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New Year’s Eve 1992/93 at the Olympic Ballroom

WORDS #1

Mark Kavanagh
In conversation with Dean Sherry, Phever

“I remember meeting Johnny [Moy] on the DART one day in 1990 and he had come back, and was telling me that he was going to start doing clubs – he was going on about DJs like Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson and Weatherall and Farley and this whole sort of scene that was emerging in London, and he was going to bring that to Dublin. To his credit, that’s exactly what he did.

“The first gig ever in the Olympic was was one of Johnny’s. It was called Orbit. […] I think Marcus O’Neill had already run one or two gigs – he had run Fun City at The Point prior to that – and then he went into The Olympic and did about six weeks. The Dance Crazy events. I think I might have played one of them.

“And then Liam Ryan just took it over himself. Legend has it that I immediately became the resident – that wouldn’t strictly be true. David Hales took over booking the DJ’s for a while. There used to be five DJs on. Liam Ryan, the owner, took a shine to me because I was kind of pushing the whole idea of people doing longer sets.

“By chance, one night everyone else went off to some Sasha and Tony Humphries gig, and I ended up playing to the ballroom pretty much the whole night on my own. And that was it. From then on it was just kind of me and maybe one warm up DJ. That was the roots of it all.”

WORDS #2

Dave Hales
From Notes on Rave in Dublin documentary

“We were searching all around Dublin looking for a venue. Eventually we came across [the Olympic Ballroom]. It was being run by an ex Garda called John, and at the time he was doing a Cure night, with about six or seven people in the place.

“So I told him we would have this place full in a couple of week’s time, and lo and behold, we did. We had some coaches coming from Belfast, Cork and Waterford, and the place was absolutely packed.”

WORDS #3

John Braine
From Notes on Rave in Dublin documentary

“With the Olympic, everyone went there. It was a kip, but it was like our own special kip. Everybody loved it.

“The week that Altern 8 were playing in the Mansion House, I remember Mark Kavanagh held up an Altern 8 record. He broke the record, and shouted ‘fuck Altern 8, fuck the Mansion House’. Everyone that was there loved Altern 8 and loved the Mansion House. But we knew what he meant, it was almost like announcing ‘this is our place, this is our home’. The place went crazy.”

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