Dubliner Karen Walshe has been working on large-scale events for 17 years now including Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, St. Patrick's Festival, Tall Ships, Electric Picnic, Body & Soul and the Dublin International Film Festival. This year, she is working as the general manager of Musictown, the city-wide event that is taking place across ten days in April.
Walshe's main role at festivals has varied over the years from press to promotion to production to management to curation but one thing that is apparent in her festival role is a willingness to live and breathe the event she's working on.
Get stuck in
"I tell people who I'm starting to work with that 'once I'm in this, I'm in it'. It's not a job," Walshe says. "I'll be thinking about it at night-time and first thing in the morning.
Walshe understands the hard work involved in putting on a big event. She says the characteristics of a good manager is being calm, organised and getting stuck in. “You're picking up litter or making sure the tech person is there on time, whatever needs to be done beyond your job criteria.”
“As soon as you launch, you start firefighting all sorts of things,” she says. “It becomes reactionary. You've got to work all hours of the day, put the kids to bed and go back to the computer because, I know, after the event is done, then, I'll get some time off.”
Walshe learned on the job, first as a press and promotions for the Temple Bar Music Centre (now the Button Factory) where she worked under the general manager at the time, Aoife Woodlock, who is currently the programmer of Other Voices, alongside Fin O'Leary, who is now a booker in MCD.
It was there she developed her enthusiasm for event management, right down to the nitty gritty of noticing the sticky floors. “I worked on the events during the day and went to them at night-time,” she remembers. “What better job could you have in your 20s in Dublin?”
DEAF
Walshe's first big festival role came out of that period. After putting on club nights in the Music Centre with Eamonn Doyle of D1 Recordings, a plan was hatched to create a festival around electronic music in the city. Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) was born.
The festival ran from 2002 to 2009 and in that time showcased electronic talent from home and abroad. Events ranged from performances in karaoke rooms to gigs in City Hall to multi-room mini-festivals in the Guinness Storehouse. Performers included revered figures in electronic music such as Plaid, Modeselektor, Ulrich Schnauss, Model 500, Photek, M83 and Laurent Garnier.
Walshe remembers fondly a show in Dublin City Hall from Coil as a highlight of her time with DEAF. It was, unbeknownst to anyone then, Coil's last show.
“The fact that the city manager allowed us to use City Hall was a shocker, “ Karen recalls. “The show was sold out and a huge success, but sadly not long afterwards - two weeks in fact - John Balance died by falling from his balcony at home.”
Walshe credits working on DEAF as her university masters as she learned so much in that time, due to being a small team of two with occasional help. “We funded it, wrote applications, pitched to sponsors, programmed, staffed it, managed it – we did nearly everything,” she says.
Challenges and mistakes
Despite the workload, the pay wasn't enough to live on. She took restaurant shifts in-between her events work, but Walshe had a long-term goal in mind.
“I knew then that I wanted to be working for myself, that I would be independent and that I wanted to go from event to event and have a colourful year,” Karen states. “Eventually the balance shifted, I started getting paid and left that restaurant job.”
There were mistakes along the way. In the second last year of DEAF in 2008, the closing party joined the three rooms of Whelan's and The Village together for one big multi-stage event featuring Laurent Garnier, Model 500, Fuck Buttons and more. Unfortunately, Moritz Von Oswald, one of the Whelan's headliners had a stroke on the flight to Dublin and ended up in hospital all week. That meant, an imbalance of acts in The Village which lead to capacity trouble as the crowds didn't flow between the venues as hoped.
“The shit hit the fan that night for us as everyone wanted to get into The Village for Laurent Garnier,” Walshe grimaces. “There were people spitting at us at the door. There were people looking to beat us up. It was horrible. In the end, we reimbursed more people than we needed to.”
“It shows that you need to be more realistic with what you can achieve and you need to look out for a worst-case scenario and we hadn't planned for it.”
In the end, securing funding for DEAF became an insurmountable task and the pair made a decision to move on. “It was becoming tiring and there was no reward coming back,” Karen recounts. “We decided to leave on a high.”
Musictown
The work that Walshe has done often included a programme of events for the public, in the city. That experience has lead to her current role, as the general manager of Musictown, an eclectic programme of city-wide events running for 10 days from April 10th-19th. Everything from Handel's Messiah to Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee, the programme says.
The programme includes free daytime events such as Breaking Tunes' Music Trail with 20 bands performing around the city to The Quiet Tree, a traditional Irish musical performance specifically designed for young children, happening in Ballyfermot.
“In the first night of Musictown, you're going to see hip-hop with Hank Shocklee, you've got Opera in Christchurch, there's contemporary pop-up pieces in the evening, to improvised film screening in the IFI,” says Walshe.
Musictown's first year is about what appetite is out there, with an aim of encouraging cross-collaboration across genres and scenes, with an aim to develop more community involvement, all going well.
Come together
"The main reason that Musictown is being put on is because music is so fractured," says Walshe. "Everyone looks after their own area and no-one really wants to share resources and funding opportunities.
“In the theatre world, you've got the Fringe Festival or Dublin Theatre Festival, which bring everyone together as an example of what's going on across the whole year.
“That's what we want to do with Musictown, to bring everyone together, unify the city, the musicians and genres and start getting people talking and collaborating with a hope to eventually, share resources and venues.”
One such show that she's looking forward to is Barrytown Meets Musictown in Vicar Street on Sunday April 12th, billed as "a music and literary celebration of Roddy Doyle's The Barrytown Trilogy. The event is being put together but Walshe's old boss, Aoife Woodlock.
"It's not just acts coming up on stage," Walshe explains "Everything is scripted. Musicians and actors will be coming together. There'll be pieces from The Snapper and The Van. It's Roddy's favourite songs too. It's going to be a special night."
Walshe hopes Musictown's attempt at cohesion across scenes will feed into Dublin's bid for the Capital of Culture in 2020. “ We want to talk about how we can come together as a city and how can we work together in future.”
