Good time Joe
If Cork has an impresario, then Joe Kelly fits the bill. He's had his hand in Henry's, The Bodega, The Roundy, St Luke's, The Pav, and of course the Savoy, which Kneecap play tonight.
Irish-language Belfast rap trio Kneecap play a second gig tonight to launch their new album, Fenian, at the Savoy. This is the culmination of their years-long relationship with the Good Room, which began when they performed at operations manager Caoilian Sherlock’s Quarter Block Party in 2019, followed by shows at City Hall in 2023 and 2025.
“They sold out the two album launch shows in a few hours,” Joe Kelly, one half of the Good Room, told Tripe + Drisheen. Each ticket includes a physical copy of the record, making sure that each attendee gets a memento from the gig. This might be the most sought-after ticket in the new Savoy, which Kelly has returned to after a twenty-year absence.
Joe Kelly has been around a bit longer than Kneecap. Not long after he landed in Cork from Galway, he set himself up in Sir Henry’s with the distinctively and forgettably named night Bla Bla Go Go Club. It was 1989, and Henry’s had been on the go for well over a decade.
Since then Joe has had a hand in clubs and pubs across the city, including The Bodega, The Roundy, St Luke’s, The Pav, and of course The Savoy, which he first managed at the turn of the century.
On 14 February of this year, Joe returned to The Savoy, which had been shuttered for ten years. With a capacity of 600 people, it’s the only venue in the city centre that straddles that missing link between Cyprus Avenue and The Opera House. It feels like it’s been a long time coming, but for Joe, who’s been round the block and then some, it’s a full-circle moment.
Henry’s
Sir Henry’s first opened in 1978 on South Main Street. Through the 1980s it became one of the country’s most famous rock bars and shifted towards dance music in the late 1980s. It was around this time, in 1988, that Joe moved to Cork from Galway for college, and soon after he was booking out Sir Henry’s for dance nights for the Bla Bla Go Go Club.
He also teamed up with Denis O’Mullane, who was the bassist in Cypress, Mine, and ran a club night in Henry’s for a period in the early 1990s.
Joe DJ’d in the front bar of Henry’s between 1992 and 1995, while Andrew Mac Donagh was holed up in the back bar. They eventually came up with a name for their duo: Joe was DJ Egg and Andrew was DJ Fork.
This was a golden period in Cork’s clubbing scene, Joe recalls, with the Donkey’s Ears on Union Quay and Isaac Bells among the places where club nights were taking place. Soon after, he and Denis set up shop, opening the Bodega on Cornmarket Street.
“It was literally just a warehouse, pigeons flying around, a few boxes in the corner, literally just not used. It was the Coal Quay and people were afraid to go down the Coal Quay at night time,” Joe recalls.
The Bodega was the first of three ventures, including the Roundy, which opened in 1999, and the Savoy in 2000. With the re-opening of the Savoy, all three are back in the mix.
Local acts
“It’s very important that you have good local bands or good local DJs,” Joe said, to complement the visiting acts. The re-opening night saw BoolaBoom, The Leon Stax Equation and DJs Stevie G, Angi and Danilo Milk perform in the Savoy.
In its time, the Savoy has hosted Gil Scott‑Heron, Jam Master Jay, Maseo of De La Soul, and Grandmaster Flash – all made their way to the theatre on St Patrick’s Street.
Joe left the Savoy after two years, and a couple of years later opened the Pav together with Pat Conway of The Lobby Bar and DJ Stevie G in 2008. It was the tail end of the Celtic Tiger years, and a crash was just around the corner.
“We did that from 2008. Unfortunately, the country was going over the cliff, and we’d been trying to get it open for the best part of a year and a half,” he says.
“But during my tenure at the Pav, Sly and Robbie as well as the XX played there, and Hozier – Kanye turned up.”
“Kanye was playing in the Marquee, and Sam Spiegel got on to Kanye and said, ‘Hey man, I’m doing the club show. Do you want to come up?’ And so they came up – he came up and did three tracks, him and Kid Cudi.”
The Pav ran for the next five years, but the recession proved the undoing of the club. “I mean, effectively then that went to the wall in 2014. I mean, as I say, the whole country went over the cliff,” Joe says, adding that the doubling of the price of late licences made it more difficult for the venue to remain open.
Joe saw business collapsing in real time as the recession hit harder. “I remember having Roy Ayers six months before we closed, and it was in December. Sometimes you’re banging your head going, ‘How is no one here?’, but when you need 250 people, 300 to break even, and you’re getting 110 people, you know in a way you’re kind of going out of business.”
Good Room, good times
In 2015, Joe teamed up with Ed O’Leary to form the Good Room. Named for a ‘good room’ in a house, the idea was to bring music and gigs to unconventional spaces. The first space they came to use was St Luke’s Church on Summerhill North.
“The City Council eventually bought it. They built the stage, and I came in and I was like, ‘Jesus, imagine if you could do proper gigs’, and we approached the City Council.”
Talos, a much-loved local electronic musician and artist who died in 2024, was the first person to perform as part of the Good Room when he supported the Balanescu Quartet. Some of Talos’ artwork, first designed for the Kino, now adorns the bar in the Savoy.
Joe has only good things to say about the former art house cinema on Washington Street.
“It’s a really good space,” he said of the 250 capacity. The single-space room has a really good sound baffle at 8–10 feet up, which reduces noise pollution and reverberation, taking “all that high range out that would kind of annoy your ears. So the sound is really good there.”
The space started off strong, and there was a sense of optimism around the city at the time. And then Covid hit.
“The first act we ever had on stage was for Sounds From A Safe Harbour – Feist.”
In the Kino’s very short lifetime as a Good Room venue, the space hosted acts that have since gone on to become headliners. “We had the Mary Wallopers, we had Gemma Dunleavy, we had John Blek, we had loads of different people performing there to 50 people.”
The pandemic put a spanner in the works, as it did for so many others, and the pattern of lockdowns put an end to the Good Room and the Kino.
The Good Room had to go back to the drawing board and continued putting on shows at St Luke’s. They also put gigs on in the Lee Rowing Club, on boats in Cork Harbour, and also ran a festival, It Takes A Village, in Trabolgan.
Meanwhile, the Savoy was purchased by development group Clarendon Properties, who shut the shopping centre to develop it and consolidate it with neighbouring commercial units. Mango and JD Sports moved in, but several other units were waiting to be filled, including the old cinema.
Rumours circulated that it would become a boutique cinema in 2020, but this never materialised. Then, the opportunity came in November 2025 for the Good Room to take over the space, and things moved very quickly after that.
The Savoy has two venues, with a smaller venue to complement the larger room. But the 650-capacity venue is firmly where they are placing their focus. The plan is for the venues to host most of the Good Room’s standing gigs, while seated gigs will remain at St Luke’s.
Event centres
So where does the Savoy fit into the live music jigsaw that is Cork?
“The 200, 250 is what we need,” Joe says. “You know, we need a 2,000 as well while you’re at it.”
Cork isn’t short on controversy surrounding a concert and event centre. While Joe is in favour of the Beamish & Crawford site, he acknowledges it is not without its difficulties. The sod was turned 10 years ago, but it has since been mired in controversy.
“So the arena shows could be anything from five to ten or more 40-foot long trucks. How do you get 5 40-foot or 10 40-foot trucks down to the Beamish site?”
“I see Tom Coughlan in the Marina Market putting out that he might try to put one up there, and to be honest with you, it’s a better location,” Joe says.
And while these big arenas like the event centre, wherever it may be, are necessary, Joe says smaller venues are also needed for artists to start out.
“I was saying in an interview the other day that CMAT played to three people in the Roundy,” Joe says, citing the Meath star’s appearance at Quarter Block Party in 2020. “Every band at some point has played in a small venue.”
Joe believes that venues should be working together in Cork to improve the situation, although he does mention that plenty of lobbying takes place.
“Collectively, we should, all the venues, be saying, how can we all help each other by having more tourism come to Cork?” he says. However, he is critical of trying to get any sort of official accreditation for good nightlife. “There’s these European purple flags. Now I have never met anyone that has said, ‘Hey, let’s go to Bilbao because they have a purple flag.’”
He also says that late licensing is not what he is interested in catering to. “It’s expensive. You might be finishing work at three, or you’re not finishing work – the building is cleared at three. You’d be getting home at five in the morning.”
While Joe sees improvements in the city’s night-time infrastructure, with an increased garda presence being a big and welcome change, many of the city’s clubs and venues have gone to the wall.
“If you want more people to come to Cork and you want more stuff on, and to be honest with you, when I got to Cork there were 17 nightclubs. I mean, what is there now? Three? What does that tell you?”
In saying this, the Savoy is located quite close to many other of the city’s established venues. The use of the back entrance on Drawbridge Street means that the venue is within a minute’s walk of Dali, the Opera House, the mostly closed Green Room and Half Moon Theatre, and the Crawford Art Gallery. Could we see the creation of a new cultural quarter, and does Joe plan on taking advantage of this?
“Within reason. I mean, on that note you need the City Council to say this is a good idea. I would approach Joe in Bakestone and the guys in Nudes and say, ‘Why don’t we close the street someday?’ All those things will happen, at some point, you know?”
Here’s looking at you, Joe.