Ireland’s first synth number.

It’s always worth dipping over to the blog of Paul Tarpey now and again. He’s being compiling a set of Notes on An Irish Disco Landscape for a few years now. Think of it as a well written scrap book of anecdotes, theories and backgrounds on clubbing and music in Ireland.

The man himself says this:

These are ongoing notes on a variety of Irish-based and music-themed experience.  Some have been published previously but all function now as complementary chapters.  It is intended that collective themes will link vernacular interventions and forgotten paths.   Images and corrections are added occasionally.

He posted this track by Barry Warner and had this to say about it.

The post Saturday Night Fever of alternative music found occasional breathing spaces in the youth club discos where, for example, Bowie’s music continued to find glamorous favour. There was, and is, a sense of containment about this sketch and to this day, a trace of a music conservatism prevails, separating town and country halls.  Looking at the Bowie-influenced portrait on Limerickman Barry Warner’s 1987 Irish electropop single “Just A Floor” is a reminder that the androgynous look always had the power to wind up Catholic Ireland. Incidentally, Warner, who is still DJ-ing, was probably the first Irish artist to produce and release synth and drum machine music influenced solely from Italo and Detroit sources in Ireland (The b-side of this single is “Jack the Floor,” an over-sincere homage to Steve “Silk” Hurley’s house classic “Jack Your Body”).