Airside Retail Park is a gaudy shopping fortress perched on an unlovely hillside and encased within a spaghetti knot of ring roads, bypasses and motorway flyovers in the grey recesses of suburban north Co Dublin. To one side of the Wright Venue are a couple of Harvey Norman and Woodie's DIY superstores, where a man might pick up a bag of tungsten-tipped screws if he was feeling bored. Behind it Volvo and Land Rover dealerships stock a range of sensibly priced family saloons. The Premier Inn opposite has comfortable beds, trouser presses and all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets.
It seems a more likely setting for a new series of I'm Alan Partridge than the site of Dublin's hottest nightspot. But after 10.30pm every weekend the 80,000sq ft entertainment complex housed here comes alive. Contained over three floors, with seven bars, three terraces and a 35-kilowatt sound system, the Wright Venue is by far the biggest nightclub in the country.
It was conceived by Michael Wright, a Howth businessman, during the boom of the mid-noughties, as a new kind of spot that would bring a degree of glamour, sophistication and elegance to Irish clubland.
Halfway through construction, economic catastrophe struck Ireland. By the time the Wright Venue opened for business, in the summer of 2009, its combination of expensive cocktails and VIP ostentation seemed hopelessly out of kilter with the times. "A lot of people thought this place would fail," says its general manager, James Berns. "A lot of people thought it would be closed within a month."
Four and a half years on, the club is pulling in more than 3,000 customers most Saturday nights, the greatest number from the nearby suburbs of Swords, Blanchardstown, Sutton, Malahide and Clontarf. Hundreds also bus down from Belfast each weekend.
On the Friday night I visit, the fashion template followed by those queuing outside is Kim Kardashian for girls, Geordie Shore for guys. Or, for clubbers who fancy themselves individuals, and refuse to follow the herd, short-sleeved shirts with the top buttons closed for boys, sexy-librarian glasses for gals.
Inside, the music is deafening, the air smells like dry ice and socks, and a surprising number of people are wearing sunglasses on the dance floor, despite the fact that it’s night-time and they’re indoors. (Perhaps this explains why virtually everything, from the steps of the stairs to the male urinal, is adorned in flashing neon.)
Groups can rent one of the club’s suites overlooking the dance floor, which come with a fridge full of alcohol. They’re popular with birthday parties, stag parties and hen nights.
Last month the Michael JF Wright Hospitality group announced 73 more jobs here: 43 in a new adjoining restaurant, bar and grill, the rest spread between the nightclub and the refurbished members’ bar. How has this unlikely superclub defied the odds when pubs and clubs are going out of business in droves?
For Berns, a 35-year veteran of the hospitality industry, the key is to understand the changing dynamics of the way people socialise. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “the whole drinking culture in this country changed on New Year’s Eve 1999. All the bars closed that night. Everybody stayed home. That’s when people realised that they could have just as good a night at home as they could have going out to a bar.”
Bigger acts
The trick is not to reverse that trend but to adapt to it, according to Berns. "Clubs like ours have become the dance floor for their local Tesco," he says. "People drink their cans and bottles at home and then come here to dance. The numbers heading out to clubs have held steady, but their average spend is way down. So we have to keep reinventing ourselves. We keep bringing in bigger acts."
Smaller, underground clubs in the city centre can chase after hip DJs if they like. But to fill a venue of this size, the appeal has to be broad. That means not just hiring mainstream chart acts, such as Calvin Harris, Ne-Yo and Afrojack, but also luring pop stars and television celebrities for personal appearances.
Emma Quinlan, the glamour model and recent Celebrity Apprentice contestant, has been the Wright Venue's PR and marketing head since it opened. The walls inside the main entrance are lined with photographs of celebrities who've trekked out to Swords: 50 Cent, Nadine Coyle, the Austin Powers actor Verne Troyer, one of the less famous members of Take That.
Quinlan remembers them all. “With big artists,” she says, “their security detail will select four or five possible venues and check them all out in advance. Often you don’t find out until the last minute whether the star is actually going to show up later or not.
“With Kylie we knew in advance she was going to come, because she had a couple of specific requests. With Britney it was more a last-minute thing. They were both amazing.”
But her favourite guest was the R&B superstar Usher. He was given a private bar but preferred to mingle with the crowd downstairs. “He had his own security, obviously, but he didn’t mind people coming up and having a chat with him, and people were pretty respectful about that,” she says. “He ended up coming back here three nights in a row,” she says with a smile. “Madness!”
Quinlan admits she is surprised by the appetite for personal appearances by soap-opera actors and reality-TV stars – "Have you heard of Brax from Home and Away? Girls go crazy for this guy" – but she says she has never had any bad experiences. "Celebs are just people. Sometimes they get fed up. Sometimes you have to be patient with them. But at the end of the day they're here to have fun."
She adds that the Wright Venue’s out-of-the-way location should not deter anyone who’s considering a visit. “If you go to Ibiza, all the big clubs are in the middle of nowhere.”
