While Bodytonic “takes risks and experiments” with Pogo, he adds that Backlash, which runs on Thursday nights at Wax, “has an unbelievably passionate, lunatic crowd”. Backlash celebrates its second birthday in November, and is the only midweek club in the capital to rival Electric City’s formidable reputation. “It’s a real achievement for a relatively underground night in Dublin to get that far,” says Backlash resident Jon Averill. “We believed that there was a market for the kind of music we were playing, which at the time no one was playing.”
“It didn’t work straight away,” he admits, “but with hard work from all involved and belief in what we were doing, one day it just clicked, and in the space of three weeks the club was full. We haven’t looked back since.”
Although sometimes referred to as a mash-up or electroclash club, Averill believes Backlash touches on a number of different styles, and on any given week, the soundtrack flits from Italo classics and fey Kompakt techno to eighties classics by Talk Talk, The Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode. It’s no surprise that Backlash has serially irreverent guest DJs like Optimo and Jacque Le Cont or that Averill hopes Backlash eventually gains the international status of Optimo’s eponymous Glasgow night. “I want it to become an institution,” he hopes.
Despite hosting one of the busiest tents at Electric Picnic, Bodytonic aren’t resting on their laurels. Although they launched a label a few years ago, the timing was wrong, coinciding with an industry-wide slump, but making and releasing music digitally is their biggest priority over the coming years. O’Shea says. “We’ve lots of other ideas, some that don’t involve music,” Trev adds. “We’re doing an e-magazine in 2006 and we’re also looking at multimedia projects. We’ve only done about 5% of what we set out to do, we’ve so much further to go.
“Two years ago we were putting on gigs in pubs to no one and now we’re hosting arenas at festivals. I could come out with some nonsense about how we’re different, but we’re doing nothing that a million other people haven’t done already, just doing it our own way. Maybe that’s what matters.”
