An eruption of pagan passion – The story of the Horny Organ Tribe

In the summer of 1993, a group of DJs, performers, artists, and like-minded souls came together to form a collective – the Horny Organ Tribe – with the aim of shaking up Dublin nightlife. 

Founder members Tonie Walsh and Derek Bruton (aka DJ Purple) were introduced by a mutual friend, Karl Quinn, in the spring of 1993, and the three set to work on developing a new night in The Gardening Club, upstairs in The Rock Garden, in Temple Bar. 

That Sunday night soirée, abbreviated to H.O.T., soon attracted a diverse, eclectic crowd, and the Tribe soon grew to include a variety of like-minded souls – DJs Aoife NicCanna, Mícheál Murray and Wayne Fitzgerald, hostesses Shelley Bartley and Paula Bibby, performers such as Paul Craig, aka Big Chief Random Chaos, and many more.

The Tribe would maintain its presence at The Rock Garden for just over a year, but the opening of the Ormond Multi Media Centre by entrepreneur Paddy Dunning in late 1993 presented an opportunity for those involved to scale up their ambition. A series of nights at the Ormond Quay venue – formerly an industrial printworks – took place under the name Elevator, and welcomed yet more artists into the fold, including mixed-media specialist Niall Sweeney and an array of graphic designers, visual artists and performers (Ray O’Brien, Rob Meerman, Glen McQuaid, Aiden Grennelle, Cashel Horgan, Ciarán McClelland and Jay St. John, to name but a few).

As the nights got more extravagant, so Elevator inevitably attracted attention from the authorities – with Dunning and Walsh finding themselves charged under the archaic Public Dance Halls Act – and the Horny Organ Tribe story entered its final chapter as the mid 90s drew in, the curtains finally closing on its anarchic cabaret. The Ormond itself closed in the summer of 1997, to make way for the Morrison Hotel. 

Many of those involved would go on to establish themselves in Ireland’s arts or events world, and they continue to shake up the system to this day. Tragically, Purple isn’t among them – he was killed in a car crash on New Year’s Eve 2000, in Galway.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Horny Organ Tribe, 909originals caught up with some of those involved, including Tonie Walsh (DJ, LGBT rights activist, journalist, and founding editor of Gay Community News), Aoife NicCanna (Dublin-born, Limerick-raised DJ, radio presenter and all-round legend); Shelley Bartley (artist, entertainer and indomitable dancefloor queen); and Niall Sweeney (artist, designer, long-term collaborator with This is Pop Baby and founder of graphic design studio Pony). 

Our story begins in the Spring of 1993… Niamh Kavanagh had just pulled off a double-win for Ireland in the Eurovision with In Your Eyes, Mary Robinson became the first Irish head of state to meet a British monarch with a visit to Queen Elizabeth II… and in Dublin, a motley crew of characters came together to start planning the future of the capital’s clubbing scene.

Tonie Walsh:  “The very first, hand drawn poster for The Rock Garden was done in marker pen and it just says ‘This Is The Real Thing, Bitch!’. I remember how the strap line came about – myself, Karl Quinn, Purple and Mícheál Murray were back in my gaff, getting stoned and talking about this club we wanted to do. We had just got the go ahead from The Rock Garden. We wanted to shake up the club scene in Dublin, because it was just f**king boring. 

“Purple had rocked up from Galway – he had built up a reputation there, where he was doing the free party circuit. We were introduced by a mutual gay friend, Karl Quinn. Karl said that he knew this guy from out clubbing, and ‘would I be interested in meting him’?” 

Aoife NicCanna: “I was living in Limerick, and was going to Sir Henry’s in Cork quite regularly. I had friends from Limerick that were at Crawford Art College, so I used to go and stay with them a lot, and we used to go to Henry’s on a Thursday and a Saturday, before it really kicked off into the rave thing, you know? The Thursday night was the one we went to the most.

“That was when I met Purple. He was around Limerick a lot, and we had a lot of the same friends – we hung around in the same circles. I think he ended up living in Galway for a while, and then when I moved back to Dublin, around 1992, he moved there at around the same time.

“I had been playing a few gigs here and there, and when I bumped into him, I was like, ‘I’m a DJ now’, And he told me, ‘I’m running clubs now’.

“He invited me to meet Tonie [Walsh], to meet and talk. Tonie was just electric – he gave me a lot of extra attention because I was a young woman and also a DJ, and there wasn’t many of us around. We’d go through his record collection, and he would show me these amazing disco records that I would never have heard of – and he would have two copies!

“I remember Purple and Tonie sat me down to have a chat, and said, ‘we’d like you to become one of our resident DJs’. That was the start of it all really, I started DJing for them, and then I ended up getting my own night in there, Juicy Fruit, on a Saturday night. I was really blessed with the timing.”

Shelley Bartley:  “I started going to Sides when I was a teenager. I loved the fact that I could wear what I wanted in there. I loved Adamski, S-Express, and the indie bands of the time as well. It was when acid house was starting to take over, and that whole vibe. I had never experienced it before – here was a group of people that really accepted me for who I was. 

“I went to a convent school, and the nuns were horrific to me – they abused me physically and emotionally – then I went to a technical school in Fairview and I used to get f**king bullied there too, because I didn’t wear tracksuits all the time. So when I found these people, I felt at home straight away. It was the beginning of all that for me, I finally felt accepted.

Niall Sweeney:  “Tonie and I used to go to Sides. I started going there in 1985 with a few friends from school, during the summer. When I went to art college, our visits became more regular. It was during that time that I distributed my very first printed flyer, at Sides in 1986. That’s where I met Tonie and the rest of the gay community. They have remained my mates all my life.  

“I started Alternative Miss Ireland in 1987, when I was just out of school. What I always used to say about that time was that we built our own stage to dance on, because nobody else was going to do it for us. It was almost by accident – ‘we’re bored, we want to go out, so let’s start a club’. And the thing was, it was possible at that time. 

“It was completely foundational, and would have been impossible without all these informal collectives. We were all aware of each other and encouraging each other, and then something would come along where it all gets crushed together, like with Elevator and Horny Organ Tribe, and then we would go on and do other things.” 

Tonie Walsh: “Again, we’re talking about a time before the Septic Tiger, when people with very little budget had the time to make something – to paint a banner or do some crazy shit. Throughout the summer of 1993, we were able to access some of that mad creativity.”

The Rock Garden opened on Crown Alley in 1991 – a time when Temple Bar’s transformation to a ‘cultural hub’ was very much in its infancy. Twinned with a venue in London’s Covent Garden, it played a formative role in the development of the city’s indie, grunge and alternative scene, while The Gardening Club upstairs played a minor role in the nascent dance movement. It was home to nights such as UFO, Juicy Fruit, and as of June 1993, the Horny Organ Tribe.

Tonie Walsh:  “I remember, we looked around at different venues – 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.”

Shelley Bartley:  “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.”

The Horny Organ Tribe arrived during a period of change in the nightclub scene in Dublin. The rave cognoscenti were well catered for with venues like the Olympic Ballroom, The Asylum and Spectrum (formerly Sides DC), but a new-found confidence in the industry was starting to emerge, represented by a new breed of nightclub. 

Tonie Walsh: “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.”

Part of the allure of Horny Organ Tribe was the name – even its acronym, H.O.T. was alluring in its own way. While the group naturally played on the connotations it suggested – as an early press release put it, this was a nigh for ‘disco tarts, drag queens, glamour babes and a veritable zoo of party people’ – the actual story of how it came together was altogether more innocent.. or at least that’s what they tell us.

Shelley Bartley: “Karl Quinn and I used to hang out together. Karl was a great brainstormer – full of creative ideas. He would always carry around a notebook. I remember being in The Globe with him when he took out his notebook and was talking about some new club he was opening with Tonie Walsh, and as far as I remember, he invented the name, ‘Horny Organ Tribe’.” I remember him writing it down in his notebook.

“Karl never DJed or anything – he was more like the ideas guy. Actually, I think Tonie fancied him.”

Tonie Walsh: “I was living in Mount Pleasant Square, in Ranelagh at the time. We would all meet up and talk about our love of music, especially deep house, which was having a moment from about 1991 onwards. I was really into it, and so was Purple. I mean, we could both play fast, furious and hard when we wanted to, but I saw no point to that. Also I wanted to do something that was a challenge to the prevailing, dominant sound of Dublin in the early-to-mid 90s, hard house and techno. 

“We wanted something that was much sexier, that drew on soul and R&B and disco and funk, but with a 4/4 behind it. 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.”

Aoife NicCanna: “Purple would always play tribal house, and would touch on drum ’n’ bass from time to time, and and Tonie always played disco and house. I would have manly played house. But anything would have worked. There was always room for other types of music, such as downtempo, acid jazz, hip hop, reggae and things like that. 

“Myself and Purple were pretty much buying all the new house music that was around at that time, that tribal sound. Sometimes, if I was playing in the back bar, I was playing more of a soulful house sound, acid jazz. We definitely mixed it up.

“It was also a bit higgledy piggeldy at times. On Folklore From The Dancefloor, I remember asking Greg Dowling [of Fish Go Deep] about it, and he said that he remembered coming to Dublin to do a Horny Organ Tribe night, and that ‘I don’t think it even had decks when I got there, and the monitor wasn’t working’. 

“One of the reasons for that was because there were so many people involved – and when you have so many people involved, the communication breaks down and things get a bit disorganised. Although that kind of organised chaos was part of the fun.”

Adopting a playful approach to marketing was central to the Horny Organ Tribe ethos – with the official membership card for the night taking the format of a donor organ card…

Tonie Walsh: “We were quite clear from the beginning that we wanted to build a membership club of sorts, that gave you discounts. Later on, when we started to spread our wings, doing the Elevator gigs, all night parties at a café called Essence on Nassau St, and some free parties around the country, the cards we gave out were basically privilege cards. 

“With the cards, I’m amazed we didn’t get into trouble, because with the first card, we just lifted a kidney donor card wholesale, and we changed it to say ‘Contact your doctor at the Rock Garden every Sunday’, and ‘I hereby donate my hips, my groove, my horns, my organs, my thang’. We were worried that we might get into trouble for copyright. With the second print, we tweaked it a bit and changed some of the wording.”

…while also taking steps to ensure the crowd was engaged before they set foot inside the door. 

Tonie Walsh: Shelley was doing the hostessing for us. She was still doing her Leaving Cert at the time – that’s how young she was. I mean, technically, she shouldn’t have been in the club. 

“We used to dress her up as a little dolly bird, and we made her a tray, like those trays serving cigarettes that you used to see in the 1930s. We would put sweets and condoms on the tray, and she would walk up and down the queue, entertaining the crowd and giving out free condoms and sweets before we opened.”

Shelley Bartley: “I was still in school at the time. And then at the weekends I would dress up in big black knee-high platforms, bondage gear, lmy underwear, basically. And then I would jazz it up a bit. I remember the tray contained Love Hearts sweets and condoms, and I used to give them to the crowd that was waiting outside before going in. That was great craic.

“I loved dressing up, because I enjoyed the attention. I was really into cutting up my mam’s old clothes. My mam was a hippie, and I had f**k all clothes myself, so I would go up to her wardrobe and go through all her 70s clothes, always pulling out something. I also had a little sister who was about five or six years old, and I used to sneak into her room and get a Mothercare t-shirt, write all over it, rip it up. My mam would go mad. 

“It was all over the top – feather boas, hot pants and everything. I would do my best to entertain the crowd outside. Once I was inside, though, I used to just dance all night. That was all I had to do, have a good time – have a f**king ball.”

With high-end flyer design the preserve of just a smattering of venues, the Horny Organ Tribe turned to the trusty photocopier to develop its marketing materials, scanning images of Celtic symbols, gargoyles and other eye-catching graphics as part of the DIY approach. In time, the group would embrace ancient Irish symbolism more with events timed around Samhain and other pagan holidays.

Tonie Walsh: “Purple was really into that – he came from the free party circuit, and he was doing stuff like going to sacred spaces with his friends and tripping on magic mushrooms. Also, I had been borrowing some of that imagery back in the Flikkers days. The biggest night for Flikkers in the Hirschfield Centre was the Halloween Ball. It was a drag ball, a fancy dress ball – but it was rooted in Halloween for very specific reasons, as a nod to old Irish, psychosocial rituals. Patching into that was just a given for us, you know?

“I suppose given the hippie nature in us, and among the crew, it seemed a natural fit to want to do something on nights like St Brigid’s Day, Midsummer, Halloween. We used to use the Irish language a lot as well, with a lot of word play. 

“With the flyers, a lot of that was about ‘necessity being the mother of invention’ – it was the result of us not having a budget. There were a couple of Sundays, were we would sit in my gaff – somebody would cook dinner, there would be a couple of spliffs and a couple of tinnies – and we’d sit around with our photocopies and cut them into irregular shapes like orthostats from Brú na Bóinne.

“We would sit there, cutting flyers for the following weekend… and it was also a way of getting ourselves excited for the night that was about to unravel.” 

While Paddy Dunning had been a fixture on Ireland’s music scene since the early 80s with his Temple Lane Rehearsal Studios, his acquisition of an old printworks on the quays – rebranded as the Ormond Multi Media Centre – was arguably his most ambitious project to date. The opportunity for the Horny Organ Tribe to utilise the new venue was unmissable, as it presented an opportunity to ramp things up considerably, as the number of artists, performers and creatives pledging allegiance to the Tribe rose into double digits. H.O.T. at the Rock Garden ran for about 18 months altogether, before the Ormond became the main focus of attention.

Tonie Walsh: “Things very quickly progressed towards the Ormond Multi Media Centre, because within a couple of months – I’d say before the end of the summer – Paddy Dunning was in touch with us to ask if we’d like to do something. He had just got his hands on the Ormond Centre.

“There was something in the air, with all these magical things happening at the same time. We were so lucky – I’m not just talking about the Horny Organ Tribe – we in Dublin were all so lucky that we were able to access these big, open spaces. 

“There were landlords that obviously wanted to make some money, but were also open to saying ‘go in there and surprise me, do something. And by the way, this is what the rent is’. We made a tonne of money for them of course – especially with Elevator, because I still have all the accounts. 

“When we were doing the Rock Garden – and this is actually I think why we left – the split was really f**king onerous in favour of the venue, it was 60/40 in their favour. There was no way of making money out of it. Between myself and Purple, I think we made about £40 a night, after basically promoting the night, DJing, and  paying people like Shelley and Mícheál Murray. Also whatever spare cash was around was put into painting tribal backdrops, and we would dress the venue up. 

“The DIY aesthetic was very evident, and at Elevator it was even more so – we had a budget, so we could scale up our ambition. We went from having a budget of £100 a night in the Rock Garden to having a budget of £6,000, which was a lot of money in 1993. We had no sponsorship –commercial sponsorship only started to take root in the mid 90s.”

Aoife NicCanna: “I remember Tonie saying, ‘we’ve got a venue, and it’s massive’. It sounds unbelievable now, what we got to work with, but there were a few big venues cropping up here and there – about a year before we had been to see Primal Scream in the SFX, and of course you had the raves in the Mansion House. 

“So it didn’t seem that unusual at the time to get the Ormond. It was an old warehouse, a great venue.”

At the time of its opening, the Ormond Multi Media Centre was unlike anything Dublin had seen to date. It incorporated offices for the arts and media sectors, rehearsal rooms, an art gallery, a café and restaurant, and a 1,000-capacity event space. ‘The place just pulsates with activity, and there’s this sense of sitting on something that’s about to explode,’ as the venue’s PR officer, Aoife Woodlock, told the Evening Herald at the time. 

Tonie Walsh: “The Rock Garden was a very distinctive space – I loved the courtyard, the upstairs and downstairs areas, and the fact that they had the rock clientele going in there for live gigs. There were several top notch clubs in there between 1993 and 1995. 

“When we went to the Ormond, it was just a concrete shell. Everything had to be put in there. We weren’t going to downplay the low-tech industrial look of the place – that was one of the strengths – but it needed lots of stuff. In order to battle some of the sound issues, we started hanging drapes, and once we decided we needed to hang drapes, then we started working up the aesthetics of it. 

“It was an enormous space – an old industrial print works – and it still had all the apparatus in it. Huge big chains along the ceiling to hold massive rolls of newsprint and things like that. There was a side room, which we operated as a bar area and chill-out lounge. We had a DJ in there playing R&B, things like that. 

“And then you had this massive dance area, with podiums featuring all these impromptu performances. A lot of the time there was no announcement – a spotlight would move across the dancefloor and all of a sudden, there would be a woman dressed like a Greek goddess standing on top of the fire exit, singing some big trance tune, like Grace – Not Over Yet. 

“Because Paddy Dunning only had a theatre licence – I actually got prosecuted under the Public Dance Halls Act later on, but that’s another story – we couldn’t do gigs without putting on some sort of performance in there. I mean, we wanted to, anyway – Paddy was sort of pushing an open door there.”

Shelley Bartley: “I had previously been to The Mansion House and the Olympic Ballroom and they were massive venues. This event was different. It had a more niche crowd, although at the same time, at this stage, the E-thing had really kicked in, sp the Ormond had loads of guys with their tops off. 

“I used to dance in a cage there. There were big massive cages that you had to climb into, and I would be there all night. We were doing so much speed, I’m surprised I didn’t have a heart attack on one of the nights.”

Niall Sweeney: “The Ormond was an amazing place. It was really one of the last great standing concrete boxes, probably full of health and safety dangers, which of course weren’t even considered at the time. 

“It was phenomenal, because it had that classic magic of a space, in which there were lots of separate spaces. It was also pretty robust. There were chains on the ceiling that used to carry the printing equipment, which that you could swing stuff out of – or people, like we did.”

By late 1993, just months on from the formation of the Horny Organ Tribe, the troupe put on its first night – Elevator – following this up with a series of similarly-titled events over the course of the following year and a half, each of which saw a ramping up of the visual and performance aspects. As a H.O.T. press release from 1994 put it, ‘Picture the scene. You’re in a large, warehouse-type venue, up to your eyes in artificial additives [Ed – guarana, perhaps?], bopping along to your beloved or looking for one, for the night at least. On all sides you’re assaulted by incredible lights, lasers and weird and wonderful film and computer-generated images on large screens….’

Tonie Walsh: “In the middle of the venue, sort of creating a semi-barrier between the art gallery, café, the front section and the dance floor, was this huge caged area with a big industrial lift. This was what gave the night it’s name, Elevator.”

Niall Sweeney: Myself and Blaise Smith – an amazing painter, who lives in Kilkenny now – did an installation piece called ‘Eternal Elevator’. It was a really simple random looping installation – we were interested in self-generating sequences. We would set up a series of clips, each topped and tailed with some kind of information, and the machine itself would then play one clip and look at what might be a good continuation from the previous one, a bit like dominoes. So you might get repetitions, something that makes sense, or something that makes nonsense. 

“I think in the actual elevator itself, we had a tiny little screen with elevator-style icon graphics and a sequence of Muzak playing. Blaise wrote this amazing piece of classic lift Muzak.”

Tonie Walsh: “When I think back, we did four Elevators pretty much back to back, which given the amount of work involved, the programming and the investment, was just extraordinary. 

“This was how I first met Panti Bliss. Rory O’Neill was living in Tokyo. He didn’t come back to Dublin until 1995, and so my first time meeting him was virtually, when Rory pre-recorded a piece, as Panti. 

“Niall and his tech boys would bring over all this equipment from Trinity, set it up, and use a mixture of the pre-recorded stuff that Panti had sent over from Tokyo, as well as a video feed from around the venue, and feed it back to the cage in real time. That would then be mixed and projected back onto those perspex screens. It was some of the sexiest, most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen, and we have no photographic evidence of it.

“We got these huge sheets of perspex – maybe three metres by two metres – and the back of them was slightly abraded. We hung them in series over the dancefloor in the Ormond Centre, and projected onto them. Because the perspex was slightly abraded, it held the image, but the image went through it as well. There was a level of transparency, but enough abrasion to give you a sort of solid figure. 

“People used to smoke in clubs at the time – and we also had smoke machines – so at a certain point, the perspex would disappear, and you would just see these images floating in the air. It was really gorgeous.”

Niall Sweeney: “At Trinity, I was part of an experimental new media group. I was brought in as the creative lead rather than just focusing on design. We worked with the latest technology – the latest Macs, cameras, and early touchscreens. Looking back, it seems really gritty, but it was incredible. 

“Tonie asked me to do the graphics for Elevator, and we had all this amazing equipment. So, for the first Elevator – or maybe it was the second one – on the Friday night, we secretly moved all this amazing computer equipment from Trinity to the Ormond, and had to get it back the next day. 

“It was a way of progressing and experimenting with the equipment. But also, we were young, so it just seemed like, ‘yeah, we can do that’, you know?’ Some of our friends had larger cars, so we would load the equipment, cover it with blankets, and then sit on top of it. But it all worked out.”

“Actually, much later on, in the 2000s, when I met Jenny Jennings – one of the directors of This is Pop Baby and a great friend – she remembered it was a transformative thing for her. All the visual effects, and the projections – she was amazed that this could be even happening in Dublin.”

As journalist Matthew Wherry noted in late 1994, the Elevator series of events was the ‘most progressive parties/club events Dublin had yet scene – both in their use of the latest multimedia technology and in the decadent sexual energy that the Horny Organ Tribe bring to all their projects’. A key aspect of that energy was about encouraging those present to become part of the performance – allowing themselves to get swept away in the ritualistic abandon of the night.

Tonie Walsh: “We encouraged people to dress up, and when I look at the photographs, people wore body paint, face paint, there were corn dollies, there were guys that were dressed as straw men, who looked like mummers or something. 

“People responded to that. I always feel when I’m DJing, I want to be down on the dancefloor. I hate DJing on a stage with a big spotlight on me, where I feel pressurised to be a sort of performing monkey or something. I’d rather be down on the floor, almost in darkness. That’s the vibe. So that then begs the question, how can you entertain people visually, without the DJ being the sole reference?

“I don’t want to come across as self aggrandising, but it was really breaking new ground. Nobody had tried any of this before. That mixture of theatre and performance, and site-specific installations – nobody had tried it then, and actually, very few people have tried it since.”

Aoife NicCanna: “If you went to Tonie and said, ‘I have a great idea’, he was always ‘let’s do it’, he never really worried about the financial side of it. He was always looking at the big picture, and what we could do. 

“There were people doing performance art, there was somebody else doing massages. There were people volunteering – sometimes they were making money from it, and sometimes they were just doing it for the love of it.”

Niall Sweeney: “There aren’t many photographs from back then, cause that wasn’t a concern, you know? Also, thank God there weren’t any photographs…!

“When you’re in the thick of an evening, so much disappears – in terms of the sellotape and the bits of stuff trying to hold up that perspex screen, you know? Whatever it takes to create the experience. It’s kind of magic. If there were an actual photograph of it, it would probably look shockingly awful. 

“Elevator achieved a mythological status for all sorts of reasons, and I think that’s great because people remember it for the feeling and the transformation that was happening, both individually and as a group. It had a collective impact.”

The individual that arguably best encapsulated the controlled madness of the Horny Organ Tribe’s events was Big Chief Random Chaos, aka artist Paul Craig, whose idiosyncratic performances underpinned the aesthetic the collective were seeking to foster.

Tonie Walsh: “There was one night that Purple was doing the first half of the night, and I was doing the second half. Usually my set would start with some deep, sexy house, and then I would creep the tempo up ever so slightly and drop some big atmospheric disco number, and then maybe go into some trancey house, or whatever.  

“Anyway, Paul had spent the afternoon with one of his helpers, making a couple of hundred paper planes with white paper, and filling a bag with them. In the club, his shtick was a bit like The Diceman – he would paint half his face in white, or have a plaster-cast mask or something like that. On this night, he was dressed all in white, and he goes and sits on the edge of the dancefloor, like a living installation. He’s chained to a deck chair, for two hours. 

“People are coming over and giving him a drink, but he can’t move, so he’s sipping through a straw. And then when it was his cue, when Purple finished and I took over – I think I played Underworld’s Rez, or a track with big chord washes at the beginning – his helper comes over with a bolt cutter to cut his chains and release him, and he walks around the dancefloor giving paper planes to people. 

“Then, when the beat comes in, the place goes insane. It was like a classroom, people f**king paper planes all over the place. It was the best fun ever, and it cost something like £2 to do. I even remember some of the bar staff crying because they didn’t get any planes.”

Niall Sweeney: “You might have Paul naked, in a plaster of paris nappy, covered in chocolate and with drawing pins stuck to him, or something like that. 

“There was a real catharsis there – ‘Jesus, if Paul can do something like that?’ There was this lovely unstructured exchange and encouragement.”

Tonie Walsh: “On another night, he was dressed in a pair of overalls with this Primus camping stove – we never would have got away with this today – at the edge of the dancefloor, and he’s there, melting chocolate in this pot. People are walking past and are getting the smell of the chocolate, and going ‘what the f**k is that?’.  

“Then when the chocolate melted, he made a performance out of it, covering himself with the chocolate, using a spatula. And then, when it hardened, he gives it to people to eat. Some of these things were so simple – so inexpensive – but they were just f**king great. 

“Of course, we were being slightly self indulgent. I mean, what do you want from a good night out? You want to have gorgeous people to have fun with. You want the music to be top notch and then when there’s a lull – that moment when you’re not on the dancefloor – you want something else, or your mind wanders. That’s the point where your creative juices should be fed in some way.

“There was always something gorgeous about that, when you’re on the dancefloor, and there’s this weird bloke a hair’s breath away from you doing some crazy shit. 

“Sometimes that’s all you need to help anchor the night’s madness for people. That’s what they remember the next week; that’s their talking point. That’s how they get their friends to invest in the club in the weeks and months to follow.”

Ensuring the right mix of people was an essential ingredient of all Horny Organ Tribe events, with the focus firmly on ensuring that each night was as inclusive as possible. As a Dublin fanzine put it at the time, ‘Importantly, no-one gets the feeling of being left out, whether it’s your first time going, or your twenty-first. […] A musical melting pot where the disparate elements gel, and very rarely jar.’

Tonie Walsh: “We wanted to shake it up in terms of the mix of people we had. We wanted to have an equal mix of drinkers and druggies – we didn’t want it top heavy with druggies.”

Aoife NicCanna: “You would get heads from The Asylum coming down, you would get people from the Temple of Sound, people from Ri-Rá. Techno hippies, crusty ravers – the lot. Also because of Purple’s connection with Galway and my connection with Limerick, you would get people coming from other parts of the country as well. Plus, Tonie had quite a big gay following, he had been DJing a lot longer than myself and Purple. 

“It was a very mixed crowd. Tonie never wanted it to be a gay-only night – he always wanted a mix. I think by the time he met myself and Purple, he was a bit frustrated with what was going on in Dublin at the time. He was a bit older, and he was always very open about drugs and sexuality and things that weren’t discussed openly at the time. 

“He would be the first to make sure that you wouldn’t be putting up with any old fuddy-duddies, like bar managers that were pricks or things like that. To stand up to all these f**king idiots, these small-minded clowns, you know? That was happening a lot, and he really had a lot of impact in terms of inverting that.”

Shelley Bartley: “There were people from all walks of life, young and old, and everyone was incredibly open-minded. The vibes at that time were so positive and unlike anything we had ever experienced. I had felt repressed during my time in school, so for me to discover this, it was like I had actually f**king landed on my feet. 

“It was truly an incredible place that fostered openness and embraced diversity. The more diverse you were, the better it was.”

As well as encouraging a mixed crowd, the collective, community spirit of those running the H.O.T. events meant that even as Elevator to a stature far in excess of what could have been only dreamed about at the Rock Garden, nobody lost the run of themselves, and the ideology remained true to the foundations on which the concept was founded. 

Aoife NicCanna: “It really was a case of trying to create a community of like-minded people. I think we were frustrated that a lot of nightclubs just weren’t welcoming, and we had to fight for it. We wanted it more. I know things have come full circle, and again there’s a shortage of underground nightclubs now – but just after the 1980s, it was really a case of ‘ok, let’s move forward with this’.”

Shelley Bartley: “These unique experiences become even more special over time because they haven’t been done before. That’s what makes them so extraordinary. It’s like being a part of something completely new – at the time, you may not fully appreciate it. It’s only when you look back on it that you realise, ‘that was actually history, it was amazing’.”

Niall Sweeney: “In pretty much anything I was involved in, in that respect, yes, people had to get paid and got paid. If we made extra, like later on with Powderbubble or whatever, we just put that money back into the next party, to make it even better.

“I think that was actually the key to the whole thing. Elevator very much felt like everybody was there to be there as ‘part of it’, as opposed to the idea of paying a ticket for an experience and then going home, you know? There was a lot of generosity of time, for the greater good.

“It was just like, ‘Okay, this has to be the best. So how can we make it the best?’“

Tonie Walsh: “You don’t really see that much in Ireland. One, I think a lot of people are lazy, they are there to just scrape the bottom of the barrel. The imagination is just not there. And two, you can only do it if you have deep pockets, or some sort of critical mass. The likes of Amnesia and Space Ibiza can do it, or the Paradiso in Amsterdam. At Heaven in London, in the 80s, it’s decor budget used to run into tens of thousands. 

“The other thing, too, was that all of the elements were driven by a desire to entertain ourselves and entertain others, and also to give a platform to people who had been denied one, or found it difficult to access. For example, I was very determined about giving some of my female friends the chance to play more sets, because it was such a ‘boys own’ game, and a lot of clubs wouldn’t make room for women DJs back then. There were lots of very talented women playing a variety of different styles of music, who just found it really hard to get a look in.”

All good things come to an end, however, and as the mid-90s dawned, and more venues opened – The Temple of Sound, The RedBox, Columbia Mills etc – the momentum that had sustained the Horny Organ Tribe for around two years began to decelerate. The eighth Elevator party at the Ormond Multi Media Centre, in early 1995, would prove to be the last.

Tonie Walsh: “Licensing laws were always a problem, especially when we wanted to keep developing Elevator. Also, as time went on, many of the gang stepped aside – plus, we were spreading ourselves too thinly, doing raves in country houses around the country, and beach parties. 

“There was also a bit of personal antagonism between myself and Purple. John Reynolds called me up one day – The Pod would have been open about six months at this point – and I went up to see him. He said, ‘I’ve been going to your night, and there’s a night I need bit of help with. If you can do what you did with Sunday nights in the Rock Garden, it’s yours’. It was a Thursday night, and we called it ‘Boogie an Domhain’. It was a deliberate attempt at a mashup between R&B and house. We were aiming it at students – Thursday was a typical student night – and we ran it for about six months. It was a bit too corporate for me, although I loved the sound spec. 

“And then myself and Purple had a big falling out. It wasn’t just about that, there were a number of elements involved. I was slightly older – I suppose I would have been eight or 10 years older than Purple. It’s the mid 90s, I’m in my mid 30s, I had been DJing since 1980. I had been around the block. 

“I needed some sort of financial security as much as anything else. And I also realised that if Horny Organ Tribe and Elevator was going to have any sort of longevity, there would need to be a stricter sort of economic foundation to the whole thing. You know, you can’t just go out every weekend and get loaded, and not think about how you’re going to pay the bills. 

“Also, some things just have an inherent energy in them – they’re meant to happen for a certain period of time, and then they run their course. It’s a little bit like relationships. Sometimes people break up, not because there’s a third party involved, but because they lose interest, or their priorities and needs shift. I suppose that’s a generous way of describing what happened with Horny Organ Tribe.”

Niall Sweeney: “Although some people had left, there were also individuals who started coming back to Dublin, filled with excitement from things they had seen and done elsewhere. You know, I actually didn’t leave Dublin until 1998 – I was having a great time, because there was so much potential and possibility.

“Other friends, who had been away for quite a long time were returning, like Trish Brennan and Panti. So suddenly, we were all there, buzzing with energy, and ready to try new things.” 

Shelley Bartley: “I witnessed the journey from the Horny Organ Tribe in the Rock Garden to the Ormond – I was in college then – and then it kept going until I was 21, when I moved to Brighton. 

“When it wrapped up, other events, like Powderbubble, Ham, and Bliss came along and followed on from that. But the nights in the Ormond were the best in the f**king world. There was nothing like them at the time, and there’s been nothing like them since.”

There was to be a tragic coda to the H.O.T. story, however, with the death of founding member Purple in a car crash in 2000. 

Tonie Walsh: “I didn’t see Purple before he died. On Millennium New Year’s Eve, he was out with a couple of friends, near Inverin, in Galway, and he was hitching a lift back into town. Some American picked him up – I think the guy might have been drunk, or whatever – and he crashed the car.

“Of course, there’s always going to be a hint of nostalgia and remorse, looking back at some of the things that weren’t said or done. It’s poignant at this point. But it’s so long ago, there’s nothing good to be gained from dwelling or regressing, thinking what could have been done or should have been done, you know?”

Shelley Bartley: “I remember Purple was really sweet, and gentle. He had a pure hippie vibe, it was in his heart. Even though I didn’t know him that well, I partied with him a few times and spent time in his company.

“When we were getting paid, the amount I received depended on the crowd. Everyone got their cut. When Tonie used to pay me at the end of the night, he had his own unique way of giving me the cash, so as not to offend anyone. He would roll it up, put it in your hand, and say ‘that’s it for the night’. On the other hand, Purple would always say, ‘Shelley, we had a good night, and this is what you earned.’ He would count it out for me, show it to me, and place it in my hand. Sometimes, he would apologise and say, ‘I’m really sorry, we didn’t get the numbers in, so it’s just this much tonight.’ He was always so open and sweet.

“Purple wasn’t there to make money. Tonie was focused on the art, and creating something special, and perhaps he wanted to make some money from it too, which is no bad thing. But Purple had a laid-back attitude – making money didn’t matter as much to him. He was a proper hippie.”

What the Horny Organ Tribe is best remembered for is the fact that it lifted a lethargic clubbing scene (barring a number of ecstasy-fuelled dungeons) out of the doldrums, injecting a dash of colour, energy and creativity to the capital’s nocturnal landscape. Several decades on, the reverberations are still being felt, by the creative minds that forged life-long careers around the collective’s misadventures, and the clubs that sought to recapture its demented doctrine in the years that followed. 

Tonie Walsh: “One of the most significant reasons why people look back on on Horny Organ Tribe and Elevator with such great respect and fondness – was because it also seeded a lot of really interesting and creative connections. People went on to do really interesting things. 

“This was something that Purple and I and the rest of the team were always about – build your dancefloor. If none is available to you, build one yourself. But also create the literal and metaphorical spaces for people to have conversations about creativity. 

“I don’t want to sound too pretentious, but it was about building a better society. It wasn’t just the conversations about how we get our kicks – of course that was really important as well –  or the quality of the music, or the soundsystem, or the drugs. It was about saying ‘I have a great idea for a short video film’, and I need dancers, or costume designers, and the next thing – hey presto – you have this extraordinary sort of cross-cultural pollination at work. 

“I think that’s one of the enduring legacies of Horny Organ Tribe and Elevator – that it actually facilitated that cross-pollination. 

Shelley Bartley: “We were experiencing a music revolution. At the time, we didn’t fully grasp the significance.

“With Horny Organ Tribe, it wasn’t a case that Tonie, Purple and the rest were out to make money, to book a particular DJ and make as much money as they could. There was heart and soul in it, and you could really feel that. It was like a family, and it was beautiful.”

Niall Sweeney: “That period, and the whole dancefloor culture, influenced every single thing I do or have done. There’s something in my approach to work that is rooted in ideas of the way nightclubs work and the way people work. 

“I mean, I could honestly say that it was more important than college. College was important, of course, but the combination of that and then working in nightclubs, was very foundational for me, and for others as well. With Elevator, it was part of a whole shift, because it spun out this great collective.

“It was just this sprawling mass. I guess Sides would have been the beginning of it because that’s really where I first met people – but looking back, it was this inevitable, fabulous tumble on. It was like the slime mould that they used to rationalise the Tokyo subway map. We were the slime mould, navigating our way through the city and following the flow of energy.”

Thanks to Tonie Walsh, Aoife NicCanna, Shelley Bartley and Niall Sweeney for their contributions. Long live the Horny Organ Tribe!

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