Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Oh, no, it's Ferdia Mac Anna, come back to life as Rocky DeValera. And a bevy of females is up near the stage, turning the upstairs at Renards on South Frederick Street into a kind of mosh pit.
Such is the level of wild and frenzied dancing here that Trudy Hayes, Darina McCann, Anita Notaro and Mac Anna's sister, Fiona Mac Anna, with her daughter Lara Hickey, may have to restrain themselves.
The newly reformed band, which used to be Rocky DeValera and the Grave Diggers (renamed for the night as the Cartoon City Band), belts out a few numbers including their one and only hit - Is it a bird? Is it a plane, Oh, no, it's John Wayne. The madness and passion is unleashed. To tremendous applause, Mac Anna must perform the song again for all the fans, who are really here for the launch of his latest novel, Cartoon City.
US rock singer Joe Jackson, whose most famous hit was Is She Really Going Out with Him?, is here to launch the book. "It's got everything," he says of Cartoon City. "At least four stories in one - a comedy, a murder, a romance, a thriller. It's got everything. I laughed, I cried. It's the greatest book ever written - in the history of mankind."
Jackson is also in Dublin to record a song with Marianne Faithfull, for his album, Night and Day, 2. Rocky and the band played support to Jackson around 1978 in Dublin, and they have remained friends ever since: he says "they look quite good". Ferdia's wife, journalist Kathryn Holmquist, is enjoying the gig and hearing their music for the first time - they first got together after the band had split up. Others spotted in the nightclub for the fun are writer Arthur Mathews and his twin sister, Ria Mathews; Fiach Mac Conghail and his wife, Brid Ni Neachtain, and artist Michele Souter, whose one-time exhibition of penis paintings inspired one of the book's characters. "Now, I'm painting death," she says. Onwards and upwards, as they say.