DESCRIPTION:
This is a pretty raw visual document of the last night of U:Mack's Phunk City club (27/8/99) at the Funnel, Dublin (the venue also closed that weekend). At the time about 10 copies were made on VHS tape and given to the organisers of the club as a thank you and memento for all the hard work they had done over the previous year and a half as well as to a few friends, staff and fellow regulars. The DJs on the night were MCut (Americhord) Dennis McNulty & Alan O'Boyle (Decal), Eamonn Doyle (D1), two of the Pure DJs (from Edinburgh), Dunk & Trev (Ambulance) and possibly one or two more.

Its over 15 years since that last night now. I first went to The Funnel for a gig when it was just a newly opened bar (the venue upstairs was not even open yet) in July 1997 and I remember it quickly closed down for a remodel but by September it was the venue many of us came to know and love so well and it began host gigs upstairs by groups like Smog and local bands such as Capratone, Redneck Manifesto, Jubilee Allstars, Schroeder's Cat and Sunbear. By the very end of December 1997 (27/12/97) Ultramack (U:Mack) also began using the venue for irregular clubs with people like Third Eye Foundation, Luke Vibert and Decal with DJs upstairs and down. By February of that year it became the weekly club, Phunk City and quickly became one of the best clubs in the city for electronic music at that time in my opinion. It might not always have been full, especially in the early days, but the music and booking policy was awesome for those in the know. Over the next year the likes of Alex Patterson, Si Begg, Baby Ford, Autechre, Mira Calix, Mike Paradinas, Speedy J, Neil Lanstrumm, Decal, Andrew Weatherall, Andrea Parker, Anodyne, Deep Burial, Jega, Ian O'Brien, Kosmik Kommando, DMX Krew, Cylob, Phil Kiernan, Hood and many many more would play live or DJ there, many of them more than once.

I was 26 when I started going to the club and can honestly say it really did change my life, friends and record collection. I had been planning to document a regular night of the club for awhile at the time and U:Mack were up for it but then out of the blue they told me the venue was closing down that weekend and that if I wanted to do it I had one last chance.

I shot it with my Sony 8mm camcorder and mostly edited in-camera and then used my home VCR to edit, make the master, add the titles and do the copies (with another VCR in real-time). The opening sequence in the car was how I always got there and I was playing Decals 'Iron Fist' as this had become the clubs anthem by then and I presumed it would be played again that night and thankfully I got it on tape when it was. What I saw and experienced is all on the screen, I tried to get as many segments of the night as I could, until literally my battery ran out. There are plenty of boring parts for sure and I'm told the last song played may not have been the AC/DC song I thought it was but everything else is true! Thanks for reading and watching.

Stephen Rennicks

I have been writing a series called Tracks & Traces about the Dublin music scene between 1992 and 2005 (the years I lived there) at this link.
http://abstractanalogue.tumblr.com/tracksandtraces

U:Mack still going strong too
https://www.facebook.com/umack/timeline