Bang to rights

Club Head Bang Bang is a Tralee-based arts collective. It consists of 10 transient members with the common interest in bringing together the local community of alternative bands, DJs, film makers and artists and helping get them out to the public. It’s been running in the town for five years – first as a charity event, then as a weekly night, before expanding into a mini indie empire to involve festivals, records and, bizarrely, table tennis tournaments.

Keith O Faolain, who is from Tralee, has been involved in the project since the beginning. After a few years away, he moved home to find that things had changed: the local IT, which would traditionally attract students for its agricultural engineering and nursing courses, had begun to offer FAS programmes in sound engineering, radio production, film and TV and media, and a stream of more creative students had started to trickle in.
“I met some people who were doing the courses,” he explains. “There was not much we were into around town, so instead of giving out, we decided to do something about it. We thought up a stupid name for an event and started doing things every Thursday. After that it went a bit beyond what we were expecting. We thought we’d get a few bands in from around town, but people started coming to us without us even trying, which has been great. As it’s gone on people who are doing very interesting stuff have come out of the woodwork. It’s made living in a small Irish town bearable!”
Club Head Bang Bang’s aim in the first place, Keith explains, was to try and break down boundaries: “If you go out to the pub, especially in Tralee, you want a covers band and to drink loads of pints, then you go outside for chips and a fight or something. So what we’ve tried to do is provide a decent alternative. People come down regularly and it’s great to see their faces, especially the locals. Some nights we clear out the whole bar and put up photos and have art exhibitions, so it’s funny when somebody walks into the bar and there are loads of people milling about looking at pictures and everything is really quiet! We’re trying to break down these boundaries and expose people to something different.”
“Something different” meaning everything from a table tennis tournament, with five dozen people dressed up in “mad sports gear” and crammed into the back room of a pub, to the first Kerry Bicycle Festival, whereby a selection of short films about bicycles snowballed into a four-day beano with workshops, talks, bike musicians, bike films, public meetings with local councillors and family cycles reclaiming the streets.
“It’s funny because the place where we do the club and exhibitions is a really die hard local bar. People go there in the morning and are still propping up the bar at closing time. At the start they were looking at us going ‘What are ye doing?’ but now when they come in they’re laughing. Most of the time they like what we’re up to.”

For information on upcoming events check out clubheadbangbang.org