Traces Of The Real

This week sees my exhibition moving down to The Workmans Club on Wellington Quay in Dublin. The Workmans is a recently opened music venue, right beside the Clarence Hotel. It’s a fabulous 160-year old building and before becoming a music venue, had a run of over 100 years as the original Dublin Workingmen’s club. They’ve done a great job of refurbishing it, keeping loads of original features intact, and as well as having an excellent live band room, it has a really nice upstairs bar with big windows looking out over the river Liffey. I’ve been talking to Karl and Karen at the Workmans for a while now about having the exhibition on display in this space and I’m really excited about it finally happening. It’s entirely fitting that the photographs should be on display in a music venue. The upstairs bar, where the exhibition will be, is open to the public each night of the week (though usually not on a Monday) from around 5pm onwards until late. So, this is one for the nightowls.

There will be an opening from 6-8pm on Thursday May 5th to which all and sundry are welcome. Following this, there will be a free gig in the venue, which myself and Karl have organised to mark the start of the exhibition. As may well be obvious, in addition to photography, one of my other great obsessions is music, and in particular the music of the great band Guided By Voices. For the unitiated, Guided By Voices (or GBV as they are known) were a bunch of beer-swilling misfits from Dayton Ohio who started in the mid-80s and carried on until a few years ago. Led by song-writing genius Robert Pollard (who once boasted that he could write five songs while taking a shit, and three of them will be good), they never achieved any sort of mainstream success but left behind a vast slew of music that rivals the output of any other musical combo, past or present, you might care to mention. Based on what Pollard calls the four P’s (Pop, Punk, Prog and Psych) their songs run the full gamut from scratchy lo-fi surreal vignettes to rousing power-pop anthems.

A few years ago, myself and some musician pals started a Guided By Voices tribute band, which we called Voided By Ponces. We do this partly because we think it’s funny to have a tribute band to an act most people haven’t heard of, but mostly because it’s a lot of fun to get together every now and then, crack open some cans of beer, and play GBV songs for a few hours. Anyway, Karl from the Workmans has kindly handed over the venue to us for the night and we decided to put on a full Guided By Voices celebration gig. We are going to play, but we also invited a bunch of other Dublin acts to play too, all of whom are coming to worship at the altar of GBV. The full line-up is

Voided By Ponces
Squarehead
Yeh Deadlies
The Riot Tapes
Powered By Springs
The Former Soviet Republic

The show kicks off at 8pm (right after the opening), admission is FREE, and it will run until whenever we all run out of songs to play.