The Twisted Pepper is Dead; Long Live The Twisted Pepper

Famed Dublin nightspot, The Twisted Pepper, closes its doors for the last time this weekend, and there’s going to be one hell of a party!

The Twisted Pepper on Middle Abbey Street opened in 2008, and in that short time managed to establish itself as one of the city’s go-to nightspots. It was as much home to gigs and club nights, as it was to exhibitions, talks, comedy, workshops, screenings and the monthly Banter; always featuring an eclectic line-up of acts and performers, always pushing the envelope.

Bodytonic will be celebrating the seven meteoric years of The Twisted Pepper in the coming days, with the Wrap Up Weekend, starting this Thursday, 13th August. The guys have pieced together this three-nighter which will feature local crews and collectives who have helped make the venue what it is since the get-go. This is their way of saying thank you to everyone who made the Pepper what is was.

In a statement released by Bodytonic today, they say, “We feel we’ve achieved what we set out to do with The Twisted Pepper, and as always for us, once we get the itch to move on & develop something new, we gotta move on. We opened in 2008, probably the worst economic time to open any venue in Dublin. We’re closing in 2015, probably as good a time as any to remain open. Economic circumstances never effected why we opened, nor why we are closing. When you believe you’re doing something different and you’ve got the fire in your belly – you go for it. When you’ve done all you have set out to do, and you start to feel your repeating yourself and the passion goes, it’s over.”

It continues, “54 Middle Abbey St will be refurbished with a new bar & food focus, mixed with another 5-10 random ideas that will inevitably ‘make no sense’. We will not be a restaurant, we have no idea where that rumour came from. Music will play a part too but it won’t be like it was before. We want to make things smaller, more intimate, more local, more creative… more fun. We want do things differently, but also in many ways return to the roots of where we started many moons ago in Wax. We’ll keep some fans, lose some fans, and hopefully gain some new ones. Maybe we’ll even regain some old ones.”

If you have any special Twisted Pepper moments that you would like to share with the guys in advance of the Closing Weekender, you can email them to Bodytonic, and they will feature some of them on the screens in the venue for the final shows over the weekend.

In many ways the philosophy behind this final weekend of lineups is a nod to the new direction The Twisted Pepper will be taking.