As Thursday is one of the busiest nights during Freshers’ Week, societies across the board led excursions into the Dublin nightlife, hoping to make some new loyal members or at least to have a good time. Amid countless pub crawls and other club nights, Trinity Ents’s event “Deep Freeze: Seabass” held much promise.
The event came as one Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Ents Officer Jonah Craig’s first performances. Upon his shoulders and indeed those of DU Snowsports, DU Surfing and markedly DUDJ, lay a heavy burden: to place a marker down for the year ahead, christen the new Hawkin’s St venue Tramline and increase Ents event turnouts among older and sophister students.
As a venue, Tramline is just about up to task. With two dancefloors and four bars dotted throughout, the club has the capacity to host Ents nights and those of larger societies comfortably. The new-look style of the bars with TVs advertising drink deals is flashy, the venue reaching for sophistication. Less impressive were small bathrooms, accessed through a corridor behind the dance floor which were the cause of long, and at times aggressive, queues. The dedicated smoking area is less a dedicated smoking area, but a back-door onto Hawkins St with a few barriers around it.
This could have been overlooked in the presence of impressive decor and while maritime decoration to make this a sea-themed night out was certainly there in places, it was poorly thought through. Wanting a place to put your drink down, you would find the tables covered in net. At least having DUDJ set up on a small boat in the back dancefloor gave the place a necessary lift.
Minor as these concerns are, yesterday’s event must go down as a triumph for DUDJ. Following their show with Patrick Topping at the Pav – which pulled in the largest crowd this writer’s ever seen on-site – they provided a healthy mix of techno for Seabass guests. Sounds were fun and dance-y at the front, harder and more frantic in the back. DU Snowsports and DU Surfing maybe found themselves outshined.
Bathroom queues and aesthetic woes aside, there was still, however, something off that good music just couldn’t mask. The event felt generic – walking in off the street, you’d think it was just another night out. Displays of PDA on couches brought back memories of teenage discos, while older students escaped to the smoking area. It did little to inspire crowd diversity and coming on the same night as clique event Club Philth, there was an obvious social divide in town last night.
The Ents Freshers’ Week event also failed to break the mould of previous years by enticing enough older students through it’s doors. Outside those associated with the involved societies, and the few bustling around in Ents jackets, the ratio of sophister student to fresher was low.
With another failure on the part of Ents to host a night that brought freshers and sophisters together in harmony, one begins to think it simply can’t work.
