The Fourth Dimension – Kerry’s rave trailblazers talk to 909originals

Back in the mid 90s, Killarney, Co. Kerry, unlikely as it may seem, became the birthplace of one of Ireland‘s most beloved dance acts, The Fourth Dimension, or ‘4D’ for short. 

Led by brothers Joe, Steve, Moss and Matt O’Leary – the latter adopting the pseudonym The Nutter – the quartet shot to fame in 1994 with Storm, a track that sampled a Sharon Shannon tune, which went top ten in the pop charts and saw The Fourth Dimension catapulted into the mainstream. Follow up EPs like Loverman and Wake Up! proved they were more than a one-hit wonder, and as the mid-90s rolled around, the group’s trajectory seemed assured. 

“The bottom line is, the tune has to be good,” Joe told the Evening Herald in July 1994. “You can have the best production job in the world, but if the tune isn’t there, it’s still just a bad tune well produced.”

The group released two albums – 1994’s gabber-charged Overground and 1995’s Around The Day In 80 Worlds – underpinning their rapid rise and eagerness to explore new musical territories. But within two years of their arrival on the scene, and amid internal tensions, The Fourth Dimension were no more – a final gig at Scotland’s T In the Park bringing the story to an abrupt close. 

Given their short lifespan, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Fourth Dimension never happened, or that they had one brief moment in the spotlight, with Storm, before fading away into the ether. 

But for anyone that experienced the group live during their brief duration – supporting The Prodigy, or D:Ream, or Scooter, at Féile 1994 or 1995, or anywhere else for that matter – the four lads from Killarney were something special, and while they never got to the level of UK rivals like The Prodigy or The Chemical Brothers (or even the Dutch hardcore acts they sought to emulate), their legacy is forever intertwined with Ireland’s rave tapestry.

909originals caught up with Joe, Steve and Matt O’Leary to discuss the rise and fall of The Fourth Dimension.

The Fourth Dimension story starts in the early to mid 80s, and Joe O’Leary’s record collection, which includes artists such as Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Tangerine Dream, all of which would have a major influence on his younger brothers, as they grew to love electronic, and latterly, dance music.

Joe: I was mad into music from about 11 or 12 years of age. I first heard Kraftwerk, and then got into Tangerine Dream and all that kind of progressive stuff. And then into dance music. 

The boys would have been listening to the same things that I was, growing up. So in terms of four guys being on the same page, that was very much the case, musically. There was little or no rock music. It was all electronic music. 

Steve: Back in the early 80s, Joe had a friend that was in to these groups, and he used to make tapes – we played those tapes constantly. Tangerine Dream was definitely my thing, more than anything else, and I still love it – the likes of Tangram, Hyperborea, White Eagle. Those were the three albums that just struck a chord with me. 

So,Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, that was my genre. In the 80s, I got into Depeche Mode, anything with synthesisers, really. But I found I could never dance to it. I didn’t have the energy.

So I remember when I was maybe 17 or 18, going to a club and hearing what was happening in commercial dance music at the time. I think it was Technotronic, actually. And I felt ‘Oh, I can actually dance to this. I feel the energy to get up and dance’. I wasn’t drinking or anything like that. I just loved the music. 

Matt: Sides [seminal Dublin nightclub] had a few huge influence on me. I went there in 1988, I think two years after it first opened. It was a Saturday night, and we loved it.

I was in UCD at the time, and Joe was working in Dublin. We decided to take a chance on it. We went to a record store, and asked where was good to go, and they said Sides was just around the corner, so we decided to try it out. There were about five or six people there. 

Then we went back, maybe a year, or a year and a half later, and there were 12 people there. But it was still excellent. They just kept persisting. There was a real dark atmosphere in there, and a super sub. And we loved it. 

Alongside brother Matt, Joe and Steve start to immerse themselves in the emerging dance scene, acquiring synthesisers and other musical equipment, and starting to experiment with electronic sounds. The nascent hard dance and gabber scenes in Europe are a big early influence.

Matt: I had bought a Yamaha RX21 drum machine and a Korg synthesiser, but I got sick of it, and decided to move to Europe.

I was working in Holland for four months – the scene was just starting there – before going back to university for my second year. When I was in Holland I met a guy from Germany, and he told me about this house he had in Greece. So, I went to Greece, and got a job there – to be honest, I could have stayed there forever.

In Greece, there were a lot of English DJs playing in the clubs, who were in a similar situation to me. They had synthesisers and drum machines but didn’t really know what to do with them. So I followed them, and then of all places I wound up in Israel.

The dance scene in Israel in 1989/90 was colossal. The best. They were playing everything from techno to trance to jungle. They were very far ahead of what we had – I mean, in Ireland, we had nothing close to that.

Steve: We discovered the Dutch stuff kind of suited us – the hardcore. I loved the energy of it. It was so powerful. 

I loved getting into a sweat and jumping all over the place. But you know, you wouldn’t sit down to listen to it, like house music, which I didn’t really get in to at the time – although I love it now.

Inspired by the club scene in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, the O’Learys start to put on events in Kerry under the name Wild Noise, which leads them to book an up and coming electronic outfit from the UK – The Prodigy. Steve forms the group Tandrum, which by the time of The Prodigy gig at The Gleneagle Hotel and Leisure Complex in August 1993, has evolved into The Fourth Dimension.

Joe: I started promoting gigs around 1990, 1991. Matt was over in Holland at the time, and getting in to the music over there. When he got back, we started promoting a bit more. The gigs started to go very well – we brought a Dublin DJ down for one of the first ones, but then we realised we could do it ourselves. 

Matt: When I came back, Joe had told me that he hired a friend of mine from Templelogue, and was running a dance night in the local hall here. It was a huge success, but it wasn’t very dancey – there were a couple of dance tunes. So we decided we were going to do them ourselves, more dance music, more techno, more trance, whatever we can get our hands on. 

That’s when we met a local guy here – Michael Hegarty. He had every record under the sun – he literally had thousands of records. But he wasn’t an actual working DJ. In his private collection, there were 300 or 400 really top notch dance records. So we asked him could we pick forty of them to play at the gig, and then he asked us ‘why don’t you start DJing’? And that’s when I got into DJing. 

It was a big surprise to me that Joe would even take the chance to put on a night. He knew the owner of the hotel – it was a good venue – and said he would give it a go. Just play some tunes and see how it goes. 

Steve: The name Tandrum was taken from ‘Tan’gerine Dream, with a few more ‘drums’ on top of it – it was quite melodic. It was basically just me, I played a few small parties and clubs. To be honest at that point I was only really discovering dance music and how to put it together. 

In fairness to Joe, he really pushed me on. He told me ‘this is good, you’re doing good stuff’ – I probably wouldn’t have even released anything only for Joe’s honesty.

Joe: It just kind of grew from there. The gigs were going great, so we said we would chance our arm and try and get The Prodigy.

This was just before they exploded – in between the first album [Experience] and the second [Music for The Jilted Generation]. They were big at the time, but the year afterwards, they went mega. I rang up their manager, Mike Champion, and we got on very well. He was sound, and he figured that we were sound, so he said ‘do you want to play alongside us’? 

You’re not going to say no to that. So that was really the start of The Fourth Dimension – we did one warm up gig in a smaller venue, with maybe a couple of hundred people there, and then the second gig was The Prodigy. 

Matt: Steve was trained on piano. I used to dabble a bit, but I can’t play like he can play. But I’m very focused. If I’m making a tune, or if I sit down with you to make a tune, we will do ten or 12 drafts of it until such time that we’re both happy. 

Steve needs inspiration though, he has fierce trouble finishing his tunes. This used to tear the hair out of our heads, myself and Joe. There was a week to go until The Prodigy gig, and we had to step in to get him to finish his tunes. We were running out of time, but we got it finished. 

Steve: How the name ‘The Fourth Dimension’ came about – there was a quiz show on and it came up as a question. And I said, ‘that’s a great name for a group!’. 

I think The Prodigy gig was my third or fourth gig ever. I had gone from playing to 10 or 20 people to playing in front of a couple of thousand in just three gigs. Which was a bit crazy, but good fun. Also, to bring The Prodigy to Killarney – to a small little town – was unusual, but it was brilliant fun. Of the 1,500 or 2,000 that were there, most of them were from outside Kerry. 

Joe: We were winging it, but when you have the chance to do something like that, you just go, ‘what’s the worst that can happen’?

The Prodigy at Gleneagle Hotel, August 1993. Pictures from www.theprodigyontour.com.

The Fourth Dimension lineup is completed with a fourth brother, Moss, joining the group to contribute vocals and on-stage energy, sporting an angular, ‘cyberpunk’ haircut. Joe, as the oldest brother, takes on management duties. Matt, given his extensive record collection amassed during several trips to the continent, becomes the group’s resident DJ, aka ‘The Nutter’.

Matt: The first place I heard gabber was in Beat Records in Temple Bar. I can’t remember the names of the guys that worked there, but they knew their stuff. There was also Abbey Discs, and another record shop in Temple Bar as well, which I can’t remember the name of. 

There was a competitive side to it too. When we were running our gigs, we were trying to get exclusive stuff that the local guys didn’t have, or that you couldn’t even buy in Dublin. So we went to Belfast Underground Records in Belfast, and to Fat Cat Records in London, and then to places like Rotterdam and Amsterdam. 

Now, that’s very expensive – running around buying new records all the time. Some people would say it’s madness. But that’s the way we were.

Steve: Matt was a cracking DJ. There was one gig in The Point – this was later – and Matt was DJing backstage. One of the main DJs on the main stage was short a pair of headphones. So Matt loaned them to the DJ, and then did his whole set without headphones. That was serious talent. 

Matt: The ‘Nutter’ thing started with Mark Kavanagh. He played a track that really stood out for me because it had a big, long sample. The track was actually rubbish, but Mark spun something else out of it to make it sound really good. 

I called over to Mark’s place – he was living in Goatstown at the time, and I asked him for ‘that nutter track’. When I played it, I was really disappointed. But I mixed it in with a Holographic track – a gabber track – and it really stood out. And that’s when I thought that ‘The Nutter’ was a good name for a DJ. 

Steve: How Mossy got involved was that there was one gig that Joe organised – a fancy dress gig – and Moss decided to jump up on stage to get the crowd going. And it really worked. So before we knew it, we were playing before The Prodigy, and Mossy is up on the stage, jumping around.

The reason he had his hair like that was for the fancy dress gig, it was part of his costume. That was his first time on stage, remember? The gig went so well that he decided to stick with it. 

Matt: There was one time that we were pulled over by the police on the way to a gig. Mossy was all done up, with the hair standing up, and the cop was leaning in, about to give us a ticket. He looked at Mossy, looked at us, and asked ‘are you in a band’? We said we were. ‘Are you any good?’ he asked. ‘We’re all right,’ we said. ‘Right so, go on then,’ he said, and off we went. 

Things move fast – Liquid Records, a subsidiary of Solid Records, signs the group on an initial one-single deal in December 1993, and the group unveil said single in March 1994. Storm, which blends uptempo rave with snippets of Sharon Shannon’s Blackbird (another artist on the Solid Records roster), had been a feature of the group’s live sets for close to a year, and takes Ireland by.. ahem… storm, hitting #10 in the charts. As Joe tells the Evening Herald, “Some people see the funny side of it. Others think it’s a gimmick. […] “If we want to have credibility we have to get away from the Irish sound. We did this for fun, but our sound has been getting harder all the time.”

Steve: We were sending tapes out, and I came up with the idea of the Sharon Shannon sample. No-one had done anything like that before – it was pretty naff – but at the time, it was fresh, and people told us it sounded good. So we sent it to a few record companies, and we got a call from Denis Desmond, who ran Solid at the time. He was also responsible for Sharon Shannon. 

Matt: I think I heard Storm for the first time when Steve was playing as Tandrum. We knew he was on to something – it really got the floor going. So when Denis Desmond called us, he was like, ’you’re both on the same label, so there’ll be no licensing issues’. It took off from there. 

Steve: No one at the time had done the traditional Irish thing in dance music. There were a lot of tracks out there that were using some sample or another, but nobody had tried it with trad – it was another genre to delve into.

Joe: It literally went down a storm. Anyone could see that the track had potential.

Myself and Dennis Desmond got on very well – I found him to be a very straight talker. He offered us a record deal – I think it was a three or four album deal – and we jumped at it. But it wasn’t a good deal, in retrospect. We were making good music, but our business knowledge was zero. 

Actually, the reason the track is called Storm is Denis had a daughter that had just been born. I was sitting down with him one day, and he asked me ‘what are you going to call the single?’ I told him I had no idea, and then he told us about his new daughter, named Storm, and so that was that. He was the owner of the record label, after all. 

Matt: Not long after Storm came out, we promptly dropped it from our sets, much to everybody’s annoyance. I’d say two months after it came out, we never played it again.

Steve: It was our first track, and that’s what people knew us for, but we didn’t want to be categorised by it. I suppose it was a bit selfish of us – I remember I used to insist that we didn’t play it, even though people were coming to the gigs and looking to hear it. But I just hated… I won’t say I ‘hated it’, but I certainly ‘disliked it’. 

Joe: We would literally turn up to gigs, and there would be 300 or 400 people there, and they would be like, ‘are you going to play Storm?’ And we would just be like, ‘Nope’.

If you want to commit commercial suicide, that’s a good way to do it. To be honest, I think we knew at the time it was a bad idea. But the boys didn’t want to play it. Steve considered it a ’novelty record’ and like all novelty records, the joke wears thin pretty soon. No matter how good it worked live, we got tired of it pretty quickly. It was that simple. 

Matt: Liam Howlett from The Prodigy was very embarrassed about Charly. He would never play it live, he hated it. Although at the same time, he realised it helped to start his career. It was like that with us and Storm. 

Building on the success of Storm, The Fourth Dimension release The Dream EP, which reaches #5 in the charts (while a Sound Crowd remix of the track Pure Dream is the first release on Dublin’s Red Records), and Wake Up, which hits #14. The group release their debut album, Overground, and showcases the harder, gabber-influenced techno sound that the group had become famous for. The group’s rapid acceleration earns them a main stage slot at Féile 1994 in Tipperary, where they close the Sunday night, taking to the stage after Elvis Costello. Elsewhere, the lads bring happy hardcore duo Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo to Dublin for a gig in October 1994.

Joe: The naivety of us was just like, ‘ok, so this is how the music business works’. This is great. We just kind of ran with it, and we were running around in circles, but at least we were running, you know?

Steve: With Overground, it wasn’t necessarily about doing a hardcore thing, it was more about bringing a better quality of dance music to Ireland. It was more about education as much as anything else because what was being played on the radio wasn’t what we were listening to.

I don’t think there was much of a gabber scene in Ireland, or even the UK for that matter, it was very much Holland and Germany, maybe Belgium as well. 

I actually wanted a slightly softer sound, a more professional techno sound, as opposed to the gabber. With gabber, you would take a sample – you could sample anything at all – speed it up, stick a distorted bass drum on the bottom of it, and go hell for leather. Whereas I wanted to bring a bit more musicality into it. That was my personal thing though – people wanted to dance, and the harder the better in many cases. 

Joe: Steve was the first of us to start making music, and Matt’s style was quite different. You know, if you listen to the first album, it does sound like two different personalities at times. It’s all over the place in some ways, the reason being that there are two different guys making the music. So it would end up roughly half and half. 

Matt could churn then out like you wouldn’t believe – the speed he was making tracks at was just ridiculous. You would go into the studio, he’d be working on a track, and it would sound pretty good. And then you would come back the next day, and it would be finished. He had a great talent for finding a start, middle and end. With Steve, you would have to encourage him more. You’d have to sit down with him and say, ‘right, Stevie, we have to finish this job’. 

Matt: I’m quite focused. If it’s something I love, I would work through the day and all through the night. I would hardly sleep. So, if Moss said to me that he’d love to have a new tune for next Friday or whatever I’d kill myself working on the tune so he would have it on time. That’s the way I am, you know? I’m very disciplined that way.

Even though Steve could play better than me, I was the only one that played live. We watched Liam Howlett, and what he did for certain tracks. He would take a sample drumbeat, and he would split his keyboard into several different channels, so you could have a 303 sound as your lead, you could have a recorded ‘dark sequence’, let’s say, just by hitting one key, on a loop, the same with the drum beat, and then you could literally play your bassline as your drum is going. 

Steve: Getting to close Féile was ridiculous, but thanks to MCD for that one, because they wanted to promote us as the new band, the new ‘hot thing’. We weren’t the headliners, but we were the last act on. 

Joe: At Féile, there were all these bands that were saying ‘who the f**k are these guys’, you know? And rightly so. You had the likes of Bjork there, and Tricky there, and they were looking at the list and wondering who the hell 4th Dimension were.

That was hilarious. In fairness again, coming back to Denis Desmond, he did take a big risk. He kind of said, ‘let’s do it, let’s see what happens here’.

Matt: I remember during that gig I missed my cue, from Moss. I think there was 60,000 people there, or something crazy like that. And Mossy just looked at me as if I had four heads, because I missed the cue. I got it the second time around, but it was an embarrassing moment. 

1995 sees the group maintain a steady momentum – Storm is re-released as Storm ’95 (featuring a live version and a couple of Sound Crowd remixes, and reaching #13 in the charts), while the Loverman EP precedes the release of the group’s second album, Around The Day In Eighty Worlds. Unlike Overground, the album blends a variety of different styles, and is more melodic – i.e. less ‘bang-bang-bang’ – than its predecessor. The group follow up their Féile 94 performance with a gig at Féile 95, taking place at Cork’s Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

Joe: There was a lot more depth to the second album, whereas today I couldn’t stand over anything, really – maybe one or two tracks – on the first album. I listen back to it and I cringe, ‘oh my God, what were we thinking’. When we made it, it was very much of its time, shall we say. But that kind of music has died. 

On the second album, there’s a few tracks that still stand up ok. That’s the difference. With any album, you have to spend time on it, and while we just churned out the first, with the second we actually did sit down and say ‘look, we have to set the tracks out properly’, and try and make it like the albums we used to listen to that would – and it sounds a corny phrase – ‘take you on a bit of a trip’. Hence the name of the album. 

Steve: By the second album, we knew what we were doing, musically. Again, Tangerine Dream had been a big influence on us, and we wanted to introduce that musicality into the tracks – running sequences, flowing melodies. We still kept the back beat on it, the ‘dance undertones’, shall we say, but it was more about educating people and trying to create a landscape.

This whole thing of just going bang, bang, bang – it’s good fun, but it doesn’t make you think. 

Joe: Our attitude was that we had to get a single out or or an EP out every three months, minimum. We got the two albums and six EPs out in about two and a bit years. That’s ridiculous output. 

If Storm hadn’t have happened, we wouldn’t have happened. After Storm, we had a bit of a licence to do whatever we wanted, and with Solid Records, God love them, they didn’t know what they were doing. They were dabbling in dance music because dance music was so hot at the time, and they were really just looking for an in on that. 

You could see them talking in the office, some of the people in there. They didn’t have a clue what to do with us. They were a rock outfit, trying to sell dance. The Sharon Shannon thing was easy, because they knew how to sell that. But after that, they were really at a loss what to do with us. 

Tension befalls The Fourth Dimension ranks, as Steve – who had previously shown his dissatisfaction with the quartet’s touring schedule – leaves the group. 4th Dimension continue on as a three-piece, with the Late Arrival EP reaching #19 in the charts in March 1996, exactly two years on from the release of Storm. As summer approaches, the group prepare for their biggest gig to date, at Scotland’s T In The Park, sharing the dance tent lineup with Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers. But the gig fails to ‘launch’ the group in the UK, and, coupled with the poor performance of Around The Day In Eighty Worlds, the remaining O’Leary brothers decide to call it a day.

Steve: I wanted to be more musical – I was probably getting up my own hole a bit. But I was very much getting into more unorthodox sounds. Also, we weren’t making it in the UK at the time – we thought we were going to get to do some gigs over there, and that just didn’t happen, so as a result, I was kind of like, ‘ah, feck it’. 

I was getting a bit cheesed off by the whole live thing as well. Hide me in the studio all day and I would be happy, but I wouldn’t be into crowds or signing autographs or anything like that. So I went ‘right, that’s it for me’.

Before that, there had been a couple of periods where I had gotten fed up – the lads wanted to continue with the partying and the hardcore stuff, and that just wasn’t for me. But really, the fact that we didn’t make it in the UK, or that we weren’t even given the opportunity to do gigs in the UK, that was the big thing. It just fizzled out from there. 

Matt: We had had a fantastic few years, but the better we were getting musically, the less we were selling.

We played with The Prodigy 14 times, and we were supposed to go on a college tour with The Prodigy in England. That would have made us. But Denis Desmond realised he wasn’t going to be making any money from it, so he pulled it. Had we got that exposure, we would have learned so much. 

We were lucky enough to play at T in the Park, and we were on the lineup with Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers. The amount that you could learn from watching other groups. The more you would play with different DJs, with different bands, your sound would get better and better, and you would get more ideas that would work, and influences.

Joe: We were definitely getting better at the time we decided to call it quits. The second album was way better than the first, but it didn’t have the stand-out tracks, except maybe for Late Arrival.

It’s a shame the way it sort of fell apart in the end. But it wasn’t that we fell out of love with the music. It was really that we were sick of the business, and ultimately, we weren’t making any money. There are plenty of bands that were doing what we were doing – more rock and roll bands, rather than electronic bands – that decided to hang in there, and some are still hanging in there today. 

In fairness to Denis, he was great in that we were legally obliged to do another two albums, but when it got to the stage that we wanted to call it a day, we just shook hands. It could have been really messy, but it was clear it wasn’t working. So that was that. 

Matt: We loved the music. I sold all my gear when it ended. I sold it all out of frustration and I bought a couple of second hand cars. 

Steve was quite happy tinkering away with his synthesisers – even to this day – and I think it’s kind of mad that he’s not making tracks, and releasing them. But for me, I would have kept going. I was loving it, even though I wasn’t making any money out of it. But Joe was really the lynchpin of the whole thing. When he said ‘this isn’t working, and we’re going to have to pack it in’, I was a bit taken aback. Moss was the same. 

Joe: Towards the end, would you believe, there was talk of Carl Cox remixing Storm. The second album hadn’t done very well, so there was some talk of releasing Storm in the UK, and starting the same programme of events again. 

They were going to get Carl Cox, and a few other guys to remix it, and see where it went from there. I was like, ‘there’s no f**king way we’re releasing Storm again’. Besides, we had already released a remix version. Again, though, in retrospect, that was a very bad business move on my part. Who knows, with a Carl Cox mix we might have gone top ten?

Remember that banjo track, The Grid – Swamp Thing? That was huge. They were talking about jumping onto that bandwagon – that it would have been the perfect time to release Storm in the UK because Swamp Thing had been so big. Maybe it would have been.

Matt: The last thing we did together, was an EP called Big Rig Records – that’s what we called ourselves when 4th Dimension ended. It’s probably the music I’m most proud of. 

Mid Town Records asked us for 500 copies, we printed them up with our own money, and they distributed them all over the world. They were delighted with them, and asked us could we send some more. But we had no money. I would say there’s about ten copies left. 

At that stage I had the sound more or less right, the tunes were there, they were tried and tested in Belfast, one of our last gigs. Even the local DJs in Killarney were playing them. But we had to end it there, because financially, we couldn’t go ahead. 

Joe: There was also the time that Christy Moore wanted to do a track with us. I know, that sounds surreal. 

His son was into dance music, and we met him at the back of The Point one night. He would have been 16 or 17 at the time, and was mad to see The Prodigy and mad to see us. Christy was backstage, and we got chatting to him. He said he had an idea for a track for us, with a bodhran, and a little bit of ‘diddly-eye’. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I remember thinking ‘God, here we go again’. 

By right, we should have just had an offshoot with a different name, and all we could have been doing is trad mixed with electronic music. Dance fusion kind of stuff.

There was a chat backstage, and then he rang me a couple of times after that. I didn’t want to say no to him, you know? I just kind of said, ‘look, we’ll work on something’. And we left it there. I never got back to him. Because you don’t say ‘no’ to Christy Moore, you know? 

That was at the time we were trying to steer clear of all that stuff. But if Christy Moore rang me up tomorrow morning and said he wanted to do a track, I would say ‘bring it on, Christy!’

Steve: There are some times that you think back and you think ‘should I remix some of those old tracks’ and maybe re-release them. But I would always be of the mindset that you need to move forward with music, you don’t look back. That was probably one of my biggest problems in the studio, when I was listening to a track over and over, and then it was released and played live, I just got sick of it. I wanted to play something new. 

Joe: It was a blast while it lasted. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. If we had the time again, would we have sucked it up and played Storm everywhere? Probably not, to be honest. 

Fast forward to the preset day – Matt drives the link bus from Killarney to Dublin Airport, Joe organises golf tours around County Kerry, and Steve works in the family’s electrical hardware shop, while also still producing music in his spare time. There are occasional DJ gigs, albeit not under The Fourth Dimension banner – Steve and Joe played the INEC in Killarney at the end of December, around three decades on from 4th Dimension’s first gig in the Gleneagle.

Steve: Every Christmas, we have a bit of a get together and just play a few tunes, and there’s a nephew of ours who likes it as well, so he does a bit of DJing. It’s sort of an ‘everyone’s home for Christmas’ kind of thing. The people that were into The Fourth Dimension from the local area get together and have a bit of fun. 

Joe: We played at the Gleneagle last December, which was funny, because it was almost exactly 30 years from the time we were told by the manager that we would ‘never get into this venue again’, let alone play there again. 

That has to do with the fact that I sold The Prodigy as a rock gig, because I knew if I sold it as a rave, it would be shut down straight away. I told the venue, ‘this is a rock and roll group, there’s an element of fusion about them, a bit of dancing’. The music at the Gleneagle was very conservative at the time. When it was over, the manager was traumatised – because it was f**king bedlam, 1,500 to 2,000 people flying around. He swore to me that we would never allowed in there again. So anyway, we were back last Christmas… ha ha.

Steve: Actually, one of the nicest compliments I ever got about the whole 4th Dimension thing was from our parents. They were always giving out, saying we were mad, and asking ‘why would we play that hardcore music’ and that ‘we should be playing traditional music’. 

But a couple of years after The Fourth Dimension finished, we found a scrapbook that my mother had put together, and she was keeping everything. Photos, newspaper articles, all that sort of thing. So even though they were giving us grief about it, they were still appreciative of what we were doing. 

Thanks to Joe, Steve and Matt for the chat. Long live The Fourth Dimension! Words by Stephen Wynne-Jones. 🙂

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