The art of partying

The best part of this second installment of Wonky – the first of these art-music-film-multimedia partyclashes having been held in April of this year – was not the many staggeringly great gigs it featured, nor was it the smile-inducingly imaginative visual-art projects it gave an innovative platform to. It wasn’t the fact that the door price was low and included a fistful of beer vouchers, either (although both are true and admittedly a nice touch). Its highlight, really, was that it seemed to symbolise a movement toward eclecticism, experimentation, pop-cultural multi-tasking, call it what you like, that makes up a great part of the reason why the capital’s current music community is currently so vital.

Special occasions, like this one, after all, call for grand gestures – and the Irish artists have risen to this playful challenge beautifully. The Last Post nearly upstage their own (gorgeous) set by supplying not only a string section, but a nine-piece brass band in full dress uniform and black plumed hats. Decal, for quite different reasons, also perform the set of a lifetime - not least thanks to live drummer David Lacey, whose pistol-shot snare and whipcrack drum fills snap us to transfixed attention throughout. Meanwhile, The Jimmy Cake, who play Wonky2 as a kind of busman’s-holiday away from recording their second album, have transposed their newfound leanness and focus from the mixing desk to the stage and are positively arresting in their bloodymindedness.

We could go on: more great sets from The Uptown Racquet Club, Paul O’Reilly and Goodtime John; familiar artists trying unfamiliar things just for tonight; musicians hurrying up and down the escalators to sit in with each other’s bands for one or two. But it’s Wonky2, so it’s a weekend of spectacle as well as sound, and thus a bit of a wander around the two floors of the Guinness Storehouse also turns up multimedia artworks and interactive pieces, top-drawer films and animation, things to watch and hear and feel and, well, things to play with, in a word.

It’s interesting that on a weekend also featuring sets from Four Tet and Manitoba, the artists and exhibits everyone is talking about, and dashing from floor to floor to see and hear, are homegrown. It’s natural, though, when the locals have so evidently pulled out all the stops, inspired not only by this singular location but by the mix-it-up sense of play and possibility. The carte blanche both visual and musical artists were given by Leagues O’Toole, Wonky2’s promoter, has paid off in spades.

Meanwhile, all this is transpiring in a mammoth glass and iron building that used to brew beer, whose huge escalator-criscrossed open atrium makes you think of the Eiffel Tower, and which looks for all the world like it was constructed specifically for a multifaceted, attention-deficit-disorder sprawl of an event like this.

"The last couple of years," Leagues says, "I’ve kind of decided that art isn’t a dirty word. Not because I thought it was a dirty word, but because most of the world, and the media, treat it as a dirty word, and that filters down into everyday life.

"We tend to view art in a very po-faced way," he continues. "We rarely look at it as fun. We look at it on many emotional and aesthetic levels, but rarely on a fun level. And it’s just really good fun to go to an event, and go watch some music, and go for a wander, and not just look at stuff, but involve yourself with cool stuff."

"I saw so much good stuff the first night, I was running up and downstairs, trying to catch everything," a slightly tipsy punter tells me on Sunday, when it’s all over and doormen are trying (and failing) to clear the building. "The second night, I kind of relaxed a bit more, and chatted to people. There’s loads on, amazin’ bands, exhibits, whatever, but it’s basically just a brilliant party, isnt it?"

As presenter of No Disco, Leagues O’Toole, Wonky’s inventor and promoter, was clearly perfectly placed to see the potential for interesting cross-fertilisation between the aural and visual worlds. But like so many great music-industry schemes, movements, record labels and pop-culture brainchildren, the first-ever Wonky was originally largely conceived around a handful of strong local visual artists and one band whom he’d practically kill for. In Leagues’ case, this meant animation and design collectives Del 9 ("they’re such a tight unit, they’re so exciting to work with") and D.A.D.D.Y. ("there are 14 of them, all with different skills. They’re pretty much the Wu-Tang Clan of animation") – and last but not least, Dublin instrumental powerhouses The Redneck Manifesto ("They’re my favourite Irish band, I’m totally obsessed with them," Leagues says ardently. "When I see them live, I feel like a teenager, and I’m thirty"). Wonky Mk 1, therefore, was to be a launch of the Rednecks’ second album, Cut Your Heart Off From Your Head, presented via multimedia, in the true meaning of the word.

"For the first one, I was going: I really don’t want this to be a ‘gig’, like. I want it to be an event that involves visual art as much as music. And I was worried that these installations would just be decoration, and the visuals would just be background. But they weren’t. People were queueing up to use them, and play the games, and check them out. They were really likin’ it."

This weekend’s pint-toting queues to play with interactive sculpture Requiem For A Fly and to have a click on a two-way animation called Connect Your Orchestra testify that, one Wonky later, they’re still really liking it. This might be Wonky’s most significant success: it makes modern pop-art accessible to the kinds of young people who, by rights, should be interested in it – insofar as they’re interested in new things generally, and new music, media and technology in particular – but who, perhaps, wouldn’t head out to IMMA of an afternoon. Dublin in any case not being exceptional in the way of art galleries, it also fills a gap in the pop culture.

"Well, yeah," Leagues agrees tentatively. "I mean, it does satisfy a lot of those urges, and needs, but it’s also just a party as well. Cos you cant really party in a museum, or an art gallery, as great as they are."

Occasionally, good fortune smiles on a positive idea. In this case, this meant Guinness Ireland Ltd seeing Wonky as the kind of feat of the imagination it paid to spend marketing-budget euro on, thus giving them certain financial liberties.

"It was probably a bit daft to charge six euro a ticket," Leagues remembers of the inaugural Wonky. "And we did lose money and stuff. But really, it was based in the idea of being able to make entertainment accessible. There’s not point in moaning and bitching about people not listening to leftfield music, not exploring new avenues, if you don’t make it accessible to them. So that was the idea of the 6 euro ticket: even if you’ve never heard any of the music, you’d probably buy a ticket, just because it was cheap and sounded interesting."

Funding from Guinness or no, it’s significant to note that both Wonkies sold out without any paid-for promotion or advertising: strictly via press listings and word of mouth.

"We didn’t think we needed to advertise it," he says simply. "And anyway, I didn’t want to take out ads. I wanted it to be a tight, lo-fi production, wanted to make it cheap. We didn’t want to use Ticketmaster, didn’t want to sell it anywhere except Road [Records, in Dublin’s Fade Street] – they have a website, they can sell tickets as well as anyone. We didn’t wanna hire an event production company for the sound and the tech: we ended up doing it with the guys from Whelans. It’s all good for the spirit of the event, as well."

Wonky2 was, admittedly, beset by the kinds of teething problems that are somewhat inevitable in the early days of a project of this size – the worst of which was a power failure, bang in the middle of a set by Creative Controle. "It’s just so huge, it’s a logistical nightmare, or it can be," Leagues admits. "Even with this one, I made some silly mistakes, just cos it was stuff I didn’t know." But a very wet Witnness 2002 certainly reminded gig-goers that absolutely no-one is exempt from the odd technical hitch – and in any case, Wonky has done plenty right: the ‘spirit’ of the thing is bang on. Two more, to be held in Limerick and Cork, are in the pipeline. "Not for the sake of ego," Leagues says, "but for the sake of shouting louder. Everybody does what they do because they want to be heard."

Indeed, and it works both ways: an artist’s ambition grows as their possible platform grows encouragingly larger. It’s a happy, fruitful symbiosis. As it happens however, the artists are not the only ones who have found both the philosophy and the actuality of Wonky to be a tremendous step forward.

"Lee [Casey]," says Leagues, "who was DJing at one stage over the weekend, said he was in the lift, and there were three young girls in there talking about it, how cool it was. And they were saying how they were going to write a letter to the Irish Times to question, y’know, how this event can happen when corporate-promoted music events can be quite dull, and cost more to go to." He grins. "So I guess that’s a good sign."