Remembering those salad days, dancing at the disco

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The demise of Galway’s biggest nightclub, after the curse of Covid inflicted death by a thousand cuts, brought to mind a different era in the city – when disco ruled our world.

Not so much today’s highly sophisticated hi-tech strobe lighting and electronic dance mixes; more glitter balls, slow sets and a choice of salad or curry to set you up for the night and allow all to avail of the late bar.

Because the law back then insisted that you couldn’t dance on an empty stomach – so in order to get a bar extension you had to serve all customers food.

Some didn’t eat it of course, but for others it was the thing that saved them from themselves – a sit-down plate of salad (as in, the ones perfected by nuns, not the sophisticated take you’d now get in a restaurant) or something loosely described as curry.

Then, fully sated, it was off to the bar or the dancefloor and a blaze of technicolour, coordinated lighting – or perhaps three spotlights that alternatively threw out blasts of red, yellow and blue.

We called them discos, because nightclubs were only to be found on Leeson Street – dark, exciting places were politicians and businessmen went at night to smoke big cigars and drink copious amounts of Black Tower and Blue Nun.

Ordinary people went to discos, where the only requirement is that you could stand fairly straight in a queue – and you didn’t wear jeans or runners…and, sometimes also, white socks.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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