O’Connell Bridge Bootleg Cassettes
When I moved to Dublin in late 1992 you could still buy bootleg cassettes on O'Connell Bridge. I don’t know when this trade would have started but originally the tapes on offer would be a mixture of mostly Dublin/Irish live shows. Things like U2 or Simple Minds live in Croke Park or Slane, that sort of thing. I think there were also cassettes of demos or other rare material as well, which might have originally come from vinyl bootlegs. Prince’s unreleased, The Black Album, always seemed to be a popular title. There was a fitting element of mystery as to how some of this material had made its way to the public however.
I went looking in my attic for some of these tapes which I would have bought in the 90s and was surprised to find I still have 12 of them left. I don’t think any of them actually came from O'Connell Bridge but date from a little later when a few secondhand record shops were selling them in Dublin. I don’t think any of these shops still exist. I was surprised to find almost nothing about this subject online and looking at them again got me thinking and remembering this largely forgotten and now long obsolete market on the very furthest fringes of the record industry.
The original sellers on O'Connell Bridge would be fairly open about what they were doing but always on the look out for the Gardai. I don’t know how many of them there would have been, perhaps very few, as I don’t remember there being more than one or two people selling tapes at any time on the bridge. Perhaps two people would work together, with two open briefcases propped on boxes, with 3 rows of cassettes in each. You often find these type of cases in Charity Shops today. For whatever reason I rarely walked on the east-side of the bridge so I don’t know if there would have ever been sellers there as well. I only remember them being on the always busier west side. The photo below comes from 1991 and while I can’t make out any tape sellers I’m sure they are lurking somewhere, especially if this was a weekend!
There was a little thrill in stopping and quickly pouring over the spines to see what they had. Sometimes they would have to literally shut the case in front of you and leg it if they thought the Gardai were coming. This might turn out to be a false alarm and they would set up a few seconds later or disappear completely. I seem to remember they appeared to be likeable guys, mostly in their 20s, not scary criminal types at all. They were music fans who knew their stock and if some show might once have been available. I still regret not buying Sonic Youth live at Dublin’s McGonagles in 1990 when I saw it as this was a gig I was at. I probably thought I’d see it again but as I would soon learn, this was often not the case. You might see something once and never again. There were plenty of obscure groups too alongside the more obvious so it was always worth a look. If an overseas artist you liked had played a gig in town the weekend before you might well see it on the bridge a few days later. I forget how much they cost at this time, maybe 3 or 4 pounds in old money. This would have been a good profit from a blank tape and a usually florescent photocopy! I can only imagine how many copies might have been sold of a particular show but I’m sure artists like U2 must have sold in pretty large amounts over the years. At this time of high unemployment in Ireland, at least it made some money for a few enterprising people. I do remember there was a big story once in the Sunday World about how these bridge traders were openly pirating U2 in their home city under the noses of the Guards.
When I went to see R.E.M. in 1989 at the RDS on their Green Tour (my first gig when I was 16) I also bought my first bootleg tape from someone with a briefcase set up at the side of the road close to the venue. I don’t have it anymore but it was a live show from I think a vinyl bootleg from 1985. I do remember it sounding okay and I would have played it a lot at the time. Listening to this live show was a very different experience than I was used to. I wasn’t sure what country it was from and the recording had an unpolished, in the moment quality to it. I became more interested in the things I could hear outside of the music, the between song banter and anything I could make out from the crowd noise. I also wondered who had made the recording and how many times it had been copied since then. A few years later I bought a double cassette of the actual show I was at but I remember the quality was bad and really I should have known I wasn’t going to want to listen to it all again. Much later on in 2004 when I was doing my Junk Out of Context art project I did recycle a lot of my old tapes and I’m sure that is where this and much of my bootleg collection went.
I don’t think I bought too many tapes from people on O'Connell Bridge, partly because they seemed to disappear not long after I moved to Dublin. The last time I clearly remember them on the bridge they were selling the Nirvana at The Point Depot cassette from 1992 with Kurt’s own ‘Rock Star’ signature on the cover (another show I attended). It’s possible this was one of the last big sellers for the traders. Maybe with the increased uptake of CD or the Gardai cracking down on them this business seemed to gradually move into shops from then on but the emphasis was more on unreleased studio recordings. I’m not sure if you could still quite so easily buy live shows from Dublin anymore. While the quality was not always great, it could be argued that the people who were making the original gig recordings were doing a public service for fans (possibly not the same people who were copying and selling the tapes).
Looking back I like the idea of people making these cassettes and artwork themselves, although their whole life must have been spent pressing play and record on double deck machines set to hi-speed dubbing mode! This is something I did myself in my teenage years as most music fans from my generation will remember; when making copies of albums for friends. The cassette bootleggers didn’t hurt any artist’s sales however as these were not pirate copies of an album but something otherwise unavailable. It was closer to fans trading live tapes than anything more sinister. I don’t think paying for downloads of live shows has really taken off, although companies have tried, but if you bought one of these tapes you would at least be more likely to play it than an MP3 somewhere on your computer.
In the 1990s I started to get the odd tape in a basement record shop very close to Tower Records that I forget the name of and a few other places, one in Temple Bar. I liked hearing unreleased studio material and by now most of it was being copied from CD bootlegs so the quality was usually okay. While there was already a long tradition of box-sets of unreleased material, these bootleg CDs preempted this demand for groups like Nirvana and Pixies who were only recently split up or over by then.
While cassettes have become popular on the underground music scene again for limited editions or DIY groups, I don’t expect the live bootleg cassette to ever make a comeback but the fans demand for unreleased recordings has always been there and always will be and bootlegs traditionally fill the void as long as it lasts. The bygone days of buying them on a cold windy bridge in the middle of Dublin and wondering what the ‘Unknown’ track was, marvelling at the crudeness of the homemade sleeves and hoping the quality of the recording would be good was actually a very memorable and exciting part of being a music fan at that time.
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