McGonagles, Dublin: An icon of a gloriously shabby golden age

It’s May 1988 and I’m in a small, run-down, sweaty dive in Dublin with about 500 other unusually excited music fans. Public Enemy, the biggest Hip-Hop band on the planet are about to take to the stage. A month later they will release their era-defining Nation of Millions album and they are at the very peak of their powers. It’s an extraordinary moment. The full weight of a bona fide, global musical revolution reaches in and punches Dublin in the face. The venue, of course, is McGonagles.
In January of 1988 The Economist had run a feature on Ireland. Its cover featured a mother and her child, begging on a Dublin street under the damning headline “The Poorest of the Rich”. It painted a bleak picture of a country with unemployment in double figures and emigration reaching 1950’s levels. For those of us growing up in ‘80’s Dublin however this was simply our normal. Context, as they say, is everything and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.
1988 was Dublin’s Millennium year — a celebration (with dubious historical precision) of the 1000 years since the Vikings founded the city. Our national side had qualified for the Euro ’88 football championship in Germany and, with The Joshua Tree conquering the world, the city was awash with A&R men looking for the next U2. There was a shabby and impoverished cultural vibrancy that suffused Dublin’s streets throughout the 1980’s. Alan Parker’s The Commitments, filmed on these same falling down streets just a couple of years later captures the mood perfectly — it’s a glorious caricature for sure but pretty accurate for all that. And it was into this world that Public Enemy improbably landed.
1980’s Dublin enjoyed a rich local music scene with countless bands taking to the well-worn stages of the city’s live music circuit on any given night. From The Ivy Rooms and The SFX on the Northside to The Baggot Inn, The TV Club and The Underground across the river. At the heart of it all was McGonagles on South Anne Street.
McGonagles had held a special place in the hearts of Dublin music fans since the 1950’s. Originally named The Crystal Ballroom, throughout the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s the venue played host to the Jazz and Swing Orchestras and Showbands of the day. These bands provided the musical backdrop for a whole generation of young Dubliners who would show up week-in, week-out to dance to the latest hits.

This golden age of The Crystal Ballroom was captured many years later in the U2 song of the same name. The band had frequently played on the McGonagles stage at the beginning of their career and Bono wrote the song in memory of his parents, Iris and Norman, who used to go dancing in that same place all those years before.
“My mother died when she was at her father’s funeral. I was only 14. And in this song I am singing, “Everyone is here tonight, everyone but you.” And it’s me wanting to see my mother dance again in the Crystal Ballroom and for her to see what happened to her son.”
It was still known as The Crystal Ballroom when it hosted Johnny Cash in 1963 and also when Thin Lizzy were playing there just seven years later. Sometime in the 1970’s it was renamed McGonagles.

Throughout the next two decades McGonagles went on to play a central part in Dublin’s music scene, hosting bands and club nights that spanned the musical spectrum
McGonagles was a particularly important venue for U2. In the summer of 1979 the band played four consecutive Thursday night shows billed as Jingle Balls — Christmas in June with the stage decked out in Christmas decorations. Chas de Whalley of CBS Records came to Dublin for one of these shows and subsequently signed U2 to an Ireland only contract. It was this which led to the release of the band’s now legendary U2–3 debut single.
Free Booze are worth a mention here; another late ‘70’s act who regularly played McGonagles. Well regarded for their music, it’s fair to say that at least some of their success in drawing a crowd was due to their posters promising ‘Free Booze at McGonagles’.
The 1970’s also saw McGonagles first hosting its long-running regular Saturday afternoon All Ages shows; hugely popular and a rare opportunity for younger music fans to experience live music in a bona fide, grown-up music venue
By the 1980’s the venue was hosting regular club nights alongside the live music. Danceteria launched in October 1981 and was followed later in the decade by other much loved McGonagles dance-music nights including Club Voodoo and Soul On Ice.

Always ecumenical in its music policy the venue was also home to reliably well attended Heavy Metal nights on Fridays. This inclusive generosity didn’t always extend to the crowd however. The Stone Roses, pre indie-megastardom, played McGonagles in 1985. They didn’t go down well with a room full of people expecting their usual Friday night head banging session — a near riot ensued and the band ended up barricaded into their dressing room until the police arrived to find them soaking wet having smashed up the room and burst a water pipe. Rock ’n’ Roll eh?
Reflecting further on McGonagles’ eclecticism Peter Jones, Dublin punk scene veteran and founding member of Dublin’s own Paranoid Visions, vividly recalls seeing The Virgin Prunes passing a pigs head into the audience at one of their typically intense shows in McGonagles in the early ‘80’s.
A quick scan of the 1980’s listings for McGonagles reveals a roll-call that covers all the bases with shows from, in no particular order, Theatre of Hate, The Teardrop Explodes, The Pogues (their first Irish headline show — “mayhem, carnage”), Transvision Vamp, XTC, Saxon (“to a crowd of just 52 punters”), Onslaught, My Bloody Valentine, Snuff, Paranoid Visions, The Tom Tom Club, Golden Horde, Lord John White, Guernica, Something Happens, Stars of Heaven, Suicidal Tendencies, The Fall, New Model Army, DC Nein, Xentrics, Stepaside, The Lookalikes, Napalm Death, Inspiral Carpets (with one Noel Gallagher as their roadie) The Alsatians, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Only Ones, Fugazi, A House and countless others.

The 1990’s carried on in much the same vein as the previous decade for McGonagles, welcoming touring bands from the UK and beyond alongside local acts. Ozzy Osbourne’s rehearsal gigs ahead of his world tour in 1991 are frequently hailed as a high point amongst Dublin metal fans. For the indie fraternity Sonic Youth’s blistering show the same year holds a similarly revered place in fans memories.
By the mid ‘90’s the Celtic Tiger was beginning to roar. Less than a decade earlier no-one could have predicted that Ireland, the run-down European backwater that Public Enemy had encountered on that heady night in May 1988, would become a vibrant economy with growth rates the envy of the developed world. The writing was on the wall for McGonagles. What chance could a worn out music venue situated a mere 30 second walk from Grafton Street, one of the most expensive retail rent locations in the world, ever have had against the shiny new future promised by the developers plans? Closure and demolition followed and McGonagles was no more.
From time to time I’ll find myself passing down South Anne Street. I’ll pause momentarily when I get to number 21A and if I listen carefully I can still hear the faint voices of the ghosts of gigs past roaring their joyous songs.
“Turn it up! Bring the noise!”
