- Well-established during the heady days of rave culture in Ireland—and formerly home to an aptly beaten, sweat-addled, atmospherically brooding club—the centrally located The Clarence Hotel on Wine St has ambitious plans to bring electronica's biggest name acts to the heart of North West Ireland. The venue has a gutting that makes it polished and upmarket in attire with three tiered levels dizzyingly elevating towards an expansive skyline.
The new, leaner model boasts a capacity of 1000 yet provides an intimate experience for the clubber, allowing them to invade the space over the stage. And the promoter, Donal, told me on this night that there are plans to offer special room rates with nightclub tickets that should help keep the party going all night long. It's an enticing offer, considering acts such as Nic Fanciulli, Sander Kleinenberg and Danny Howells will feature in the future, but on this night things were focused squarely on one man: Sasha.
In a career spanning nearly 20 years, Sasha has never played the North West of Ireland. To a handful of devoted music lovers, it's been a long wait. "Usually, we have to travel to Dublin to hear the really big names play. It's brillant that some quality names are finally coming into Sligo." With a superstar name headlining, it came as a surprise, then, that the venue was never rammed. Could it be the economic times we're in? The fact that Planet Love was on the following day? Or maybe it was the €27 door fee for one headliner? One clubber tells me that it's simply that "Sligo's been hit hard with job losses, it's a Friday night and The Clarence generally gets a late crowd. People pile in about 1 AM.'' But the promoters tell a different story: "There isn't a problem in numbers. We actually turned away 100 people. Door policy tonight is tight because we wanted to get the right crowd in."
As the night wound on, the venue began to fill and eventually peaked with about 600 in the door, but it also meant that the main act was slow to get on. A sense of anxiety hung in the air. "Is he actually going to show?" We shouldn't have worried. Sasha got behind the decks at 12:45 AM, and slowly he began building the sound with a low key epic intro that weaved intricately against a relentless under-bubble of driving sound that throbbed from the venue's speakers. By 2 AM, as he relaxed and rocked his head from side to side in flow with the music, so too did the sound with tracks such as his remix of Ladytron's "Destroy Everything You Touch" bringing a deeper, trippier element to the picture. Pitched down melodic breakdowns came later, layered between Tom Middleton's feel-good Balearic-infused big room edit of "Humate Love Stimulation," which literally "sang" out from the speakers. Other tracks dropped included Paul Woolford's "Heirbas" and "Earth 82" between his own remix of The Doves "Jetstream" that blasted out as the final track of the night like a spaced-out journey of sound.
If the superstar DJs are dead, someone should tell the crowd. Dublin. Roscommon, Belfast, Athlone, Galway: All got representation with one couple saying "Sasha draws people, we travelled just to hear him play." For a figure that is usually portrayed as being removed from the crowd due to the sheer number of people he usually gets at gigs, we saw a relaxed Sasha who seemed happy to be on a equal level with the clubbers on the floor again. It was a night that let the crowd get up close and personal.
There was only one thing. You got the sense that Sasha was just getting started as the club finished at the prescribed 3 AM close. Either way, The Clarence is an intimate and special club that is clearly taking its job of bringing the best of electronica's acts into the North West very seriously.