With a gig on the North Bull Wall, an experimental punk band reclaims the city

The audience was small, a huddle of nine. But sure, that didn’t matter.

At 7.15pm, John Ryan was unloading the gear onto green plastic crates.

He and his bandmate, Niall Murphy, set up a tape player. They arranged a mixing table and effects pedals, and passed around extension cables, plugging speakers into a portable battery.

Behind them, the sky over Dublin Bay was silvery blue. The wind was salty. The tide was distant and the occasional ferry passed on the horizon.

Enda Rouke turned to the audience. The setlist would consist of two shows that sound similar to the soundcheck happening behind him, he said.

Rourke strode on the concrete steps of the North Bull Wall in black wellingtons and a high-vis jacket, inspecting his band mates below him as they set up.

The trio were all members of experimental punk band Vsevolod Plotkin. Although only two would perform tonight, 4 October.

The bay darkened. Murphy switched on a bike headlamp to illuminate his rig. He twisted knobs  on the sound board to make wonky and disorienting industrial beats.

Ryan stood at a microphone. He played a shrieking melody on a recorder, and looped the layers of whistling.

They screwed about with old tapes, and twisted textures with the pedals.

The raw and improvised noise set lasted a little over 30 minutes. It was the second in an ongoing series of outdoor gigs, said Murphy once it was over.

Whether people come by isn’t vital. It’s just fun to go out and do something and be surprised if people show up, Rourke said. “It’s part of the play.”

The band takes DIY music very literally, says Ryan, heading out with a battery and a PA system he had in childhood. “It’s all stuff cobbled together over the years.”

It’s about reclaiming the city, too. Sure, the band isn’t playing Whelans, or getting booked for Culture Night, Rourke says.

“But this concrete is here for us to sit on. Come and use it,” he says.

On the edge

A day earlier, the band had played a more conventional gig.  This time, at Fibber Magees, the rock bar on Parnell Street.

It was different. “A gig that looked like it belonged in Fibbers,” Rourke told the spectators at the bay. They even had guitars, he said.

In Clontarf, they didn’t. This gig “looks like it belongs here”, Rourke said.

They had wanted to do a noise set on the bay, Ryan says. “I like noise music.”

But “Vsevolod Plotkin usually is more, kind of, cerebral. We come up with an idea then find music around it,” he says.

Like when they staged a hybrid gig-workshop about the housing crisis, with contributions from the satirical artists Aoife Ward and Eve Griffin.

In December, they plan to hold a nativity play.

The location on the edge of Bull Island was not random, said Rourke. “Like we just wanted something sort of playful, like a day at the beach.”

They work with whatever is at hand, he said.

No need for expensive lighting or visual enhancements. “The scenery does a lot of the work,” he says.

Where they perform is meaningful and motivated by their left-wing politics too, says Ryan. “A lot of avenues are restricted to us because someone else owns it.”

“But no one owns this,” he says, of Dublin Bay. “It’s public, we can use it.”

Joining in

Rourke and Ryan formed the band in 2017, Rourke says.

Ryan had wanted to be in a band. “But didn’t want to be in a band with people he didn’t know. So I was in the band but couldn’t play any music,” says Rourke.

They grabbed the name after watching Red Mob, a 1992 action film by the Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Plotkin, he said. “It was just fine, y’know, it was one of those films that doesn’t inspire you at all.”

Their vision was to be an opening act at a pub gig, he says. “We’d be a decent band with no other ambition than to just be okay.”

In late May 2018, they released their debut EP Family Court, a collection of lo-fi punk songs with a doomy gothic undertone.

The subject matter of the EP was John Waters, the journalist.

For one track, “Fuck Off and Talk to Una Mullally”, the band recreated Waters’ spat with Eamon Dunphy on the latter’s podcast from just five days before the EP’s release.

A second EP followed, titled Middle Ireland. And a full-length album, From the Plough to the Stars.

Around 2023, the band started to reappraise, Rourke says. “We kinda didn’t go anywhere for years, so we started talking about what could we actually do without me learning how to play bass?”

Sitting down and figuring out how to be a competent musician didn’t seem in line with their ethos, he says. “A lot of bands will go, ‘Oh look, there’s Jimi Hendrix, I wanna be like him,’ and you sit down and practice.”

But they want to have fun and engage with off-kilter shows, like playing in an old tunnel in Santry, he says. “It’s fun to explore public space.”

You look at what you can and can’t do, Rourke said, down on the edge of the land at the North Bull Wall. “Like with the lights. We can’t do set design.”

Rourke teaches kids with special needs, he says. “So a lot of my work day-to-day is ‘Okay, we want to do some playing, we want to include people in the room’, and it’s all about making things happen, playing with limitations.”

It’s not about aspiring to play the 3Arena, he says. “It’s about doing things with what we have.”

That ethos, they apply to the band itself, Ryan says.

Vsevolod Plotkin doesn’t have a set line up. It’s more mix and match than that.

They’ve played gigs where he or Rourke sat it out, he says. “The goal is to eventually do a gig where neither is present.”

Somebody entirely besides themself could do a gig in their name, he says. “It’s about opening things up for other people.”