Kaught at the Karpark gig links back to Cork punk heyday at the Arcadia

A Culture Night gig at North Main St carpark will feature music from members of the scene at the Arcadia in the 1980s

Wed, 17 Sep, 2025 - 21:00

Paul McDermott

On Culture Night (Friday, September 19) Kaught at the Karpark takes place on the roof of North Main St carpark in Cork. The gig will celebrate the 45th anniversary of Kaught at the Kampus, a 1980 live recording by four Cork bands at the Downtown Kampus in the Arcadia Ballroom.

Kaught at the Kampus featured Nun Attax, Microdisney, Mean Features and Urban Blitz, and was released on Reekus Records by Elvera Butler, the promoter of the Kampus gigs.

"That many will find it raucous and unmusical, goes almost without saying," wrote the Evening Echo in its original review of the EP.

Raucous and unmusical it may have sounded to many but it also gave us the first recorded output of three of Ireland’s most charismatic frontmen: Finbarr Donnelly, Mick Lynch and Cathal Coughlan.

Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan, his Microdisney partner, left Cork for London in 1983. Nun Attax morphed into Five Go Down to the Sea? and Donnelly - with his bandmates Ricky Dineen, Mick Stack and Keith “Smelly” O’Connell - emigrated too. Mean Features’ Mick Lynch also left and formed Stump with another Kampus alumni, Rob McKahey. These three bands would plough highly original furrows and record some extraordinary records.

Donnelly, Lynch and Coughlan have all sadly passed away but some of their bandmates will reconvene on Culture Night to celebrate those heady days of the Arc and commemorate friends lost.

Elvera Butler was manager at the Downtown Kampus at the Arcadia.

Nun Attax’s Ricky Dineen remembers the recording of the record 45 years ago: “It was a big night for all of us. We were all aware that it was being recorded, indeed Mick Lynch opens for Mean Features with, ‘This song is being recorded so we have to get it right’.”

“There was a huge truck parked outside the Arcadia with cables running all over the shop. This added to the nervousness,” Dineen continues. “We still managed to feck up though… broken strings, missed cues, but everything was left in, warts and all. Nowadays there would probably be a post-production clean up, and all the warts would be lanced.”

Sean O’Hagan, Microdisney’s guitarist, can’t quite believe it’s been 45 years. “Where has the time gone? I think of a snap of a finger but I also think of a sense of real happiness, because it was a time when none of us had responsibilities. We were all high on life even though we had nothing. We had no money. We didn’t have prospects.

“The actual gig was very exciting,” says O’Hagan. “The little giddy journey that we were all on was been overseen at a distance by the’ old’ Elvera Butler. But, of course, she was only about three years older than us. We thought of her as our matriarch, our auntie.”

Rob McKahey remembers those days with fondness: “There was a feeling that you belonged to some great cultural shift. A post-punk cultural shift. Music in Ireland all sounded the same. But anything that came out of Cork at the time was kind of twisted and maimed. There must have been something in the water.

“It’s profound, Stump are like a real cult band, as are Microdisney. Nun Attax and Five Go Down to the Sea? are the same as well,” says McKahey.

“The three main protagonists are dead and it’s a real pity nobody ever took a photograph of the three of them together. That would have been absolutely beautiful to have. Even though there was begrudgery between them at times, they were intertwined culturally. I mean, Donnelly kind of created Mick and Cathal.”

Ricky Dineen can’t quite believe that the gigs in the Arc are still remembered with affection. “It’s amazing,” he smiles. “Imagine if those of us in in the ’80s had been reminiscing about the late ’30s or early ’40s. Glen Miller for the Stardust! People fondly remember the Arc, it was an iconic place, unmatched anywhere in Ireland.”

Members of current Cork band Pretty Happy have been involved in making a documentary about the punk scene in Cork. Picture: Dan Linehan

Kaught at the Karpark marks the climax of the production of a film called Leeside Creatures by members of Cork art-punk band Pretty Happy. The brother-sister-friend trio of Arann and Abbey Blake and Andy Killian produced the first version of the film a few years ago as part of a ‘Write Record Perform’ artist residency in the Triskel Arts Centre.

“Our original pitch was to make an audio-visual response to our cultural lineage with punk. The older version of Leeside Creatures was 50 minutes and what we wanted to do was make a feature out of it,” says director Arann.

“It’s us shedding light on a part of Irish punk history that was well ahead of its time, but underappreciated, for whatever reasons. What these people were doing, this unbelievably ground-breaking art, is deserving of a bigger audience.”

The band brought in Zoë Greenway as director of photography for the new version. “We loved her music videos and we’ve interviewed more subjects but the documentary needed a third act. We needed something to happen, we needed an ending. We needed a gig, a big event.

“We’re going to film Kaught at the Karpark with multiple camera operators and a drone. Thankfully the City Council and the Arts Council have supported the idea and now we get to do it in a much more spectacular way on top of a carpark.”

On Culture Night, McKahey and O’Hagan will play as will Big Boy Foolish, the duo of Dineen and Liam Heffernan, Mean Features’ guitarist. Dineen will also play tribute to his old friend Donnelly, who sadly died in a drowning accident in 1989, by playing their music in the band And Nun Came Back.

“I don’t think there’s a day goes by where I don’t think of Donnelly,” says Dineen. “He made such an impact on my life despite knowing him for a relatively short time.”

The Kaught at the Kampus album was reissued in recent years.

Dineen is also keen to remember others from the original EP that have passed away in the intervening years: “Pat [Kelleher, Mean Features], Chris [McCarthy, Microdisney] and Sean [Linehan, Urban Blitz] were important members of the scene, taken from us too young. I will also remember Maurice Carter who played with us in London but wasn’t part of the Cork scene.”

O’Hagan also recalls his old friends: “We’ve lost so many people. It’s bittersweet. But you can’t get away from the fact that Cork is this incredible city,” insists O’Hagan.

“When we were making that music it was in the depths of a recession but there was still something buzzing in the place. I could see that as an incomer to the City. So, while bittersweet, there is still a sweetness because of what Cork is now, because it’s ever more exciting and ever more brilliant. I’m looking forward to bringing the family over and saying this is where it all happened.”

As the production of Leeside Creatures nears completion there is a sense that the music scene of the post-punk Arc years is slowly being recognised as a hugely significant part of Cork’s cultural past.

There have been radio documentaries, Kaught at the Kampus has been expanded and reissued and its 40th anniversary was celebrated on Culture Night 2020 with an exhibition in Cork City Library and a mural on the public toilets on the Grand Parade.

“It’s nice, in fairness,” says Dineen. “From being punk rockers who allegedly sprayed the name ‘Nun Attax’ on public toilets, to having murals on the same conveniences. Sure we’re part of the establishment now. But I still I think it’s time for a mural in town of the trio of Donnelly, Mick and Cathal.”