Dublin Discomania: "We have a problem with Denim"

The pubs have been shut for almost half an hour. The early editions of the Sunday papers have been on sale since long before the cinemas emptied. The lines of taxis in O'Connell Street are beginning to dwindle. In countless doorways on main streets and in back alleys Dublin's teenage working class lovers are facing the perennial problem:

Where? Your place or mine doesn't enter into it. No car, either. So it's hold tight and a moment's grinding before catching the last bus home. Maybe next week. The night is over.

A queue is forming on the stairs of Zhivago's in a lane off Baggot Street. Not far away, in Leeson Street, three nattily dressed people stand on the baseement steps outside Samantha's, waiting patiently while Maurice gives them the once-over through the peephole. Down in Fleet Street a knot of teenagers who have just left the Palace Bar are stampping impatiently outside Sloopy's. Across the river, just off Wolfe Tone Street, four punks are bouncing up the stairs to Dingo's Rock Palace. The night has just begun.

Technically, disco is a pair of record decks, microphone, amp and speakers. The Dl may come equipped with a light show, a projector, or even video equippment. It's a method of cuing up a second record so it's ready to go as the first one ends.

Culturally, it's something else again.

The music that has grown out of and fee off the non-stop dance cult has had a dominating influence. Songs already familiar from the radio are pumped out one after another to dancers who slip in to them like familiar clothes. It's body music.

Condemned as mindless by the pop and rock establishment, disco music and the social habits surrounding it have nevertheless thrived. It is mindless. So is an orgasm. Mixing soul and rock, shavving off the hard edges, the merchants of disco have manufactured on aural vaseeline that lubricates the senses. Grease is the word.

For the first time in an age Dublin teenagers and pre-teens are queing up to pay their £1.80p an hour for dance lessons. And liking it. When the Irish Theatre Company recently took their disco play, Where AllY our Dreams Come True around the working class estates of Dublin they had l6-year-old kids flocking onstage with jacket collars turned up and arms akimbo to dance without inhibition.

As with everything else, disco is firmly set in a commercial context. Neither the musicians, nor the record companies, nor the film makers, nor the teachers, nor the DIs, nor the disco club owners are operating out of a love for the music, the dance or the dancers. A regiment of mobile DIs has hit the roads to the youth clubs, parish halls, pubs and hotels, bringing their equippment with them, pouring out the grease for three or four hours and collecting up to £100 a night for the privilege. The mantle of disco and its influence have settled on many of the established gathering places, watering holes and dance clubs, but few have brought out its positive aspects.

You don't go to Dingo's to be seen. You dance. You approach the place through a dark lane off Mary Street, under an old Canada Dry sign that's been turned inside out, lit up, and turned on its side and when you walk through the door the bouncer calls you "man". They don't have security perrsonnel at Dingo's, just bouncers. The first few dancers drift along about 11 pm. There might be two or three hunndred there within a couple of hours or there might be much less. Dingo's has had varying fortunes on the two nights a week on which it opens. Tonight they have The Addix, a punk band from London. And the safety pins are already drifting in. But first, the disco.

If there has been a shift in social attitudes which is reflected in the forms of entertainment it is reflected best at Dingo's. The disco mechanics remain, but the music is mostly hard rock or punk. Few of the clientele are over 20. By midnight there are about two dozen kids dancing, all but two of them male. There are few inhibitions about dancing styles or looking good, and less about sex roles. Get out there and move with the music.

You may do forward rolls across the carpet in front of the stage. Or trade hip thrusts with a partner. Or just start running around the edge of the wooden . dance floor, throwing your arms about in time to the music. And if you bump into someone and you both go sprawwling, that's all right too. You just hop up again, in time with the music, of course. A 16 year old, wearing a duffle coat, hood up, does the splits while his fingers scratch frantically around an immaginary guitar. Halfway down he changes instruments and slashes out at a drum kit.

There is an orgasmic fury to the dancing that is seen in none of the more celebrated nightspots. And with the lack of inhibitions goes an undertone of violence. Graffiti scrawled on jackets. Panzer Regiment Punk. A swastika. But whenever the dancing tumbles over into playful violence .3; bouncer springs out from the side of Uie hall, points a finger, smiles, and gets a smile in return. When the band comes on, about 12.45, things slow down. Breaks between songs, prooblems with microphones, and the kids hang around the stage patiently waitting for the records to begin again.

Here, where the music is hard and the kids harder, where the disco trimmmings are at a minimum, where the D'J keeps knocking against the record decks and upsetting the stylus, there is someething new. Musically and culturally. A pattern has been broken.

Pat Long never kno.cks ·against h,is record decks. Crouched' in his cabin at Barbarella's, Pat trades one deck off against the other, weaving a daisy-chain of disco sounds, occasionally talking over an intro in a voice that sounds like it's coming frorn. a well. The club looks like an AnCO training centre for innterior decorators. Everything that can be gilded has been gilded. There is even a glass globe spinning· near the ceiling, throwing flashes of light around the room in a time-honouredttad ition. And the globe has been gilded with a couple of hoops of bamboo.

Gilding and garnishing is the stock in trade of the disco clubs. There are commfortable rooms with places to sit and a floor on which to dance. To attract the customers when the pubs close they need a wine licence. To get a wine licence they need to sell food. And so it grows. Former Go-Go Club owner John Ryan's Lord John's, in Sackville Place, is the most elaborate in decor. Decked out like an Arthurian castle, from portcullis to dungeon it conforms to a wide variety of romantic fantasies.

There is an occasional Travolta surge on the dance floor, but the pattern is an old One. The clientele of the betterrestablished clubs, Zhivago's, Lord John's, Barbarella's, Sloopy's, is drawn from the 21 - 25 age bracket, with an occasional side order of teens and thirties. The couples having a longgplanned night out, the singles casting their bread upon the wine licence yet again. You need two pounds to get in the door, but that's not all. You must believe that love stories begin at Zhivago's and that Lord John's is luxurrious and sophisticated. And you must dress and behave to suit that image. There you will meet others who believe the same thing. It's a method of breakking down the old dancehall crowds into roughly homogenous groups. There are slight differences in the average age and social background of the clients of these clubs, but they all share a belief in the stereotyped romantic, sexual and social roles assigned to them. The music, the door and the squads of bouncers at the doors are all props for the golden dream.

They don't have coins in Samantha's. Vulgar, you see. Hand the barman a quid for an orange juice and that's what you get. An orange juice, no change. The little blue digits on the electronic cash register blink in what could be reelief as the trivial and seldom used "1.0" sign is wiped off, to be replaced by a "6.00" and a bottle of wine is on its way to the gent at table four. The wine comes in a bucket shaped like an uppturned top hat. The tables are lit by a series of small spotlights; the discreet beams crisscrossing the room with enough subtlety to leave pockets of darkness but enough light to make sure that the diners don't use the wrong fork with the fish. Above the bar runs a thin band of flickering green neon. Could be a disco flicker. Could be an electrical fault.

Samantha's is one of a series ofbaseement clubs along Leeson Street where the elite meet to eat. They have dance floors. They have disco. But John Travolta would never make it past the front doors. "Proper dress essential., ... Please keep our club beautiful", says the polished plaque outside Maxwell Plums. Proper dress and beautiful are defined by the doormen who would seem to be recruited on the basis of their physique and their ability to estimate at a glance the social status and credit rating of potential clients.

The various Leeson Street clubs have different functions. Places like Maxwell Plums (and I thought we'd agreed to stop using names like that sometime around 1969) are for making connecctions. Wine to loosen the tongue, a dance floor just big enough to provide a couple with an excuse to get acquainted and do something together, and enough shady nooks to fade into for an intimate conversation.

Samantha's is for people who already have connections. Not least, social, commmercial and political ones.

Bojangle's, another Leeson Street club, is for people who haven't given a party that night and haven't been innvited to any. On entering the ground floor hallway you turn into the parlour. A scattering of people are draped across sofas and armchairs clutching drinks and trying to look at home within the bookklined walls. Like hotel residents whiling away an evening in the TV room. They may be guests, or they may be hired to hang around for effect, like the books and the armchairs. Through the dining room and down the spiral staircase to where the action is. There are two rooms. One for dancing, one for pickking your partner. The effect is that of a party in a private house. One that charges £1.50 for a glass of nauseating port. Ages range from early twenties to those who are on their third bottle of Grecian 2000.,

There's nothing going on on the dance floor that would be out of place in the Mayflower Ballroom in Drummshanbo. Fairly sedate lurching and a bit of jiving. In the bar room, potential partners are being eyed. Two men, late twenties and late forties, compare notes. The younger one suggests a stroll to the other end of the room to see if there are any hidden buggets.

"Nah, I can see all I want from here," says the older one, his eye on the oldest of three women chatting in the centre of the room.

"You've better eyesight than I have," says his sceptical friend.

The younger one stubs out a cigarrette fixes his face in a smile, and takes a stroll. He's back two minutes later, having approached one of two young women just in time to be tapped on the shoulder by her boyfriend who's returnned with a bottle of wine and three glasses. Too embarrassed to switch his affections in mid-sentence, he does a fade. His older friend clicks his tongue in sympathy, sighs and says, "What the hell," and approaches the three women in the centre of the room. He shepards his prize towards the dance floor, raising his eyebrows at the younger man who's lighting another cigarette and not smilling at all.

At Studio 54, in New York, one of the most famous and exclusive disco clubs in the world, they brought the disco ethic to a fine art. They called it "painting the picture". Every night a crowd would assemble outside while the owner, Steve Ruble, or his deputy, would borrow a technique from On The Waterfront. You, you, not you, you, no, him there .

That way the social and sexual balance, the picture, inside the club was maintained. In Dublin, it is not as crude but the technique is the same.

The bouncer behind the door takes a squint through the peephole. Swinging open the door and replacing it with his considerably more solid frame, he announces solemnly, "We have a problem with denim."

The sifting process is not too subtle.

If the un wanted patron is' not wearing the dreaded blue cloth he or she can be stymied another way. "Are you a memmber?" You're told that it's a "special night", members only. The doorman at Sloopy's admits that it's a device to keep out those who do not fit the piccture being painted inside.

The picture painted in the Zhivago type of club is a middle class/working class one. The Leeson Street types are closer to the upper crust. The status of the clubs is reflected not only in the price of the soft drinks or in the dress of the patrons, which varies only in quallity, not style. The lower-ranking clubs strive for sophistication, for exotic effects, to match the striving of their clientele. The upper crust expect only a setting which tells them they need not strive.

Barbarella's is decorated with backklit photographs of women in bikinis. On the walls of Bojangles the women are done in oils with bare breasts. In Samantha's the nudes are in silvered bas-relief.

Down in tatty Dingo's, they paint their own pictures. It may have dissturbing shadows, but it is their own .•