CAVANMAN'S DIARY: Ah... to walk 500 miles again...

Club Tropicana, the Dome, Club OTO, Club Icon, Paul Fitzpatrick is showing his vintage this week in his lament for the discos and clubs of the nineties...

My buddy was talking about a pair of skinny blue jeans he bought and, as friends do, I slaughtered him. My withering response was delivered in auto-pilot, like turning the car for home of an evening – you don’t consciously think, it just happens automatically.

“A middle-aged man bragging about his skinny jeans,” I muttered. “Dressing like a young lad. Sad to see it,” I added, with a theatrical flourish.

He was outraged at my use of middle-aged and it was only later that the thought struck me: he’s only a couple of years older than me. My next birthday will be my 41st; the average life expectancy in this country is 82. I’m into first-half injury time, at best. I’m middle-aged too (there, I said it).

For a long time, I clung on to being able to tick the ‘25-34’ box but that day is long gone. Regardless, we beat on, convincing ourselves that time is just a social construct anyway.

Speaking of socialising, I was talking to a footballer of fairly long standing a while back and he made an interesting point regarding his younger teammates. “They’ve never been to a nightclub,” he told me, explaining that they came of age during Covid and that a lot of youngsters are no longer attending discos anyway.

Habits have changed – but when I was their age (more old-man talk there), nightclubs were all the rage.

Now, I was never the biggest fan of them – which didn’t stop me from being almost permanently resident in them at weekends from the age of about 16 to 25. I just didn’t like running the gauntlet of bouncers and then, most of all, having to pay in.

My theory, too, was always that nightclubs were dark and overly loud for a simple reason; when the senses are being assaulted, the natural response is to numb them with more drink.

But for my generation, that was the done thing anyway. Nightclub culture was all-pervasive; every town worth its salt had one. Medium-sized towns had two, or more. It feels like another world now.

A hilarious sub-genre of sardonic nicknames grew up around them. A rowdy spot down the country called Time was known as Time Bomb. Another place I frequented with college mates was officially called Rapture; the local wags knew it as Rupture.

One could, by happenstance, find themselves in Dublin or Galway or any provincial town and in a nightclub and not much changed bar the furniture (and it didn’t change too often, either). There was usually a comical name like Club Inferno, say (I’ve made that one up but I’d be amazed if it didn’t exist somewhere) and a DJ whose nom de guerre included his first name and the first letter of his surname.

There would be bulky bouncers, girls on the dance floor and, looking on, young lads who, unsure of the etiquette, sort of danced their way everywhere. The odd scuffle, a couple of slow sets and, near the end of the night, scrums of lads, shoulder to shoulder, jumping around to 500 Miles by the Proclaimers or some such number. God, I miss it!

As it happens, last week marked the 23rd anniversary of the 9-11 atrocities. I looked back through the archives of this newspaper to see how we covered it and found that there were two major stories gracing the front page that week.

The lead headline screamed “World rocked by US catastrophy (sic)”; below the fold, “Disappointed Andrews resigns”. A local row and all that…

Anyway, what really stood out that week – apart from the night of the long knives at the county board, when Val stepped down as manager, and the atrocity in New York – was the entertainment page. It was crammed with ads from what looked like every pub and venue in the county, each with live music. And then there were the larger display ads for the nightclubs, which are hilarious in hindsight, full of “groovy” lingo, like something from the Jazz Club sketch in The Fast Show comedy from the time (“Noicce!”).

A snapshot? Club Icon at the Lakeside Manor was open Friday, Saturday and Sunday that week. Sunday featured an Ibiza Party Night with DJ Tony M. Ibiza, on the shores of Lough Ramor!

Club OTO (which I always took to stand for Over 21) at the Farnham Arms boasted the “hottest hits” and the “biggest party in town”. Across the top of the ad, like a sort of ticker, was the simple phrase ‘Party Nights’, repeated three times, like a stuttering compère.

The Hotel Kilmore had The Dome, a favourite haunt of many teenagers, where, the ad said, “Friday night is party night”. Partying, it seems, was the thing.

The Carraig Springs in Crosskeys, a very popular venue, advertised its Club Tropicana, where there was a “disco with Ollie B, Saturday and Sunday”. The Springs (“are ya Springin’?” was a particularly rustic phrase that used to be heard in the pubs in Cavan Town, from where revellers would jump on minibuses to Crosskeys, where the proprietor Donal Keogan ran a very busy establishment).

As an aside, I remember when I was about 17 attending the Wolfe Tones here. Even then, they were washed up and awful – I recall that, comically, they played their main hit, the Celtic Symphony, three times. And yet, here we are, nearly 25 years on, and the octogenarians are playing to bigger crowds than ever and few are attending discos any more. Mad.

I digress. There was Kokas Nite Club at the Slieve Russell, which catered to the masses from west Cavan. The Tunnel Nite Club in Oldcastle was looking forward to ‘Big Party Disco with DJ Dave’. Interestingly, the hotel (The Naper Arms) also had live music booked in the lounge both nights.

Blazers in Longford had the Classic Hits Disco Explosion, while the Breffni Arms in Arva was looking to attract punters to its raunchy-sounding Disco Erotica. That’s amoré!

There was a foam party in the White Horse in Cootehill and plenty more. This was the golden age of nightclubs – and Club Vision (‘Double Vision’ as it was colloquially called) at the Imperial in the county town had yet to be launched and would prove wildly popular in the years that followed, too.

That was then, this is now. God be with the days – and not a pair of skinny jeans to be had!