FLYERS

PHOTOS

Photos from Tonie Walsh Private Collection

Photos by Seán Gilmartin (from Tonie Walsh Private Collection)

WORDS #1

Tonie Walsh
In conversation with 909originals

“I remember, we looked around at different venues [for the Horny Organ Tribe nights]. The Rock Garden wouldn’t give us Saturday night, I think maybe Claire Moloney was doing something in there at the time. But when they gave us Sunday I thought. ‘OK, no pressure. It’s a nicer night. People from the service industry are going to be out’. So we jumped at it.

“The fact that Horny Organ Tribe started in 1993 is actually really interesting, because that was the year that the ‘superclubs’ arrived in quick succession – The Pod, Ri-Rá and The Kitchen.

“Of course, in many ways, we wanted a bite of that cherry. Without a doubt. But we were also hugely critical of what we regarded as the crass commercialisation of the scene. On our flyers, we used to put ‘Undress to Impress’, which was a sly dig at The Pod’s flyers at the time, which said ‘Dress to Impress – Dennis on the Door’.

“We wanted to puncture some of that preciousness, and the elitism that was on very naked view. On one of our posters we had ‘Horny Organ Tribe – Choker-Free Zone’. Anyone in the know would know that was a barbed reference to places like Lillie’s Bordello, where the lads were all showing up wearing waistcoats and chokers. I mean, look at Boyzone back then.

“I think that’s one of the reasons why people look back on Horny Organ Tribe and Elevator with such fondness and respect, because we were trying to bring in a really diverse social and sexual mix of people, and we succeeded in it. I mean, there was an element of circumstance about it as well, and it came down to the personality of the people that were driving the place as much as the image we were trying to sell.

“The other thing too – I mean, now we take it for granted – is that very few people were going to mixed gay/hetero nights. That just didn’t fly in Dublin in the early 90s. And it certainly didn’t fly on a Sunday night.”

“The ‘Horny Organ’ was actually a reference to the Hammond organ. The Hammond organ-led house music was the sort of thing that really got us worked up. So we decided we had to reference that.

“So, the name came about in reference to the music, the dominant house that we were keen to play. We didn’t just play that of course, we used to split the night in half, and have guests like Greg Dowling, Ian McCready from Belfast, Billy Scurry, Johnny Moy. Very quickly, the club became so popular that we had all the top tier DJs from around the country banging on our door wanting to play, because the crowd was so f**king up for it.”

WORDS #2

Shelley Bartley
In conversation with 909originals

“The Rock Garden was located in the middle of Temple Bar. Upstairs, there was a relatively small and intimate venue, suitable for a couple of hundred people, with a small bar and a few tables.

“It was small, but it was also like a blank canvas where you could add your own style. It was brand new at the time. It had been a rocker bar, so they likely hadn’t seen anything like us before.”

WORDS #3

Sara Colohan

“I used to run Girls Girls Girls with another DJ, Emily Dawson, when it was The Rock Garden in 1991/92. I remember huge groups of people getting kicked out for smoking weed and basically doing stuff it was easier get away with in Club So or Sides! The Rock Garden was a bit more mainstream at the start.

“A few years later, in 94/95 when it was Eamonn Dorans, there wasn’t anything happening on a Tuesday in Dublin so I started a vintage sounds night called Voodoo and it ran for a couple of years. The series of photo flyers [check them out here, here and here] were my absolute favourite not least because Liam Dollard had no idea his baby photo was going to appear.

“Billy Scurry managed to get the photo of Liam on the sly and I printed them up. Liam didn’t even recognise his own picture at first when he saw the flyers stacked up in the record shop. It was a lot to get his head round! A lot of clubbers probably didn’t realise that these are photos of us as kids. I tried to make them look like vintage photographs and I remember spending a fortune getting a gloss photo finish.

“I had another small square flyer for Voodoo Christmas party and I stuck it into a plastic bag with white plastic fake snow. I remember spending days packing the flyers but it was all worth it when I used to hand them out to people in clubs. They all looked startled thinking I’d just given them something so much more than a flyer! A labour of love. Very few of those nights made money but we had a pretty good time!”

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