pine’s seminal book Notes to Self, published by Tramp Press. Poet Emmet O’Brien performed many of his poems now recommended for the Junior Cert syllabus there.
Breakout star of comedy Small Town, Big Story, Peter McGann, recalls: “My big thing with Workman’s is when I would do the Pulp Injection radio plays. They’d always be put on on a Monday or a Tuesday, and each one would dissolve into a massive school night session … the whole cast would have pints … bought for us by people who came to the show. We’d be dancing away to the DJ till all hours and then we’d have to crawl out of bed the next day to get to work.”
The fashion was a big part of it too. Fedoras were everywhere. As were moustaches and moustache tattoos. There were multiple ironic takes on the ‘fur coat, no knickers’ look. Former regular, Carly Murphy, says: “I have a recollection of some fabulous emo-esque ride in a huge brown bear coat at the top of the stairs coming down when I was going up.”
It was also messy. Every scene worth mythologising has its narcotic haze. One was either into Zaconey and Coke or Cute Hoor pale ale. Peter McGann had many a night slide into Cute Hoor-fuelled carnage. “Cute Hoor was like rocket fuel. It was like a pint of Buckfast and cocaine in how it made you carry on.”
For nights like that, what mattered wasn’t who might be there. It was who was there. Regulars here would go on to write books, star in Love/Hate, the Meteor ad, prestige TV, or become Paul Mescal. Others would also go on to be teachers, nurses, gardaí, journalists, doctors, engineers. Many, however, forged careers in the creative industry, in part thanks to connections made at Workman’s.
Now, as it slips into examinership in an attempt to save itself, will the generation that built it up let it go? Will they return in their droves to indulge the nostalgia of their misbegotten youth? Or will other upstarts come along and create a new space for the next generation of creatives to call home?
