‘We wanted to make the best underground electronic music club in Ireland’: Fernando Martin of District 8 on their big gamble

When District X, a new dance-music festival happening in September at Palmerstown House Estate, in Co Kildare, put tickets on sale, in early April, what happened next caused whiplash in the Irish live-music industry. Within 24 hours, 20,000 tickets sold out.

The festival market is increasingly challenging. Margins are tight and costs are rising. Many festivals struggled to find audiences and bankable headliners after the pandemic. New festivals tend to start small, often testing their first year with a few thousand tickets, making District X’s ambition a statement in itself.

Fernando Martin and Martin Smyth, the two key figures in District 8, which is the promoter of the District X festival as well as the group behind the Dublin nightclub Index, are digesting the success of this new phase over coffee and pastries in a meeting room at the Masonry building, on Thomas Street in the Liberties. “If you asked us the day before, we wouldn’t have been that surprised,” Martin says of the festival selling out. “If you asked us a month before, yes, very surprised.” But, he adds, “The line-up is really strong.”

The line-up is, as Smyth puts it, stacked. There are local heroes, such as blk, who recently performed a sold-out show at 3Arena. There’s the Galway star Kettama; the grime legend Skepta, presenting his Más Tiempo house-music project; the house-music icon Kerri Chandler; Hannah Laing, the Scottish trance and techno DJ partly responsible for the resurgence of the Sophie Ellis-Bextor hit Murder on the Dancefloor; the UK garage-lovers Girls Don’t Sync; and on and on.

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District 8 has already hosted events in the walled garden of Palmerstown House Estate. The District X festival is yet another evolution for an organisation that keeps moving, in part out of pure necessity.

Martin began promoting and playing gigs in Dublin in 2002, including a psychedelic trance night at RedBox. He started Life Festival in 2006. Smyth became obsessed with dance-music culture after watching an Irish documentary on the dance-music gathering Homelands. “I’d say I watched it every single day when I came home from school.” Having DJ-ed in clubs around Dublin “reasonably unsuccessfully”, Smyth emigrated to Australia. When he came back a friend asked if he wanted to run a stage at Life Festival. In 2012 he approached Martin to become a partner in the festival.

District 8 came into being when they had booked a New Year’s Eve show and were looking for a venue. They landed on the Tivoli, the theatre that used to stand on Francis Street, around the corner from building we’re talking in. Their journey really started at the Tivoli in 2014, making this August their 10th anniversary. They’re marking it with a birthday-party show featuring Carl Cox.

The demolition of the Tivoli hit the capital hard. District 8 became nomadic. In September 2019 District 8 relaunched its parties at Jam Park, in Swords in north Co Dublin. The location was a gamble. Jam Park was to be a destination club, but it never made it out of the pandemic. Index then came into being on Arran Quay, before landing on Wexford Street, at the Opium venue (formerly the Village) in September 2023.

“We wanted to make the best underground electronic music club in Ireland, something new, something immersive,” Martin says of the current location. “Having a very, very good sound system was my first condition. That’s the main thing. It has to be pristine.” The club has set high standards, with international headliners, and frequently sells out.

In a historically territorial industry, other promoters often speak about Smyth and Martin as having a collaborative approach. They seem a little bashful about this. “We work with a lot of people,” Smyth says. “We’re proud of that. It’s important to us.” The broader ecosystem of smaller clubs and nights, he says, “is really important to the whole scene”.

Smyth frequently diverts the conversation to laud those in their team, including Ryan Roe. “We constantly engage with the younger people working around us. They help us think and move in the right direction. We always try to put on a good, safe show that’s entertaining.”

What would make the industry easier to operate within, and to grow?

Martin says: “The obvious one would be extending [licensing] hours, so that people can choose what time they want to go out at and what time they want to leave, so that it’s not all [operating] within a few hours.” He also points to the need for more venues in Dublin city centre. For Smyth, a huge component of a vibrant night-time economy is transport. “It’s an issue that gets constantly raised,” he says.

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Many young people are frustrated by the lack of cultural, social and creative offerings at night compared with what happens in other European cities. “Where things are at now is a consequence of the wider situation with housing,” says Smyth. “Not as many young people are living in cities, and students are staying off-campus. Despite all that, I want to credit all the operators around Dublin who put on great nightlife and are operating in tough times. A key attribute of people who stick around in this business is resilience – being able to be versatile, being creative, solving problems. I think there are a lot of people doing a lot of great things, and I think that’s really important to acknowledge.”

The pandemic was a time of enforced reflection. Martin says his enthusiasm for the work is rooted in a simple drive. “I do this because I enjoy it. I go to the club every weekend.” He especially loves creating and designing the production aspects of both Index and their outdoor events.

“I just love nothing more than seeing a room packed and people having a really good time,” says Smyth. “I know that might sound cheesy, but it’s true: when you see smiles on people’s faces, that you’re giving people a space for release, that’s the essence of dance music from the beginning, that escape. We have shows for 18- to 20-year-olds, and we have shows for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s. It doesn’t matter to me. I just love seeing the club busy, the people happy and the DJs happy.”

District X takes place at Palmerstown House Estate, in Co Kildare, on Saturday, September 21st; some Backstage Experience tickets are still available