Cian Ó Ciobháin: reflections from the other side
The veteran DJ and broadcaster on club residencies, community, understanding "underground" and 25 years of An Taobh Tuathail
On 1st May 1999, Cian Ó Ciobháin cued up the record that would kickstart the rest of his life. Far from the nearest dancefloor, that Saturday night the 24-year-old DJ stood alone in a studio in Casla, a small village west of Galway where RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, the country’s first Irish-language station, has its headquarters. Soon, a sound unlike anything heard previously on its frequency came through unsuspecting speakers across the country: a hip-hop beat.
The track was ‘The Night Side’ by Danish production trio The Prunes, a slice of slinking, film noir-style boom-bap released on Mo’ Wax in 1996. It set the tone for An Taobh Tuathail, an alternative music show specialising in “fresh interesting sounds for all” – to this day, it broadcasts every weeknight with Ó Ciobháin at its helm, joining the dots between disparate leftfield genres with a curious ear that remains fine-tuned to the present.
When the west Kerry native shows up on my screen for a video call in mid-May, he’s just back from a break in Portugal. Having spent the past few months preparing for An Taobh Tuathail’s 25th anniversary shows – a five-day programme consisting entirely of exclusive, previously unheard music – he devoted much of the past week to catching up on sleep. Between naps, he read, relishing in the electronic musings of Simon Reynolds’ Futuromania, David Cavanagh's The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, and Nick Durden’s Exit Stage Left, which looks into the lives of pop stars after their 15 minutes of fame are up.
Maybe the reading list had something to do with it, but the time away also gave Ó Ciobháin a chance to reflect, not just on the success of ATT’s birthday broadcasts, but on the quarter century of DJing, dancing and discovery that’s led him to this point, and the people around him who’ve been crucial at every step along the way.
“Firstly, I wanted it to be a party – a celebration,” says Ó Ciobháin of An Taobh Tuathail’s anniversary episodes, which ran from 29th April to 3rd May and featured new music from Irish and international artists including Eomac, Natalia Beylis, Junk Drawer and Gruff Rhys. “I wanted the shows that week to feel like the early days; to recreate the feeling that listeners had back then, when they couldn’t possibly have heard any of the music anywhere else. It harked back to a time when radio DJs used to get all their music up front and stuff wasn’t leaked, because the internet back then didn’t really accommodate it.”
“The biggest thing that came out of it was the feeling of community around the programme that struck me as particularly apparent that week,” he adds, noting that among the show’s loyal listenership are numerous “criminally ignored” musicians for whom ATT provides their sole airtime. “All the artists really got behind it, announcing to their followers online that an exclusive track was going to get its very first airing, which created a general excitement that chimed with others and most definitely made new listeners aware of the show.”
Others who sent new music in said that tuning into the week’s varied programming inspired their own creativity, a compliment that’s stuck with Ó Ciobháin in the weeks since. “I like that [ATT] can be a place where somebody might hear something and be nudged to try something new, or to approach their music in a new way,” he remarks.
It’s an energy his show has exuded since day one: a welcoming hand extended to listeners of all persuasions. Everyone’s invited to An Taobh Tuathail, which translates to mean The Other Side, so long as they’re open to hearing something a little different to the usual. This unpretentious manner has helped Ó Ciobháin weather the industry’s perpetually changing tides and maintain this anomalous jewel in Ireland’s media landscape. Sift through its archive and ask yourself: where else on national radio can you hear experimental ambient tracks from Eamon Ivri, KMRU and Mantua alongside songs by Elliot Smith and Broadcast? Or step into a full-pelt kitchen rave soundtracked by or:la, Autumns and Robert Hood, held together with easy-going links delivered as Gaeilge? On late-night drives down rural roads, incidental listeners may be introduced to the music of the late Japanese visionary Susumu Yokota, local krautrockers Trá Pháidín and The Jimmy Cake, or psychedelic dub ensemble African Head Charge.
Post-anniversary, Ó Ciobháin’s been feeling re-energised; happy to settle back into the “quotidienne” of his nightly music ritual. “Working on the anniversary shows and promoting them took up quite a bit of my time over the past couple of months, so the freedom of going back to my regular routine is lovely,” he says, acknowledging that if it weren’t for RnaG, this routine would be long gone. “It just would not have lasted 25 years anywhere else. I’m so glad I wasn’t lured elsewhere... It would have been replaced by something else on the schedule, as happens on commercial stations.”
That An Taobh Tuathail came into existence at all is a minor miracle. “It was a huge deal at the time to hear modern electronic music on RTÉ RnaG,” Ó Ciobháin explained recently of the show’s early days on the station, where he’d scored an internship shortly after graduating university in Galway, working as a continuity announcer and giving on-air weather updates. When broadcasting hours were extended in early 1999, he submitted a 20-page proposal for a late-night contemporary music show, assuring management that he could uphold their ban on songs with English lyrics, which remained in place until 2005. “The station exclusively played almost all Irish traditional music and folk songs,” he said. “It was quite the culture shock to go from sean-nós and polkas to the driving, hedonistic techno of Slam’s ‘Positive Education’.”
Around this time, Ó Ciobháin was deep in the Galway dance scene, having caught “the tail end” of Salthill’s halcyon clubbing days while in college, and having launched the now-fabled 110th Street nights with Cyril Briscoe in November 1998. The pair went on to throw regular parties across the city over the next two decades in spaces like The GPO, The Town Hall, The Drum, The Vic, The Radisson and the Black Box, most of which no longer exist – none with a capacity for late-night dancing. They regularly hosted legendary DJs like Erol Alkan and Andrew Weatherall – whose thumping selections and genre-free spirit resonated with their own.
When the latter tragically passed away in early 2020, Ó Ciobháin paid tribute to one of his “biggest influences and total heroes in my life” in an article for RTÉ, which he followed up a year later, recounting stories of The Guv'nor’s visits to Galway. In 2022, it was Ó Ciobháin who led the search for the young Cork fisherman credited with imparting Weatherall with the phrase: “Fail we may, sail we must.”
In 2002 – a year after Ó Ciobháin and Hector Ó hEochagáin were sent to Ibiza by TG4 to report back on its hedonistic club culture – 110th Street commenced its bi-weekly residency in The GPO (later Carbon), where they tapped into the early thrill of electroclash and what the club’s flyers described as “punky funky, robo-pogo disco”. Among their semi-regular bookings were The Glimmers, a Belgian DJ duo famed for their marathon sets in Ghent’s Culture Club. “They were a huge influence on two particular young local clubbers, who were later inspired to DJ themselves as 2ManyDJs,” Ó Ciobháin says. “Also, on the rare occasion that Optimo couldn’t make their Sunday night residency in Sub Club in Glasgow, The Glimmers were the only DJs they trusted to call in to cover.”
He recalls how, after booking them to play in The GPO’s smaller room a few times, The Glimmers had built-up a near-mystical reputation in Galway. When they came over later to play in the main-room, there was a roadblock of people down Eglinton Street scrambling to get in. Ó Ciobháin found a recording of the set recently, and has been blasting it in his car ever since. “It’s just wild punk rock energy,” he grins. “Some of the mixes are a little bit loose; they were just flying in… Italo, techno, electroclash, disco, pop, the 1950s Batman theme tune. They played the entire night. They were amazing.”
When hearing these stories, or reading Ó Ciobháin’s in-depth accounts of Galway's dance scene in the early ‘00s, you get a clear picture of just how crucial club residencies were to the cultivation of a healthy scene at that time. In these regular slots, DJs could hone their own sounds, learn to read a room with alchemical precision, and forge loyal followings of local dancers who would return again and again, whether or not there was an international headliner on the bill.
In this atmosphere of symbiotic trust between dancefloor and DJ, certain records could take on a mythical status – random anthems could be woven into the historical fabric of a party, club or town by pure virtue of repeated spins. Ó Ciobháin recalls a night when they played Mylo’s ‘Drop The Pressure’, a throwaway B-Side from 2003’s Paris Four Hundred EP. “We’d been playing the track for a few weeks before it eventually took off,” he remembers. “Then, one night, as soon as the first couple of bars came in, everyone lost it. It still hadn’t blown up everywhere else, but we’d been rinsing it, and through playing it at the club every week, everyone recognised it.”
While there are clearly more pressing matters at hand for dance music in Ireland and elsewhere in 2024 – a dearth of spaces, prohibitive licencing laws, the commercialisation of “the underground” – the loss of these types of opportunities for young DJs is a sticking point for Ó Ciobháin – a not unconnected casualty in a maelstrom of issues. “From a DJ’s point of view, learning your trade with a residency is one of the most valuable things,” he says. “We took it for granted when we had them. I just wonder how younger DJs get to practise now. You need to kind of do it in real time in front of an audience. Playing the whole night, learning how to build a set, when to peak and, of course, making mistakes – it’s all part of the process of becoming a better DJ”.
“I played out most Saturdays between 1998 and 2008,” he continues. “People were just going out to see DJs who lived in their city, who they probably kind of knew in the streets. So, it was really just friends getting together and having a party – there was a community feel to it.”
So much of electronic music’s community-building now takes place online, with young, digital native collectives exchanging tracks and mixes and uplifting each other that way. When bricks and mortar spaces are hard to come by, it’s certainly no bad thing, but, as Ó Ciobháin sees it, it’s one of the few benefits that “the internet in our pocket” has brought to the scene. “Clubs were places where there were no instruments of mass surveillance,” he says. “I saw some guy memorably put it once: the way clubs are now, you might as well broadcast your best gurn to the internet. A random photo posted online from a night out might affect someone’s possibility of getting a job down the line. The privacy, the hallowed space that clubs used to have, where you could go and dance and no one would photograph or video you, is gone. There’s no turning back there.”
All that being said, Ó Ciobháin is no doomer. “We talk about ‘back in the day’,” he offers. “But when were used to be doing rocking nights in The GPO in the early 00s, you’d still have some older clubber come up to you, tap you on the shoulder, and say, deadly serious, that it was better ‘back in the day’, as if I wanted to hear that in the middle of a cueing up a record! I caught the tail end of Salthill clubbing, and a bit of ‘Sweat’ at [legendary Cork club] Sir Henry’s as well, and there were even people there in the early ‘90s saying that it wasn’t wasn’t as good then as it had been in ‘88 and ‘89!
“To a young person experiencing a nightclub or that music for the very first time, they're still going to experience the whole holistic thrill of entering that space, and not just seeing what it might look like through an Instagram clip, in pretty much the same magical way we did,” he adds. “The thrill of going clubbing for the first time and hearing beats played loud, in real life, surrounded by other dancing bodies… you can’t take that away.”
Amid all the intolerable “hard dance” about – “I can't remember the last time young people made electronic music that pissed older people off so much” – Ó Ciobháin’s been impressed by plenty of next generation DJs. “I hear lots of younger DJs who are absolutely amazing and they’ve only played a handful of gigs,” he says. “I wonder where they learned to play like this! I look at people’s mixes on Soundcloud and go through the tracklists and I don’t know any of the music. I know there’s so much music out there, but I often wonder where they find it, and how they put it all together if they’re not playing out regularly. But maybe it’s all just from practising at home or at house parties.”
He’s been heartened by the reopening of several Galway clubs in recent months too, after a period of time post-pandemic when there were almost no dedicated dance spaces in the city. As part of ATT’s 25th anniversary celebrations, he played all-night at a sold-out edition of his Disco Dána party in club Cuba, which opened its doors for the first time in over a decade back in March. Between that, the return of Electric, the likes of Shampain and KETTAMA making a splash on the global stage, and parties like Ar Ais Arís working wonders in Club Áras na nGael, the West’s dance scene is feeling revitalised lately. For Ó Ciobháin though, he’s mostly just happy to watch from the sidelines.
“I couldn’t do a residency now; I wouldn’t have the energy,” he says. “And I don't want to step on anyone's toes. I really want the next generation to come forward and do their own thing and not be like: ‘Oh, here’s yer man from 20 years ago’. But if someone wants to invite me along to play a party once or twice a year that’s cool with me!”
From his teenage DJ sets at school discos in west Kerry, where he’d sneak tracks by Joy Division and Pixies into selections of crowd-pleasing chart tunes, through his early days of broadcasting on Flirt FM in University of Galway (then UCG), to his years spent raving in Berlin, Glasgow and London, the key thing for Ó Ciobháin has always been the communal experience of music, and the relationships you build through that. “All of my best friends have been made while out clubbing – people I’ve bumped into at clubs or at an after party,” he says. “They’re the people who I still see years later that I’m the most comfortable with, because I’ve probably been at my most vulnerable with them. And I can’t say enough about that.”
In recent years, the parties that have made him feel most connected to that communal feeling have been Homoelectric and Homobloc events in Manchester, which he tries to get over to whenever he can. “Look, I’m a straight man, but going into those spaces, I can understand what people mean when they talk about safe spaces… I am so comfortable dancing there. Everyone is so relaxed and friendly and open to connecting with you.”
“The word ‘straight’ says it all,” he adds, expanding on the sense of connection he feels toward queer dance spaces. “For me the straight world is the ‘grown-up’ world of bankers, accountants and barristers… The world where people of my age might usually go golfing and stuff. The queer world is where you can go and listen to music with people, where you can comfortably get your freak on, where you can feel completely at ease to express yourself. You smile at somebody and they’ll smile back at you. It’s the opposite of the feeling of unease you might get in a city centre on a Saturday night where you’re avoiding making eye contact with people.”
Conversation turns to the “underground”, and how over the years the word’s meaning has moved beyond its origins into something amorphous and new. A few days after our call, Ó Ciobháin elucidates his thoughts on the matter in a follow-up email:
“For most of An Taobh Tuathail’s existence, RTÉ RnaG’s website described the music that I played as being ‘underground’, but I’m not sure if this label is valid anymore. When the show began broadcasting, one would have to actively seek out any music that was different to what daytime radio stations were playing. You had to be ‘in the know’, or have someone or a source in a magazine tell you about a particular record, which you then had to leave the house, or perhaps even the town you lived in, to go in search of.
“There may only have been 500 copies of that record pressed up on vinyl, available in a select amount of record shops, and if you missed out on buying one of these, there was no way of possessing that particular piece of music unless it was re-pressed or made available on CD at a later stage. Often this was music being played by DJs in actual underground venues, subterranean basements where, in the pre-internet age, you would once more have to have access to the information that a party was happening in order to be present and dance to the music. When pretty much all music can be accessed with just a click of your mouse now, can we truly describe it as ‘underground’? There’s no longer any reason to leave the house, or your town, in pursuit of a particular record. You can hear almost any record you want, whether it’s made in Tokyo or Taiwan, from the comfort of your living room.
“So, I think of ‘underground’ now being more about a community that gathers around a band, a venue, or a club night makes sense to me. Somewhere for like-minds to congregate and not be surrounded by ‘straights’ or, as Sinéad O’Connor liked to call them, ‘squares’. Though ‘underground’ is still a handy catch-all phrase, it probably makes more sense to older music fans to describe it as an attitude, a feeling – a handy way to describe a less-’corporate’ style of music. However, the current description at the top of the ATT page says ‘fresh interesting sounds for all’, which makes most sense to me right now.”
With the show’s anniversary celebrations has come a pang of bittersweet reflections on the past, and on the friends and colleagues Ó Ciobháin has said goodbye to over the past decade, such as the late Mark Logan and Keith O’Hanlon of Galway’s Disconauts DJs, and Rónán Mac Aodha Bhuí, ATT’s former co-host who passed away in 2023.
The future, too, can feel like a daunting prospect for someone like Ó Ciobháin, plugged in as he is to right now. “My mother often says that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me,” he laughs. “I get up early, I try and get as much out of my time as possible. I don’t have kids, so I have loads of time to listen to new music. And yet I often feel that I don't have enough time. As you get older, you feel like time is running out. You’re just conscious, like: ‘Can I get everything done?’”
It can seem like a lot, and amidst all the noise of life rushing by as he tries to put a show together each night, you’d have to wonder: can he ever not be arsed? The answer is a resounding ‘sure’, but by the time 10pm rolls around, Ó Ciobháin’s lifelong lodestar sets him back on course to the other side, where it still sounds great, 25 years strong. “Once you put your headphones on and start, you’re back in the groove again.”
Thanks for reading! Come back next week for the latest round-up of new Irish music. In the meantime, be well!