Paul Woodward Dublin music / film

The Dublin Music Scene

Paul Woodward

80s and 90s

As a young aspiring musician I started playing bass in local Finglas bands in the late 1980s and quickly progressed to singing and writing songs soon after .

These early ventures into the live gig scene where with a band called withered leaf and later I joined Fantasy screams before forming my own band Kick to the heart, my brother Tony Woodward was the bass player in The Beat System and was a seasoned giging musician who played the venues back then regulary such as ivy rooms and the Baggot inn and the Underground .The Beat System where finialists in the Bacirdi Hot Press Annual Band Competition of 1980s not sure of the exact year . This was to inspire me as the younger sibling who looked up to him, to try follow in his footsteps and indeed it wasnt long before my little group where creating their own little slight buzz .

The Dublin scene around say 1989 was thriving mostly due to the rise abroad paticulary in England and Europe of Local bands such as An Emotional Fish, who toured with U2 and Simple Minds, and of course Aslan a band with a Finglas connection indeed as did the mighty U2.

In addition The Hothouse Flowers and Les Enfants who signed to Chrysalis records and appeared on the Tube music show in the UK. A little later on The Frames, where formed also from Dublin. Before them from Cork was Microdisney, and Those Nervous Animals from Sligo also The Stunning, from Galway. Cry before Dawn, from Wexford .The Saw Doctors, also from Galway and Engine Alley, from Kilkenny and not forgetting The 4 of us from Newry in the North of Ireland .

The list goes on.. and this is a late 80’s early 90’s one. In the l990’s and beyond to present day the lineage goes on with the whole of the Island contributing to a still thriving Irish music industry.

All of this despite recent challanges facing artists with the advent of AI and wholesale disregard for years of copyright law.

Finglas was also making an inpact in the mid to late 1980s as far as bands starting to get noticed nationaly,with acts such as The Atrix, Alien Confort, The Beat System, Dorian Gray, Lord John White who became Sack, The D11 Runners, The Missing Link, The Brilliant Trees, and the band i was now a member of Kick to the Heart. I could add many other bands to this list of movers and shakers to the extent an aditional website would be required,surfice to say it was a very vibrant scene and an amazing time to venture into a career in music.

It was a good time to start playing music in the city of Dublin and as the 90’s came around the spotlight was well and truly on the city to the extent that even Hollywood movies such as The Commitments where being made in the location,it was a buzz very like the later scenes that would develop in Manchester and Seattle to my mind .