I’d bought a titanic Korg drum machine specifically for the night. Cait’s dad packed it into the boot of the car with our guitars, dodgy Yamaha keyboards and mic-stands, and dropped us outside the red-andwhite front of the Camden Street pub that was playing host to our first ever gig that wasn’t for Blast or in a bedroom. We were ushered through the dimly-lit bar, led up the stairs to what appeared to be a disused sitting room with a defunct bar set into its walls. The rest is a blur of broken guitar strings and the fear of being booed by the thirty or so friends we’d assembled. (“There is a core of really intelligent songwriting in what they do,” raved one Karl McDonald in an entirely unbiased blog review afterwards.)
Anseo, five years later, has become one of my old reliables. The upstairs gigs, in a room that used to house a pool table and some illicit bets in its previous incarnation as Con’s, seem to have all but stopped, gigs that were a cornerstone after the bar’s inception as an alternative for the art crowd to the then-nerve centre Thomas House. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. There are wet paint signs stuck to the windows tonight, but nothing’s really changed.
“Sweaty, sincere and seriously social,” declared the Guardian of Anseo in a 2007 guide to Dublin bars, the youngest entry in a list that included other steadfast joints such as the Stag’s Head and the Library Bar. Its position on that list couldn’t be more pertinent now.
Anseo is marked by a self-confidence in its own personality that expresses itself in whispers, not shouts. There’s the bookshelf, stuffed with Franzens, Reynoldses and Becketts, a resource for the lone drinker and second-date conversation starter rather than an aesthetic feature. There’s the fridge, stocked since before #craftbeer broke with a solid treasury of brews (we go with a Rothaus and Dungarvan Red, as well as the usual on-tap suspects). There are the gig posters that are one tasteful notch above Whelans’ Delorentoes (with the still-lingering Chalets album insert maybe somewhere in the middleground), and the always exemplary DJ shifting from Baby’s On Fire to Baby I Love You to Baby Milk Snatcher. Like the contents of its library, the albums in the vinyl stack and the brown bottles backlit by fridge glow, Anseo is now canon, and has little else left to prove. It’s here, and it’s here to stay.
18 Camden Street Lower,
Dublin 2.
014751321
