Youth culture in Dublin is a reoccurring theme on the blog, from the Beat Clubs to the Teddy Boys.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of The Grove Social Club, an important local disco with a difference on Dublin’s northside which ran for an incredible three decades. A proudly alternative disco, this Raheny night achieved something of a legendary status, with the Northside People noting that it was “a safe haven for Northside teens; a melting pot where rockers could hang with Mods, Goths, geeks, hippies and Cureheads.” The club has inspired a dedicated website which tells its story, not to mention television documentaries and radio features. The club was such a part of the northside that one journalist was moved to write in the early 90s that “anyone between the ages of 15 and 40 living north of the Liffey has its name emblazoned on their souls.”
Evening Herald, December 1993.
The Grove club owed its very existence to Cecil Nolan, who the writer Tara Delaney would honour as “the man whose disco-spinning nursed generations through spots, break-ups and exam stress”. Emerging out of members of the Belgrove Football Club, Cecil was a natural DJ fit for the new local endeavor, already known locally as ‘The Music Man’ for his eclectic collection of records. He later recalled that “I played whatever I wanted because I knew there was a market out there for it and if it failed,well I didn’t care, at least I was enjoying myself.”
Beginning life at the Belgrove Football Club on Mount Prospect Avenue in 1967, it immediately acquired a reputation as a night with a difference. Attendees of the club remember the unique music it offered, from Led Zeppelin to Deep Purple, and from Elmore James’ Dust My Broom to Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale. Much like DJ Paul Webb would recall Dublin’s Hirschfeld Centre as a break from “the same twenty clubs up on Leeson or Harcourt St all playing the same twenty songs” in the 1980s, The Grove introduced young suburban Dubliners in the 1960s to entirely new music, far removed from that in the charts. Following a fire at Belgrove, it moved to St Paul’s school in Raheny in the mid 1970s, though it retained its original name through subsequent decades. A recent video marking the fiftieth anniversary of the club shows its St Paul’s hall, with Cecil recalling his memories of the place:
Moral panic around youth discos in the 1960s was very real; readers of one newspaper were warned in 1967 that “a young boy or girl put on the way to becoming regular drinkers can only finish up as moral wrecks.” Plenty of column inches were lost on purple hearts and marijuana. Yet while plenty of newspaper ink went on that, there were also advertisements from young men and women looking to rent spaces across the city for discos. In an affectionate remembrance piece on the youth discos of 1970s Dublin, the journalist Niall Bourke recalled how “your arse wouldn’t touch the ground until you hit the tarmac of the car park outside if you were found in possession of any dodgy substances.” It would be foolish to suggest drink wasn’t a factor in it all – Jason Duffy recalled “finishing off a few drinks in St. Anne’s Park before making our way into St. Paul’s” – but anyone who thought it the main attraction of a night out missed the point.
Whenever a journalist did darken the door of a youth disco, they found them to be places of community and enjoyment, and well-needed escapism from school and the stresses of life. The Grove in particular had a transformative effect for many, with broadcaster Marty Whelan (who met his wife at the club) recalling:
Every time I hear certain songs I’m right back there remembering the Grove. There was just a vibe. I think a place like that is special because someone like Cecil,who was from another generation, came up and related to every teenager who went over a thirty year period.
Hard rock took over for a period, but as Bourke noted, Cecil “knew how to work a crowd…during his career he presented the different genres of metal, punk, gothic and grunge to the ever-enthusiastic punters who lapped it all up with absolute relish.” A discussion on a forum dedicated to the club gives a sense of its 1980s playlist. The Damned and Motorhead competed for time against The Smiths, XTC and 10cc. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne is recalled too, presumably a ‘slow dance and snog’ type of number. The last song played at The Grove in 1997 was Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, a classic teenage angst anthem which includes the line “Here we are now, entertain us.” For thirty years, The Grove entertained without disappointment.
In 2006, RTÉ produced a True Lives feature special entitled The Grove: More Than A Feeling. Including contributions from RTÉ’s own Eileen Dunne, Marty Whelan and the comedian Brendan Bourke, it was a nostalgic but important piece of social history. It captured the sense of community which existed – and continues to exist – around the club. Reunion nights, instigated by former Grover Andy Colbert and featuring the original club DJ Cecil Nolan, have ensured that the community remains today.
A Grove Reunion Poster.
As well as inspiring documentary features and reunion nights, The Grove has even made its way into fiction. In the trailer for the award winning 2007 feature film 32A, the story of teenage years in the suburban Dublin of the late 70s and early 80s, the all-important question “are you going to The Grove tonight?” is asked:
We salute all involved on fifty years of a club culture in Dublin, and may their reunions continue long into the future!
For a membership card from The Grove, see this recent addition to The National Treasures project. My thanks to Dr. Linda King, with whom I am working on National Treasures, for putting the idea for this article into my head!
