One of the most iconic Dublin club nights of the early 90s – UFO – returns for a one-off 30th anniversary bash at The Sound House on Friday 22 November.
The brainchild of DJs Francois Pittion and Mick Heaney, both of whom are set to take to the decks on what promises to be an epic night, UFO (or Unlimited Freak Out) began life as a Friday night soirée in the UCD bar, before moving on to the Rock Garden and later The Waterfront/Columbia Mills – in the process becoming a Dublin clubbing institution.
For Pittion, who was elected Entertainment (or Ents) officer at UCD in 1988, while undertaking an Arts degree, the level to which UFO exploded in just a few short years was unlike anything he or his contemporaries had experienced, and helped light the touchpaper for the capital’s clubbing scene to follow.
909originals caught up with Pittion – better known as DJ Francois – to talk about the UFO story.
Before we get on to UFO, I remember you showing me flyers from various dance events in UCD from the late 80s/early 90s. There’s one from a Students Union gig at the Mansion House in 1989, with ‘DJ Piglet and Sonic Mindscape’, and another promoting a night called Rave On – UCDSU presents Dance NRG. That was around the time you were Ents Officer, right?
Yeah, I put that on. I was elected Entertainment Officer in 1988, and obviously the whole acid house thing was kicking off. I had been involved in other clubs before, such as the Anarchy Night Cafe in Sides.
Mick Heaney, who is doing the back room at UFO 30, I met by chance, because he was wearing a obscure band t-shirt – “Oh, you like The Prisoners?” – and we started chatting and became friends. He’s got absolutely savage music knowledge and a massive record collection.
On Saturdays in the Belfield bar, there was cheap pints and a commercial disco. Mick and I approached the bar committee and asked them whether we could do Friday nights. We started in there, and it took off really quickly because it was a mixture of indie punk, hip hop, punk, soul, rap, techno – I suppose Balearic would be the best way to describe it.
When I was DJing in the Anarchy Night Cafe, though – that would have been around 1986 – it was more about punk, American hardcore. That was in Sides on a Wednesday, and up to Fibber McGee’s for a while.
So, when you joined UCD you were doing arts, and then you became Ents Officer. To get a sense of the UCD social scene, what kind of stuff did they used to put on there? That was a few years on from those infamous Belfield punk gigs, where somebody died. But things were starting to pick up again?
It was really thanks to Mickey O’Rourke, actually – he went on to work on one of the big sports channels, selling GAA games via satellite to the US. He really professionalized the whole Ents Officer role. So, there was Rag Week and Freshers Week, there would have also been lunchtime gigs, there would have been gigs at night. Things going on all the time, loads of discos. He really improved the Freshers Ball by bringing it on campus, where previously it would have been in places like the Olympic Ballroom. I just followed on from that.
The scene was very good. I remember the lunchtime gigs down by the lake if it was nice and sunny, you used to have A-House, Blue in Heaven, The Golden Horde – the cream of 80s indie rock. They would set up the PA there, and if it was raining, they would just move in to the bar.
When you took over as Ents Officer, did you have a core policy in mind – was there a poster stating ‘this is what Francois Pittion stands for’, and is going to do this, or that?
Actually, my brother was into Rainbow, the heavy metal band, and on one of their albums, there was a gatefold sleeve of some guys holding a banner that said ‘Long Live Rock and Roll’, so I used that as my poster. It was really about doing more of the same. Mickey O’Rourke had set the template.
We didn’t actually get the Friday nights up and running in the bar until about 1990. I had dropped out of UCD by that stage actually. There were a run of Ents Officers after that, including Paul Davis from Influx, who was there for two years.
So there was a big demand for alternative music at UCD, not necessarily dance yet…
Yeah, anything that would be considered alternative. I mean, Mick got into Nirvana before anyone had ever heard of them. I remember he played Smells Like Teen Spirit the place went f**king insane to it. It was the same with Revolution by Spacemen 3, another track that people went mad to, and we’d play stuff by Butthole Surfers, as well as a bit of punk and hip hop.
It wasn’t called UFO then, was it?
It was, yeah. I nicked the name from the famous Pink Floyd club in the 1960s that was called the Unlimited Freak Out, and I thought ‘that sounds like a great name’.
So we’re now at 1990, and the dance scene in Ireland is starting to really kick off. I remember Liam Dollard saying that for him, 1991 was the year that everything really started in Dublin; ecstasy was available, and the dance scene was really kicking off. Would you say there an underground appreciation for certain narcotics in UCD?
There always was. There was always a big vibe. I mean, it tended to be mushrooms and speed, maybe acid as well. I was quite surprised, looking back, at the amount of drug taking that was involved. But it was not heavy drug taking – in the 70s there was a big heroin scene in UCD. That kind of disappeared.
I remember one time we organised a mass trip – about 150 people met in the bar at midday. They all dropped acid, and there was absolute f**king chaos around campus for the next eight hours. Running around the library, there was panic.
There was another time, that a friend of mine, Paul, came in with literally a bread bag full of mushrooms, and started doling them out. People just enjoying themselves.
When did the dance thing start to creep in? You had hip hop, alternative, Balearic – when did UFO become more dance-oriented?
It was there from the start. But just to kind of wind it back a bit, I was always into electronic music, since I was a kid. I remember listening to Switched On Bach when I was a five year old, and then there was Autobahn and Oxygene and all that sort of stuff. When synth pop came along in the 1980s, I really got into that, And then when the dance stuff came along, it was really piano rave.
We would play that stuff in the bar, a lot of the well known stuff – The Kraken, that sort of thing. We might do half and hour of indie, half an hour of punk, half an hour of funk, half an hour of house or rave and stuff like that. It started at 7.30pm until about 11pm, maybe 11.30, and after three weeks the place was going f**king mental every Friday.
There were people dancing up on tables, and we brought in dance risers, loads of strobes, an extra PA. The works really. Although we were still using these ancient Citronix belt-drive decks, so it was a bit of a task.
So it gets to 11.30pm, and I’m sure you’re thinking ‘what are we supposed to do now’?
Oddly enough, the two Ents Officers in UCD at the time, Hugh and Carl, were approached by Jeff Brennan of the Rock Garden at that time. He said he’d like to do a tie-in. So I thought, ‘why don’t we run buses from the bar into the Rock Garden’, and that’s basically how it started.
Before we get into talking about the Rock Garden, The Shamen played at UCD as well, right? Was that when Paul Davis was Ents Officer?
Yes, it was Paul Davis then. He also got the Dust Brothers to play, before they were known as the Chemical Brothers. The Shamen gig was really the idea of these lads from Bray, we used to call them the ‘Bray Mafia’. They told us to get The Shamen. I had Move Any Mountain on 12-inch, and it was a huge hit in the bar. So we brought them over.
They only played for about 25 minutes anyway, and Mr. C doing Move Any Mountain was the big hit. Lovely people… doling out tabs left, right and centre.
How aware were the UCD authorities about what was going on?
To be honest, Seamus Boylan, the head barman, he was pretty cool about it. I mean, he did make a couple of pointed remarks about the drop in beer sales and the increase in Lucozade of all things, but we didn’t really get any pushback on it.
In fact, we were deliberately seeded the Sunday World, we had an article going ‘Shocking Shamen To Play UCD Rave’. We totally hyped up the whole thing. It’s funny when you look back at the whole press thing, people just realised what a load of bollocks it was.
Yeah, I remember when I was researching Analog Rhythms, any press coverage about dance music was 100% negative. It wasn’t until well into the 90s that people started to think of it like a cultural revolution. Ok, so you were fanning the flames a little bit, but even then, there was no knock on the door saying, ‘look, you got to call a halt to these?’
Yeah, in fairness to them, they were, they were pretty open minded. They obviously weren’t stupid and they must have know what was going on. But, we never ran into any issues. Maybe Paul Davis had a bit of pushback, but I certainly didn’t.
Moving on to the Rock Garden, then. This started as an after-party, right, after the night finished in UCD?
Yeah, it was a case of everyone would pile onto a bus, and head to the Rock Garden.
Obviously I did the piece recently about Horny Organ Tribe, and that went into the Rock Garden at around the same time, as well as Juju Club?
There was lots going on, there was S1W, there was Girls, Girls, Girls. I frequented the place quite a lot. It was all upstairs, and the room only held about 80 people. So that kind of gave it a real family atmosphere.
It was my favourite venue of the whole lot – at the start of the rave thing, everyone knew each other. They were there religiously every week, and there was a brilliant atmosphere.
Talking to Tonie Walsh about the Horny Organ Tribe, he mentioned that one of the reasons it started was because he was bored with what was going on in the city at the time.
Well, Sides was still going on at that time, but it was a bit rough and ready by that stage, The gay crew had moved on from it by that stage. I used to go to the Mansion House, Sides, and other than that, we used to have lots of parties in people’s houses.
At that time, I remember Jeff Brennan, the Rock Garden guy, said, ‘look, what are you doing with the two Ents Officers, just get rid of them’. So I brought on John Collins and Louise Mahon to, to help. UFO wouldn’t have existed without them anyway, without their help – I really have to credit the pair of them.
When we started doing the Friday nights, it just grew and grew, and that culminated in our first birthday party, where we took over the whole Rock Garden – upstairs and downstairs – and we had Liam Dollard, Johnny Moy and Warren K playing. We turned away something like 1,000 people out on the street trying to get in, it was unreal.
From the start you kind of had an identity for the club, with the Penguin book cover flyers, and the Michelin man imagery. Where did that idea come from?
The Penguin books thing was John Collins. He was doing a marketing degree – he was also a journalist for Hot Press at the time – and he came up with that idea.
With the Michelin man, we were walking home from Belfield bar one night, and we saw an old metal sign up on a garage, in Clonskeagh, that had closed. We climbed up, took it down, and thought ‘that would make a great poster’. We got it printed up then.
Was Mick Heaney still involved at this stage?
In fairness to Mick, he said to me ‘look, they’re here for the dance stuff, they’re not here for the obscure funk and things like that. So why don’t you plough your own furrow?’ He was getting into journalism at the time as well. We’re still good friends, and we still DJ together, maybe three or four gigs a year.
What was on the UFO playlist by this stage?
It had gone from piano rave to stuff on Limbo, Gorilla Records, trance, progressive house and things like that. I think that was a golden age for club music, the labels were producing some absolutely marvellous music.
I remember when Hardfloor – Acperience came out, nobody had ever heard anything like it. We played it in the bar and the place absolutely erupted. I stuck it on twice.
You also had a membership club, didn’t you? With a newsletter called Ufology?
Yeah, we had the newsletter, we had a mailing list – we got early into the Internet. We had t-shirts, we had branded matchboxes. And we had gold and silver membership cards, which got you a reduced rate into the club.
So now we’re getting into 1994/95, and you start to see venues starting to materialise. The Ormond Multimedia Centre opens. The Pod opens. The Waterfront, later Columbia Mills, starts doing dance gigs. Or had those been going for a while?
Yeah, they had Funk Off running for a while on Thursdays, that was Eoin Foyle’s night.
The Rock Garden had changed hands by that stage, so we were kind of lost for a bit. We ended up in Power’s Hotel for about a month. We had the run of the place, and I remember one night, a busload of American tourists arrive – their flight must have been delayed. They’re coming into the lobby, and there’s people there off their chops, tops off, massaging each other. It was kind of hilarious.
The opportunity to go into The Waterfront came along. Robbie Wooton was running the place at the time. From day one, it was packed out.
At the same time, there was a bit of an issue with the venue, in that it was historically used by gangland members as a drinking spot. You used to have the Penguin’s gang drinking there. One Paddy’s Day, it came to a head when all these north inner city guys tried to storm the door. They attacked the bouncers with baseball bats and clubs and things like that. And then the following week, we got raided.
The music policy at that point had been German hard trance, European trance, but after we got raided, we decided, ‘ok, we’re really more into techno’, so let’s focus on techno. We changed the name to Alien, and we focused more on underground techno. We had Surgeon play there when he was still unknown – he stayed in John’s house. Luke Slater, Cristian Vogel, people like that. It had changed to Alien, but people still called it UFO.
Actually after we got raided the the cops were in, talking to Robbie Wooton about revoking his licence, and he did his posh schoolboy thing – ‘yes, sir, thank you very much, sir’ – and was able to remain open.
So in terms of how the UFO story ended, then, it was on a high? It was all crescendo, there was no real collapse, just an evolution?
Yeah, that’s basically it. More and more clubs came on stream, and more events started happening. So the crowd started to thin out a bit. I mean, I was lucky, I was established as a DJ. John was already working in journalism and marketing, and Louise was working in the restaurant industry.
We’re talking about 1996/97 now, right? Columbia Mills was open for a few years after that, right?
Yeah, 1996. Mark Kavanagh started doing Unknown Pleasures in there, which was great. Then Pat O’Keeffe started running the Friday nights. That wasn’t a great night, though, it was kind of the beginning of the end for that place.
Obviously this is the 30th anniversary UFO party coming up, but I don’t remember there being a 10-year anniversary, or a 20-year anniversary?
No, we never did one. Actually it came about a couple of years ago – Louise died, and myself and John were talking about giving it ‘one more lash’ and then that would be it then.
It’s hard to explain to anyone under thirty just how vibrant every day of the week was in Dublin back then. Yes, the opening hours were shite compared to the rest of Europe, but any day of the week you had so many options. And UFO was part of that mix. When you think back, did you feel like you were part of a movement?
Back then, you wouldn’t have come out and said ‘I’m a techno DJ’, or ‘I like going to rave clubs’. You just didn’t. It was kind of taboo in a way. But at the same time, you’d be walking down the street, and see how someone was dressed, or you might bump into them in a record shop, and you would ‘know’.
I remember one guy that used to go to UFO, he had a job servicing restaurants. I met him in the Kylemore Café on College Green one morning when I was getting coffee. He was there servicing the coffee machine. And he’s just there going ‘you don’t tell, I won’t tell.’
To finish off, then, were there any particular one-off memories that stand out from the UFO days, or any moments when it was like ‘how the f**k did we pull that off?’
Yeah, there were quite a few, but I’m not sure if I can remember them to be honest, ha ha. One of the best memories for me was when I got a promo copy of Born Slippy before anyone else had heard it, and when the drums kicked in, The Waterfront went absolutely f**king mental. It was something else.
Surgeon playing was another highlight, also Rolando, of Knights of the Jaguar fame. He stood in for Robert Hood. Robert Hood’s girlfriend/wife at the time was also his booking agent, and I remember she phoned up Louise, and she starts going ‘you think you can take a black man out of the ghetto to play black man’s music to a bunch of white kids?’ Anyway, Robert Hood pulled out, and we did a deal with the Sub Club in Glasgow and got Rolando to step in. He was incredible.
You mentioned about the club being raided, would that have been a low point?
Yeah, that was a different experience – the club was rammed, and all of a sudden it got raided. Actually I have a copy of the Evening Herald from that night actually. A big headline on the front page – 16 Teens Held In Ecstasy Swoop.
But it’s all good memories. As I said, it was kind of like a family, where everybody knew each other because we were there religiously every week. Also, we were privileged in that we were given a chance to play music that wasn’t really part of the mainstream, obscure Detroit techno and stuff like that. I do think we laid the path for people like D1 and stuff like that.
UFO 30 takes place at The Sound House, Dublin, on Friday 22 November, with François, Warren K, Dean Sherry, Decal (Live) and Mick Heaney set to appear. Tickets are priced at €25 and can be purchased here. A donation from ticket proceeds will be made to BelongTo, the LGBTQ youth organisation which caters for young people aged between 14–23 years.
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