Back to the Lane: A Tale of Standing Outside the First Post Pandemic DIY Punk Gig in Ireland

I was at the last local punk gig before the lockdown. It was the final Disguise gig, probably the final gig in Jigsaw ever and it was great craic. Quintessentially pre-Covid. Rammed full of people shouting loudly in each other’s faces to be heard over the racket of everyone else doing the same.

The jacks was overwhelmed at some point in the evening and the toilets backed up, leaking sewage into the venue and onto some of the gear. I’ve heard some horror stories from people who had to load out and clean up. It was wild, it was messy, it was gloriously early 2020.

There were a few things that seemed strange then and seem unfathomable now. Out in the garden, I got caught in the crossfire of a spit fight between two very young and unfamiliar punks and got inadvertently spit on, square in face from less than two feet away. Your man that spit on me was very apologetic, and I had bought the sincerity of his apology up to the point, later in the evening where he forgot what I looked like and confided in me that he had spit in some poor sap’s face and started to bad mouth me simultaneously to my face and behind my back.

That gig was great though. Everyone was in deadly form and all the bands killed it. It had everything that we have had to live without over the last two years. Live music. Close contact. Germs. Raucous conversations between people who don’t live together. Even getting grabbed and somewhat violently dragged around the venue by a man commonly referred to as Catweasle now seems strangely comforting. I have only made physical contact with less than a dozen people since that gig. Much like the spitting, it seems oddly innocent now.

But things in Ireland are open again. Restaurants are busy. Pubs are packed. Gigs are back on. Close contact is once again on the table. The first proper DIY Punk gig since the first lockdown was a couple of weeks ago and I knew in my stomach that I couldn’t miss it.

By the time I heard about the gig, my wife had already written her name down in black biro on the calendar for the night. That calendar is the law in my house so it wouldn’t be easy for me to get to the gig. I pieced a bit of a plan together on how I could catch a bit of it, but a few things had to fall into place for it to work. Thankfully, they finally started to, just hours before the gig and after my wife had already left for the evening. My son got a last-minute invite to a sleepover and even got collected, so that meant that he was sorted. Then I asked my daughter how she would feel about being left in the house on her own for two hours on a Saturday night and she squealed with joy.

Once I got her reaction to the idea, it was too late to back out. She would have been crushed if I had decided to stay home. The bands were scheduled to kick off at nine, so I figured I could definitely hop on the bike and get there for the start, stay for two hours and then be home by eleven. That was about as late as I would feel comfortable leaving my fourteen and a half year old, no matter how much she would have loved to have had the house to herself way later so she could feel like a proper adult.

The hand off was easy. When I left the house Roxy was excitedly tucking into a tub of Ben and Jerry's. She nearly physically pushed me out the front door and into the cold. It was spitting rain and I had to stop at the bottom of the hill to put my waterproof trousers on, but it was nice to be back on the bike for something other than work and back to going to a gig in Phibsboro. It felt refreshingly comfortable and I didn’t even realise I had been smiling the whole way in until I got to the off license and stuck on a mask to grab a few cans.

I got to the lane the bar was on just as the first band was tuning up. I wanted to see all of the bands, but the most important was Snake. I have a long-standing personal commitment that I always do my best to get to the first gig of any band that has someone that I am in a band with or have ever been in a band with. I am in Creepy Future with Karen who is in Snake, so half the reason I wanted to go was to see their debut gig.

The lane was empty enough and I hurried into the Karate Club to stash my bike and take off my rain gear. I checked my phone quickly and saw a message that was as unexpected as the fact that I had managed to make it this far. Roxy had a sudden sore throat and was asking if she could take a Covid test. I immediately set my phone up on a Marshall Cab and pulled up a drum stool in the jam room, and video called Roxy. It was all surreal and totally unexpected.

She answered straight away. In grand form, full of smiles, just as she had been twenty minutes before, but with a Covid test in her hand. We sat there for the entirety of the Snake set, me guiding her through a test I had given her in person myself a half dozen times.

The test was of course negative, although she did have a sore throat, which I eventually got, and which also proved to not be Covid when I tested myself later in the week. The timer on my phone for the test went off just as Snake played their last few notes. I had kept one ear to the gig while Roxy was opening packages and swabbing her nose and they had sounded shit hot, but I had missed them.

When I got out out to the lane it was packed. Wall to wall people. The venue was still rammed and everyone from the scene was there. It was all refreshingly familiar. Eager conversations. Bellies full of laughter. The odd clatter of pints getting knocked over or bottles getting spilled. I even met a few Spanish and Italian punks that were in the middle of some mad adventure. Their stories similar to those I’ve been hearing for years about how they had surfed weird little rabbit holes of punk around Europe and ended up in Ireland because they heard it was great craic. I’d missed those randomer punks that had found out about the gig on some underground that I have long since lost touch with, excitedly professing their love of punk to anyone that would listen.

The venue was rammed. Beyond anything that I would have imagined. I don’t know if I had ever truly planned to actually go into the gig. It being rammed was a good excuse for me to not go inside and to convince myself that hanging out in the lane was enough. As the next band set up, I paid in, got my hand stamped, and walked back outside.

I listened to Santry FC from the lane on my own in the pissing rain and it was deadly. I could actually just stand there and listen to live music for the first time in years. I wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the venue anyway, and even if I had tried, I am quite tall and somewhat wide, so a few people wouldn’t have been able to see the gig just so that I could. So I stayed in the lane. I even had a nice view of St Peters Church and pulled the large metal door at the entrance to the venue over so that I could get a wind break.

Halfway through the set, my old friend Catweasle showed up, had a break dancing session on the wet concrete with a mate of his, knocked over his pint doing a back spin, grabbed my shoulders and yelled ‘Yankee!!’ in my face and disappeared into the venue.

Standing on my own again, it was nice to feel like I could take this return to normality at my own speed. I had told a few of my friends that I wasn’t going in and no one batted an eyelid. There is a great feeling of acceptance about everyone’s comfortability with a return to socialising in Ireland as we emerge from the lockdowns and it was nice to be able to feel ok not going in.

Once the band finished there was no way I could possibly get in for a pint anyways as seemingly everyone who had ever sewn a patch onto a jacket was trying to get one at the same time. I retreated to my bag of cans in the Karate Club and was once again greeted with the familiarity of a busy space. It was great to see everyone out and back to enjoying themselves. Back to talking excitedly in big groups in close quarters.

Then it was back into the lane for great conversations with loads and loads of people I hadn’t seen in ages. People who I saw regularly for years upon years, some of who I even went on foreign holidays with, but who I have barely even said more than two words to since the shit hit the fan. It was great to see all of the familiar faces and hear all of the familiar voices. And it was fabulous to laugh at the old stories and to get the scoop on the new ones.

I temporarily forgot about how much anxiety the last two years had caused me and how much I had written about it until a few old friends made a point to check in on me and ask me how I was doing now. Even though it was slightly embarrassing to realise how much of my inner trauma I had shared with people, it was great to feel that sense of community again. It was nice to be able to tell them that I was doing very well and that even in this packed lane, my anxiety levels were next to zero.

I caught most of Lovescum’s set from the lane and they of course sounded great, but I no longer had the lane to myself. People were still arriving and some were having to queue to get in even if they were already holding pints from the bar. By the time Strong Boys came on, the lane was as packed as the venue and nearly as loud.

It was then that I noticed how over the course of the evening the conversations had started to refer to Covid and the lock-downs in the past tense. There was a definite shift from the present to something that was done. It felt like we had collectively battled a common cause and now we were back and starting to tell the stories of this struggle to each other. This feeling was driven by a sense of celebration. Celebration of being back out, celebration of being back in and celebration of being back together.

This was something that I had ached for in the depths of the lockdowns. In those days I dreamed of the time when we could start to tell each other these dark and strange tales of the pandemic over a few drinks and with humour and joy. These were the first green shoots of those conversations.

I saw loads of new communities in that lane as well. New identities and aesthetics. Fresh and unfamiliar faces. Loads of very young people streaming into the gig, many of them probably attending their first DIY gig like this. The joy and the excitement in their faces was one of the best parts of the night for me. To see them discover the excitement of DIY gigs like these filled me with hope. The next generation starting to fill venues added to the sense that this was a re-birth.

The gig finished and it was my time to leave. The Karate Club was rammed as I grabbed my bike and I kind of hoped that I would feel a pull to go in for a few drinks and boisterous chats in the familiarity of that room. It was nice to know that option was there again, but the only pull I felt was onto the bike and back home.

I think I probably smiled all the way there. It was easy to forget about the last two years. Easy to forget how much the world has changed since I cycled home from that gig in Jigsaw with a tiny bit of someone else’s spit on my face, the outline of Catweasle’s fingers on my sleeves and a bit of sewage on my shoes.

This gig had been deadly. The bands had killed it. The buzz had been mighty. And as all good gigs do, it had felt like a celebration. There have been many times over the last couple of years ago when I wondered how we would ever get back to exactly this point. And we had.

As I cycled up the last hill towards home, I felt a bit like one of those European punks that I had met at the beginning of the night. Excited that I too had followed a bunch of punk rabbit holes in my life and I too had ended up in that fabulous lane, wrapped in that buzz. I’m excited now that gigs are back and they are once again fabulous and I can look forward to more of them. And who knows, next time, just maybe, I’ll actually go in.