The history of Dublin clubbing

1988, heralded as year zero in clubland. In the UK maybe but over here our summer of love kicked off in true style some two years later. Before the barrage of genre splicing in today's electronic music, the few styles we had then fitted neatly in to two scenes, raving and clubbing. The first true dance club in Dublin was Sides, residing in Dame lane, owned by John Murphy and ran by Ken Kelly. In true form to the history of club culture, sides was originally a gay club that opened in the mid 1980s. As the indie music policy began to take a back seat to more dance orientated sounds, resident DJ's Martin McCann and Liam Fitz were eventually joined by Johnny Moy, Liam Dollard, Billy Scurry, Dave Hales, Dave Moore and Joe McHugh. By '91 the club really took off attracting hoards of loyal regulars and dedicated house lovers. At the other end of the spectrum and just up the road on Wexford Street, was the Olympic Ballroom, a very popular and infamous venue for dancers in the 50's and 60's. Owner Liam Ryan didn't need much coaxing to realise the potential of refilling the Olympic with dancers of a new generation. The first rave was held there in April 1990, the night was called Orbit and Dave Hales, Johnny Moy, Mark Kavanagh and Niall Comiskey took control of the ones and twos that night. Shortly after that Marcus O'Neill took over to run a night called Dance Crazy which ran for six weeks before passing the reins back to the owner. Ryan got Mark Kavanagh back on board, who remained as head resident until a series of raids in '94 which led to the venue losing its license. Even two years after the biggest culture explosion had occurred, the Irish media still hadn't really cottoned onto the fact that it was going on in their own country and continued to copy scare stories from the UK tabloids. It wasn't until promoters started staging events in the Mansion House that the press really sat up and paid attention. They made sure to cover one particular night when TD Tony Gregory and a select committee lined the balconies of the Mansion House to determine just how drug fuelled these raves were. They gave it the thumbs up. Unknown to them at the time the very reason the night was bereft of any trouble was the full-scale use of Ecstasy rather then the naively presumed lack of. The Mansion house staged big extravaganza's rather then weekly regulars, featuring state of the art sound and light systems, and bands such as Shades of Rhythm, Altern8 and the Ragga twins. UK legends like Jumping Jack frost, Grooverider and Tin Tin joined Dublin regulars like the Banana boys, Brenda Morrisey and members of the the DFC, (Dublin funk Collective) Speedy D, DJ Noel and DJ Bass. What was it like then? Firstly, it's fairly important to paint a picture of the dance scenes status in society back then. It hadn't much representation in the media, no TV programmes, no books, no club listings in evening papers and a far cry away from any full length movies. Undocumented, unknown, underground. So to walk into a crowd of 1000+ nutters dancing like no one's watching, with lasers flying overhead, music from the next century and strangers instantly becoming best friends was an exhilarating slap in the face, like walking into another dimension, let in on one big secret