Club Culture: Even this 'summer', people are flocking to outdoor raves to savour the sand, sea and sound of music. Derek O'Connor reports
Picture this: it's seven o'clock on a glorious summer morning. The rain has managed to hold off for the night, and dawn has arrived in a suitably impressive fashion. On a small, out-of-the-way beach somewhere in deepest Wicklow, the dawn chorus just happens to consist of some 70 to 80 enthusiastic young people of every shape, size and sort imaginable, whooping, cheering and dancing themselves silly.
As a modest PA blasts out yet another pumping dance tune, it doesn't look like anybody is planning to call it a night at any point in the near future. And, after the summer (or lack thereof) we've just had, do you really blame them?
The beach party season is in full swing, though evidence of its existence is as elusive as ever. For the past decade, thousands of enthusiastic clubbers have been wending their way to destinations all over the country, following a tip-off from some semi-reliable source or other, in search of that big night outdoors.
On spots of inconspicuous coastline (or, in many cases, deep in the heart of anonymous woodlands) they hit the jackpot. As an alternative to the nation's somewhat jaded club scene, the outdoor rave remains popular; weather permitting, naturally. Indeed, when writers from the British style bible The Face want to write about going out in Ireland, they don't jump the queue at the Red Box or take a trip to South; instead, they hit the beaches around the Dublin coast.
"For me," says arts administrator Frank Geary, "it's certainly not intended as a big 'f**k you' to established clubs. It's just about doing something different, taking an alternative approach, and making something good happen." For several summers, Geary helped to run a series of much-loved beach parties, called Dub Trax, on a secluded stretch of beach in the Dublin area.
"If anything, Ireland's just catching up with the rest of Europe. The beach party scene here is as big and vibrant, now, as it is anywhere else you could imagine, possibly even more so."
Geary has since successfully transported the spirit of Dub Trax to the heart of the capital, as one of the movers and shakers behind the resoundingly eclectic Thomas The Skank Engine nights at the Thomas House bar on Thomas Street. He hopes, however, to host another trip to the wilds before the summer is out.
"I'd love to keep doing them," he says. "On a basic level, people are really taking everything in and paying a bit more attention to the whole event than they normally would. When you go to a club, a house party or whatever, there's a boredom that can easily set in. Going to the same places week in, week out, hearing the same people playing a lot of the same music becomes very dull, very quickly, whereas with something outdoors, even getting there can be an adventure. It becomes more of an event, and so people are automatically in better form, more excited by everything that's going on."
There's no particular rhyme, rhythm or structure to the well-run beach party. The location is usually chosen for its distance from any potential hassle, and the set-up involved can range from a cheap DJ rig, a couple of perfunctory lights and a portable generator to elaborate endeavours involving multiple rigs, public facilities and on-site performers. Rocking the house from Bettystown and Glenville to the Glen Of The Downs and Rathlin Island (to name but a few locations for recent events), this is one quiet social revolution that is happy to make a racket - while at pains to avoid causing anything resembling a fuss.
The talent can be surprising: several of the country's prominent DJs can often be found behind the decks, and electronic music behemoths Rephlex - home of The Aphex Twin - hosted a night last year. Financial gain doesn't come into it; a voluntary donation towards the cost of equipment hire is about as serious as things get. Ultimately, the proposition is an utterly simple one; get a lot of people together, dance and have a very good time. If only life could be that simple.
The average beach party remains an enigmatic prospect, by and large, as a matter of necessity. While not illegal per se, the official Garda line on such events remains somewhat blurry, largely due to the sheer diversity of their nature.
The Public Order Act allows the authorities to intervene at any point at which they feel a situation is out of hand; issues of excessive alcohol and illegal drug consumption usually cause concern, as do incidents of unreasonable behaviour, often resulting from the above.
Talk to certain party organisers and they'll tell you tales of surprisingly tolerant Garda behaviour; but that certainly isn't always the case. Last year, a major party on a Dalkey beach, allegedly involving up to well over a thousand people, led to police confiscating equipment and issuing a serious crackdown on an future events in the area.
Film-maker Mike Casey spent some months documenting outdoor excursions along the west coast. "It's always been a very risky business," he says. "For the first couple of years, the events that were being staged were, slowly but surely, becoming more professional, more organised and very ambitious. There were regular nights being run by the same groups of people, and the crowds were rapidly getting bigger and bigger."
FOLLOWING a now-infamous run-in with the Garda at a site near Ballyconneely in Connemara, however, a less tolerant atmosphere prevailed. "After that," says Casey, "everything pretty much reached a critical mass. Equipment was confiscated, and relations grew hostile. All the Garda really did by clamping down on the bigger events was to push the whole scene back underground, where it has thrived ever since. The parties dispersed all over the country, they got smaller, more local - and, in a lot of cases, even better. Before, everybody would know when a night was happening; these days, people only let the people they want to come know what's going on. That said, word always travels."
While word of mouth is very important, the Internet remains the average party fiend's favourite method of communication. Online discussion groups, such as ie.dance, attract reams of IT Mc-jobbers who while away their hours at the console passing on titbits about the forthcoming weekend's activities. Some of the more organised clubbing collectives around the country even host dedicated sites, offering everything from details of forthcoming events to advice on staging your own events.
Did you know that gazebos make for a cheap and handy mini-marquee, to protect your sound system from the elements? You do now.
Beach parties will remain choice fixtures on the social calendar; we've just heard about a really good one in Donegal next weekend, for starters. Dress for the weather, mind you.
"When we were younger," says Frank Geary, "you'd read all these things in the paper about these 'shocking' rave parties, about people getting a phone number on the day and phoning it to find out where they had to go, driving out to the middle of nowhere. And it sounded cool, sounded like a lot of fun. And it is.
"There is a kind of glamour to it, I suppose," he adds. "I'll take a nice bit of beach at six in the morning over trudging home through streets covered in puke any time."
