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Making music has never been easier or more popular, with home studio and mixing equipment easily and cheaply available. But actually being in a band – and finding the space to rehearse and write songs together – that part, at least if you’re in a city with rising rents, is hard.
It’s a situation that Paul Kenny knows from first hand experience. Kenny has been a professional drummer for two decades, picking up sticks for Irish artists James Vincent McMorrow and Róisín O, among others, and touring around the world.
“In 20-odd years I probably had a space where I could practice 12 months out of that time,” Kenny says. “There are almost no options for people outside of someone helping them out, whether in a shed or garage. Finding a place where you can practice is very rare.”
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In 2018 Kenny and his friend Jeff Deehan decided to try to change things: they took over a building on Ossory Road in Dublin’s North Strand area, renovating 11 rooms at first.
“When we started building the rooms – it’s not the most fancy of industrial units – the builders thought we were crazy to build something like this. We spent over €200,000. The builders were like, ‘Are youse mad?’ And then, within a couple of months, we were calling again.”
A year after opening the first one, Kenny and Deehan found out that the adjacent building was becoming available. “It was an empty shell. We had to build it all from scratch,” Kenny says.
There are now 25 rooms available at Yellow Door Music Studios, for use by about 50 musical acts. It is Ireland’s largest rehearsal studio, with rooms offered on a rolling monthly contract with 24/7 residential-style access. It gives artists working there a permanent base and an alternative to the per-hour rental contract that most studios offer.
“The original plan was to do the per-hour model, because that’s what existed,” says Deehan. “But Paul told me that what musicians really need and want is their own space to work and be productive.”
Some of the most prominent Irish acts to have passed through the studio doors so far include Fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital and Pillow Queens.
“One of the really interesting parts of the job is getting to hear what’s happening in the next three to five years on the Irish music scene,” Kenny says.
Deehan, who had never worked in the music industry before opening Yellow Door, was immediately struck by just how hard working musicians are.
“They are incredibly dedicated,” he says. “You take Pillow Queens – they have an unbelievable work ethic. Unbelievable. Fontaines D.C., we knew when they came in here how successful they were going to be. They were here every day writing, rehearsing.”
This professionalism took him by surprise, he says, as there is sometimes a perception of musicians as being disorganised or lazy. By the time most people will hear of an artist, “they think that’s step one,” Kenny says. “But realistically that’s been going on for years. To just get to the point where something’s listenable or to a state where people will want to present it, so much work has gone into that.”
Neither Yellow Door founder is sure that Dublin or Ireland “really appreciates” what an artistic community can contribute to a city, which they feel is evident in the lack of spaces available to create work. Ireland is “a double-edged sword”, Kenny says, because it’s the birthplace of great literature and music, but little is done to support artists’ careers.
“If suddenly there’s no Hozier, Dermot Kennedy or all these big acts, if suddenly that was to go away, then people would see the real value of it. But it’s very hard to get the funding and support. You go to other countries and that’s not the case. To take a career in the arts is actually a very serious consideration, which countries get behind and fund. Whereas I think in Ireland, it’s just taken for granted”.
That’s the draw of Yellow Door, Deehan says, describing what the business has built as a “creative home for artists”.
“People can come here and set up their own equipment and have everything they need ready to go, rather than going to a place where you’re renting it out for a session, where each time they have to set up they end up losing a lot of the creative spark in just the logistics,” he adds. “This is for people who want to be able to do it regularly and on a permanent basis.”
For Alex Sanchez, who moved from Spain in 2018 to study music, his studio space has been everything to him. When Sanchez first arrived in Ireland he worked in Starbucks and began his degree at BIMM Music Institute.
“Now after six years, I can say proudly that I am a professional drummer in Ireland. I’m living my dream,” he says.
Sanchez uses his space at Yellow Door to practise and record his work and as a teaching space: “It’s great to have a space, especially for drummers, because drums is a very loud instrument. To have a space in the city to come every day with the freedom to practise – for me, it’s everything.”
“I can be here for fun too and it’s great because we have a huge community,” he says, adding that musicians at the studio often “ask questions on the music scene, ask for favours” or swap upcoming jobs if they don’t have availability.
We give artists the space and they make what they will of it. The joy is just seeing how much people appreciate this place
— Jeff Deehan
The sense of community Sanchez is referring to grows in part because there is so little turnover. There is a long waiting list to get a studio spot and the queue only really moves when groups disband or a musician stops creating or moves abroad full-time.
“There are dozens on the waiting list,” Kenny says, and the pair harbour hopes of expanding.
“If we were ambitious – and we think we are – we’d like to think, one more in Dublin then we’d love to go to Galway, and Cork is a possibility,” Deehan says. “Then maybe further afield. People keep telling us: “You should come here, there’s nothing like this here’. Even in London.”
But just finding the space they already have was an enormous challenge. “Obviously we can’t do this in residential areas and another issue we have is because we want to take over a building, and we invest quite a bit into it, we need a long-term lease. We want to have security and to make the money back to pay for whatever we borrowed.”
It’s like “trying to find Goldilocks – the right premise, in the right place, for the right price”, Deehan says.
Since moving into its first premises, Yellow Door, in common with other small businesses in Ireland, has faced challenges from VAT rates to the “massive initial cost” of starting up the business, and from fire regulations to, in Kenny and Deehan’s case, a fire breaking out.
“These things are really important,” Kenny laughs, grateful looking back on the money they spent on fireproofing, as he points to the evidence of fire outside the building. They were “lucky”, while a building next door was not. “We can only control what we can control. We’re a young business and we’re in a good position now. We give artists the space and they make what they will of it,” Deehan says.
“The joy is just seeing how much people appreciate this place. When we first opened up, my mom would bake banana bread and cookies,”
“She’s like the local saint,” Kenny adds. “One of the great joys is just walking around the corridors and hearing all of this creativity. There are times where you’re walking through and hearing so much good music coming out of all these rooms. That’s an amazing feeling.”
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