Una Gibney
Una Gibney is a singer, stylist and model. From Finglas, she lives in Temple Bar, Dublin
At the moment I'm living between London and Dublin. My partner is in London. His name is Ryan, and he works in banking. I met him on holidays two years ago. I travel a lot for my work and I usually work weekends, so sometimes I might have days off midweek. That's when I go to London.
I live in Temple Bar. I love being in the hustle and bustle. I'm out of Dublin a lot and I work lots of late nights with gigging. Often I don't get home until three or four in the morning. It's usually very noisy at that time. When I go to bed, people are leaving clubs. You might get a little bit of traffic between the hours of four and six, and then the early morning traffic starts at seven. The noise doesn't bother me. I'm so used to it now. If it's warm, I leave the window open at night.
I love living in Temple Bar. Because I'm on the road a lot, I like that when I wake up in the mornings I'm in the thick of things. I can meet friends, or go shopping. If I've done a gig the night before I need rest, so I mightn't get up until 12. I eat very well, but I don't watch what I eat. I'm addicted to chocolate. For breakfast I'll have Special K, or in winter I'll have porridge. I would never leave the house without food. And I take lots of water. I drink it all day long. When you're on stage you sweat a lot, so you need to rehydrate.
I work at three different things, and my working day revolves around those. I am a singer with the band Boogie Nights, and we also have another band, Party Kings. I work as a stylist, and I do some modelling too. At this time of year, besides my gigs, I'm meeting a lot of people from production companies because I style a lot of fashion shows. I still model, so I might be going to a fitting that day. But I started out as a singer.
Years ago, I was doing a gig with the Hothouse Flowers and Christy Dignam and the designer Michael Mortell was in the audience. He phoned a modelling agency and told them that they should see me. It was Elaine Doody's Elaine's Model Management.
I never thought of myself as a model. I loved singing, and the fact that I fell into modelling was fantastic. I think this country is great for modelling. I'm only five foot eight, which is the minimum, and I'm a size 10, not six or eight, but there's a great market for stuff like that. I always sang, and modelling gave me the freedom to do both careers. They ran very well hand in hand. I ended up signing my own record deal with Warner a few years after that. I also spent a year on tour singing with Michael Flatley's show, Celtic Tiger. We played in Madison Square Garden. It was amazing.
When I lost my deal with Warner, I sang with a band called Abbaesque, and out of that myself and four friends decided that we'd set up our own band -- Boogie Nights. That was 10 years ago. Boogie Nights is a Seventies show and we all play characters. I play this cheeky New York gym instructor called Fifi. We play all the Seventies songs like I Will Survive, Night Fever and Amarillo. We make sure that we have everyone on the dance floor from start to finish.
We do everything from private parties to corporate gigs to weddings. We just did a corporate event in Marbella and there was one in Manchester too.
The business has changed in the last few years because everybody is cutting back on budgets. You don't work six nights a week anymore. It might be a couple of nights at the weekend. There aren't as many charity balls anymore. It's a competitive market, but we're lucky that we did the groundwork years ago. We have a good reputation.
But I also perform with two other bands -- Party Kings, which is more Eighties' music, and Abba Revival. Sometimes I do corporate gigs with Paul Harrington, so that is just a pianist and a singer, and I sing with two other girls, and we call ourselves The Divas. The variety of those bands, along with the styling and modelling, means that I'm not dependent on one thing.
If I have to go to a gig outside Dublin, I might have to leave at three for a six-thirty set-up in Cork. I always eat two hours minimum before a gig, never any later. It's very difficult to sing on a full stomach, but also a lot of my costumes would be quite revealing -- bikini tops and hot pants -- so there's no room for holding in the stomach.
I do my hair and make-up, and then put on my costumes. I make all the costumes for the band. I love clothes. My mum sewed at home. She had an industrial Singer sewing machine and I made my first dress when I was 11. I did it because I was bored on a rainy day. When I was with Warner I made all the clothes I wore on stage. I'd love to have my own fashion label someday.
Sometimes if we are doing a corporate gig, people are worried about getting up on the dance floor because they don't want to do anything silly in front of their boss. But I teach the crowd dance routines and everybody gets up. It's great fun. I don't stop working from the minute I'm up on stage, and I make sure that there's a constant flow of people on the dance floor. Sometimes if people are drunk, they might heckle and be mildly offensive, but I have ways of turning it around, but in a nice way.
We do a lot of weddings, and often we're booked for them a year in advance. Twice the wedding was called off. One time it was only six weeks before the big day. We never asked what happened.
www.boogienights.ie
www.thepartykings.net
www.unagibney.com
- (In conversation with) Ciara Dwyer
Originally published in
