The Playboy of the Western World you’ll remember well. The Playboy of Aston Quay you probably won’t.
But back in the Swinging 1970s, it was a short-lived attempt to enliven the Dublin pub scene with an infusion of funk dancing or, as it was better known at the time, “go-go”.
The RTÉ website has a charmingly dated video from 1974, which in docudrama style follows two of the protagonists on a typical working day. One is “Brenny” Hooper, the suit-wearing young businessman behind the campaign to bring go-go to Ireland.
The other is Jean Smith, a “convent-educated” 22-year-old seen having breakfast at the decadently late hour of 11am before leaving for work in her yellow bell-bottoms and bandanna to become “Michele la Fleece” while entertaining lunchtime customers in the pub near O’Connell Bridge.
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Other acts at the venue then, day and night, included “Miss Tina Montez” and “Miss Mitzi Monroe”, along with such male dancers as “Fin McCool” and “The Hopper”.
Their shows were advertised in the Evening Herald with the question: “Dare you bring your wife?” (although RTÉ assured viewers that the attire of performers was nothing you wouldn’t see “on any Irish beach in summertime”).
Wives or no wives, reports spoke of packed attendances early on. There was even a “Playboy Go-Go Tour” advertised at one point to destinations unspecified.
But the phenomenon appears to have been fleeting. This was the era in Irish politics, as defined by Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, of the Minister for Hardship and Richie Ruin, whose budgets must have helped bring go-go to a stop. Whatever the reason, according to the archives, it does not seem to have reached 1975.
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The phenomenon was remembered in passing on Thursday night at an event in the latest of several pubs to occupy the same Aston Quay site: Bill Aherne’s.
This is an entirely different establishment, whose name hints at an umbilical cord link with one of Dublin’s great literary bars. Sure enough, it turns out that the new pub is owned by the man behind The Palace, Willie Aherne, who named it after his grandfather.
The companion bars do not have a physical link, quite, but they occupy the same city block: one facing south on Fleet Street, the other north towards the Liffey. Hence their nicknames among aficionados who have spent too long in France. The older bar is now the Palace (en ville), the new one the Palace (sur mer).
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Christopher Nolan’s movie version of Homer’s Odyssey may accidentally attract a few new readers to James Joyce’s early 20th-century Dublin version of the epic, Ulysses. Others, meanwhile, need no such excuse.
Thursday’s event in Bill Aherne’s was the latest annual instalment of Paddy Dignam’s month’s mind, in which the fictional character buried on June 16th every year is formally commemorated by Joyce addicts who’ve endured 30 days’ cold turkey since Bloomsday and are now suffering withdrawal symptoms.
Unusually for a month’s mind, the latest instalment attracted a multiple of the attendance at the original (if fictional) funeral. Most were hard-core Joyceans, although a few innocent American tourists who just happened to be on the premises also got sucked on. It was an evening of prose, poetry and music (but no go-go dancing), by the end of which poor Paddy – God be good to him – was once again suitably commemorated.
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At the Bastille Day garden party in the French Ambassador Céline Place’s residence on Tuesday, many of the guests stayed late to watch the first World Cup semi-final on a large screen.
Earlier, we had sung along with the lyrics of the Marseillaise, as it predicted that “le jour de gloire est arrivé”. Alas for our hosts and most of those watching, the day of glory did not extend to the football, in which it was Spain who stormed the Bastille.
Among the crowd then was Malcolm Byrne TD. When I ran into him elsewhere next day, he reminded me that we had both also been in the much smaller gathering at the Canadian ambassador’s residence for another World Cup watching party in which our hosts were knocked out.
The possibility arose that, as perhaps the only common denominators between the two events, one or both of us was a curse. So what also arose, briefly, was the thought that we could influence the outcome of Wednesday night’s semi-final.
But, perhaps luckily, there is no English embassy, only a British one, in Dublin, or, in the absence of a party, at least one of us might have been tempted to camp outside it and watch the game on an iPhone.
Not that England needed curses from anywhere else, with the unwise words of Jude Bellingham soon to incur the dreaded “Nod of Messi”, which in the manner of Medusa turned England to stone. As for Sunday’s final, even if Spain and Argentina are not hosting World Cup parties, I for one promise to stay well away from both their embassies.
