Sunday Independent, LIFE magazine feature Sunday 31

 

HouseWork: The women who shaped Ireland's club culture

Disappearing nightlife spaces and the female DJs who carved out room for themselves in Ireland's underground scene.

As new theatre work HouseWork prepares to arrive at Cork Midsummer Festival in June, its exploration of Irish club culture feels unusually timely. Created by actor and theatre maker Áine Ní Laoghaire, the production revisits the overlooked role women played in shaping Ireland's underground dance scene throughout the 1980s and 1990s — a culture often remembered through male DJs and club owners, while many female pioneers quietly slipped from the historical record.

"The role of women in Ireland's 80s and 90s underground DJ culture has been historically ignored and undocumented," says Ní Laoghaire. "These women forged a role for themselves and future generations, and their story feels especially urgent now, as Ireland once again fights for its club culture and nighttime legislation."

For me, those memories are personal. But they belong to a generation International DJ Cici Cavanagh can only imagine.

Born Claire Cavanagh and raised in Palmerstown, music was in Cici's life from the beginning. Her father Mick Cavanagh was lead singer and guitarist with Irish band Room Service, and she grew up surrounded by a mix of Björk, Daft Punk and The Smashing Pumpkins. The seeds of something deeper were planted at age eleven, when she swapped an unwanted Christmas present for an album that would change everything.

"I was given the S Club 7 CD for Christmas, and even at that age I knew it wasn't exactly my taste, so I got my mum to take me to Golden Discs to exchange it," she says. "I didn't know what I was looking for, but when I saw the cover of the Daft Punk album, I was just drawn to it. I'll never forget the day I bought that album."

Her father Mick died in 2020, but his influence runs through everything she does. "I truly owe my deep understanding of sound and rhythm to my dad," she says. "He used to tell me a story about when I was a baby crying uncontrollably in my Moses basket. He blasted Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous beside me, and apparently I stopped crying immediately." Her mother Carmel has remained equally supportive, attending Cici's DJ sets whenever possible.

That foundation would eventually carry her from a Dublin living room to the booths of Fabric London, DC10 Ibiza, Amnesia and Tomorrowland — performing alongside Sven Väth at KOKO, with Carl Cox at The Cause, at Glitch Festival in Malta with Nina Kraviz, and at Field Day in London with The Chemical Brothers and her childhood heroes, Kraftwerk.

"Fabric was the one I always dreamed about," she says. “That was a pinch-me moment. It’s been a hard slog, but I've had some lucky breaks too."

In 1990, the year Cici was born, I arrived in Dublin from Galway to study fashion and journalism. Dance music in Ireland was completely underground then. It was illicit, misunderstood by the mainstream and deeply niche. Clubs operated in basements, back rooms and repurposed venues with sweat dripping down the walls and no air conditioning. DJs weren't celebrities yet. They were obsessive vinyl collectors carrying heavy record boxes through rain-soaked streets in the hope of playing to a packed room somewhere if the venue hadn't already been shut down by the Gardaí.

One night, in a bar above Judge Roy Beans, long before it became Lillie's Bordello, I listened to DJ Liam Dollard mix two records together and became instantly hooked.

There was no internet then. No streaming. No YouTube tutorials. No Shazam. If you heard a track you loved, you hunted for it physically, scribbling names onto scraps of paper beneath strobe lights and hoping Dublin's original dance music source, Abby Discs, might eventually stock it. At Orbit in the Olympic Ballroom, run by a young Jonny Moy, I stood beside the speakers, frantically writing down track names: Night in Motion by Cubic 22, Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, and Strings of Life by Rhythm Is Rhythm. Every spare bit of money I had — and occasionally my rent money — disappeared on vinyl.

My mother, a music teacher, just didn't get it. I'd play her a track, like DJ Hell's My Definition of House with the classical cello riff, explaining how dance music echoed classical structures, but she'd say, "It's just noise to me." But to us early clubbers, it felt like a cultural shift happening in real time. I spent the next few years juggling college, a night course in journalism, TV castings, and DJing and clubbing all weekend.

One lunchtime during college, I was scouted on the street and unexpectedly found myself appearing on late-night Irish television in a youth culture programme called RANT. Years later, Cici would have a similar experience when she appeared on Fade Street while studying fine art in Dublin. Before either of us became DJs, we both found ourselves navigating fashion, nightlife and public attention simultaneously — and paying for it professionally.

Like Cici, I had signed with Assets Model Agency while in college, doing occasional commercial work and TV adverts. The assumption that caring about your appearance and knowing your music were somehow incompatible would follow both of us for years.

"I looked a certain way," Cici says. "I was a model; I'd been on Fade Street. I wore makeup and liked to be dressed up and somehow that made people doubt I had any real DJ skills. It felt like I was often dismissed before I even pressed play."

By her early twenties, she had already established herself within Dublin nightlife while balancing modelling and DJ work. But the city felt limiting. She eventually relocated to Ibiza, where she initially worked as a dancer before making the transition she had always wanted.

"I worked as a dancer for the first year, which was wild, but it allowed me to get to know the industry and gradually move from podium to behind the decks," she says. "That transition was hard, and there was some resistance to a female dancer becoming a DJ."

It is a little disconcerting that, decades later, the same biases I experienced in the 1990s still persist.

While Dublin's scene revolved around venues like The Olympic, Sides and The Asylum, Cork had already become something of a pilgrimage site for dance music fans. Sir Henry's pulled international DJs and devoted crowds into the city throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, briefly placing Cork at the centre of Europe's clubbing map. Long before social media turned DJs into global brands, nights at Sir Henry's travelled through pirate radio, mixtapes and word of mouth, taking on almost mythical status among Irish clubbers.

Growing up in Cork, Ní Laoghaire says Sir Henrys loomed large in her imagination. "It was legendary," she says. "Miss Ken D was the lone female voice on Pirate Radio Friendly, and every teenage boy I knew seemed to own a pair of second-hand decks. The women involved in underground dance culture were often overlooked, but they carved out space for themselves and future generations."

Like a scene from Fade Street years later, where Cici searched Dublin for venues for her own club nights, I spent my early twenties wandering around the city trying to convince somebody to take a chance on a female promoter and DJ. Eventually, The Rock Garden gave me a space, and I launched my first club night, Girls Girls Girls.

It was 1991, and the equipment was primitive. The decks were an all-in-one Setronics unit with a built-in mixer and no crossfader, making proper mixing almost impossible. Sometimes we physically sped records up or down by twisting the centre spindle with our fingers. From there I played Sides on Dame Lane alongside the DJ who started it all for me: Liam Dollard, then Club So on Bedford Row, and on to the infamous Asylum on Sackville Place — by far the most underground club in Dublin, where some DJs were afraid to play because of its reputation. I just remember feeling fearless, focused only on getting a chance to play.

There was enormous pressure technically, perhaps even more so for women. Clubbers would hover over the decks watching your every move, sometimes wincing at mistakes. Yet there were also those rare moments when everything connected — when an entire dancefloor moved together in complete unison and the room seemed to physically lift off the ground. Thirty-five years later, I still carry those moments with me.

Looking back now, the scene was exhilarating but also very difficult for women trying to establish themselves. Misogyny was casual and everywhere. I pushed hard to create events and opportunities, only to watch projects handed over to male peers or taken from me altogether.

Ní Laoghaire recognises that experience immediately. The absence of women from the historical record was, in fact, what first drove her to make the piece. "I'd watched all these documentaries on the heydays of house in Ireland, and there were no women in any of them," she says. "And I just knew that couldn't be right — it was the 90s. There must have been women DJing and working as promoters and flyer girls. Where were they in these stories?"

What she found was complicated. Most of the women had been supported by the men closest to them—learning to DJ from a brother or a boyfriend, finding allies in their inner circle. But alongside that ran a persistent scrutiny the men around them simply didn't face. "Men would come up suggesting what they should play or offering to help them set up their decks, watching them perform and expecting them to fail, as if these women weren't skilled professionals. There's a sense of being part of a community, but not being seen as an equal. Of it being, at times, a boys' club."

Some of those experiences now feature in HouseWork, alongside testimonies from DJs and artists including Aoife Nic Canna, Sally Cinnamon, Gina Johnson, Chord Memory, DJ Soft Skills, Aisling O'Riordan and me.

Hearing Cici describe her own version of that scrutiny — despite three decades separating us — is both validating and frustrating.

"Definitely people didn't take me seriously at the start, and I was working so hard on honing my skills," she says. "I felt I had to leave Dublin to grow."

Eventually, the intensity and politics of late-night club culture exhausted me. By the late 1990s there was a shift. I took a residency at Hugh O'Regan's lavish Morrison Hotel, and suddenly I was playing in multimillion-euro surroundings with velvet John Rocha interiors, cutting-edge sound systems and giant art installations. I played private parties attended by REM and U2. Elsewhere in Dublin, nightlife visionary John Reynolds was reshaping club culture through venues including Red Box, The Pod and The Chocolate Bar, where I also held residencies.

For a while, it felt as though Irish nightlife was entering a golden age.

But many of those spaces are now gone. Earlier this year, tensions between The Hoxton Dublin and long-running late-night venue Yamamori Izakaya became symbolic of wider anxieties around gentrification and the erosion of grassroots nightlife spaces in Dublin city centre. As Ireland continues debating licensing laws and the future of nightlife, HouseWork arrives at a moment when club culture itself feels increasingly fragile. Many of the places that shaped Ireland's dance scene — from Sir Henry's to Asylum — now survive mainly through flyers, fading photographs and memory.

In 2009, I left Ireland for London around the same time Cici was finding her feet on the international circuit. Our paths, it turns out, share more similarities than either of us expected. During our conversation we discovered we had both blagged our way into our first gigs with almost no experience. I tell her about cutting the sound mid-set at Club So and getting a cheer from the good-natured crowd.

Cici laughs. "My first night was in Thomas House on Thomas Street. We had this terrible all-in-one unit, like something from an 80s wedding. But we did it."

Watching her now — commanding a crowd with confidence and technical precision, performing on CDJs with the kind of ease modern club culture demands — it is hard to square with those early stories.

"People still say things like, 'YOU'RE the DJ?'" she laughs. "There's still this idea that if you're feminine or glamorous somehow you can't possibly know what you're doing."

She admits the anxiety hasn't entirely disappeared with success. "I still fear being misunderstood or not taken seriously. That doesn't just vanish."

Cici has recently turned her hand to producing, releasing her first track Go Trip in 2021, with new material planned for 2026. "Producing my own tracks was always very important to me," she says. "I always wanted to create my own sound."

Ibiza, her adopted home since 2012, remains central to who she is. "Ibiza just has an essence and a soul that's hard to put into words," she says. "As soon as you land there you get overwhelmed with this Balearic vibe. Yes, it's going through changes, but it's amazing."

Her advice to younger women coming through is characteristically direct. "Comparison is the thief of joy. You can't waste time watching everybody else. Just keep progressing, keep learning and keep moving forward."

Three decades separate my generation from Cici Cavanagh's, yet the through-lines remain remarkably familiar: the pressure to prove yourself, the instinct to carve out space where little existed before, and the determination to keep going regardless of the obstacles.

Ní Laoghaire believes the fight for those spaces is about something deeper than nightlife policy. "It's normal to want to dance, to come together," she says. "When you buy a ticket to a gig, that's what you're doing — it's a silent agreement to be sound together for a few hours. There are so many things in the world right now that make us hard and rigid, and when we become so cut off from each other, we lose something precious. These spaces are worth fighting for. In fighting for late-night legislation for shared spaces, we reassert our right to come together. To dance at the crossroads, like."

Perhaps that is why HouseWork feels so timely — not simply as nostalgia for lost clubs and late nights, but as a reminder that Ireland's dancefloor culture was shaped by far more people than history has tended to remember.

HouseWork by Áine Ní Laoghaire runs at CTC Studio, Triskel Arts Centre, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival on June 11, 12 and 13.

CICI’S TOP FIVE TRACKS

1. Octave One - Black Water 
2. Fish Go Deep - Cure & The Cause 
3. Jaydee - Plastic Dreams
4. Jeff Mills - The Bells
5. Groove Armada - Superstylin’

SARA’S TOP FIVE TRACKS

1. Rhythm Is Rhythm - Strings Of Life - 1987 Derek May
2. The Floor Federation - Music for the Masses part 1
3. Dr Atomic - Schudelfloss - Guerilla Records
4. Smokebelch II - Sabres of Paradise
5. Awesome 3 - Don’t Go (Original Mix)