It started with a small, silly idea in September 2015; a simple brunch with friends to sing along to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette.
How did Sing Along Social get from a crowd of 100 people in a pub to an audience of 10,000 people at a music festival, in just ten years?
The Sing Along Social was created and is powered by the the simple joy of singing together, badly.
2015
This whole thing started by accident when Aoife Mc had an idea to invite her closest friends over for brunch to sing along to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morisette in its entirety.
The guestlist got kind of big so she called up her pal Eoin who worked at Bodytonic to see if she could rent the upstairs room of MVP. It was Eoin who suggested putting up a Facebook event to see if anyone else wanted to come, and by the next day nearly 1,000 people had signed up to come.
One carelessly created Facebook event later, a thousand people wanted in. We needed a bigger boat. So, on Sunday 27th of September 2015, we booked upstairs in MVP, an iconic boozer in Dublin 8 and gave away 100 tickets for free. We handed all attendees a plastic spoon when they arrived, and we started it all by saying “let’s just press play and see what happens.”
It was so much fun we decided to keep doing it until it wasn’t fun anymore. By the next month, our forever friend Nialler9 had gifted us the name Sing Along Social and he even designed cute lil logo for us. It’s still the logo that adorns our boilersuits today.
2016
After nearly a year of monthly residencies at MVP, we were invited to do our first ever festival, Body & Soul, with an appearance at the Mother Stage doing a Guilty Pleasure playlist and a Stevie Nicks vs Kate Bush pop up in the woods. We played the music from Spotify playlist on our mobile phone.
We weren’t sure what to expect but we certainly did not expect to see hundreds of people running over a hill towards the stage to sing along to Shania with us.
What an honour to pop up at the Body & Soul area of Electric Picnic a few months later. Aoife had upgraded her skills from playing the tunes on a mobile to actually using decks. The props started to get a lil bigger and guests and audience members began to appear on stage.
2017
The MVP residencies continued and we did our first wedding for a friend. It worked! We even dipped our toes into corporate events.
The first Craic Mechanic, Anna, was hired, and our first boilersuit was bedazzled in the summer of 2017 for our second Body & Soul and Electric Picnic appearances.
2018
The craic was truly mighty, with wedding, festival and corporate bookings. We need more Craic Mechanics!
We hire Aileen, Ciara, Emma G, Maura Darragh, Nell, Sarah and Jessy. We have our first residency at The Sugar Club in Dublin, and we take the show on the road with regular gigs around the country in Roisin Dubh in Galway and The Pav in Cork.
We discover we LOVE weddings and they love us! Our festival gigs get bigger and we do our first year of All Together Now at the Belonging Bandstand.
We do our first Feile na Bealtaine in the yard of Dick Mack’s Pub in Dingle, Co Kerry, and it becomes one of our annual highlights.
2019
The crowd starts to get even bigger at festivals like All Together, Electric Picnic, and Body & Soul. We’re like where the heck are all these cuties coming from?!
We even had an engagement at our Electric Picnic show - congratulations to Mark and Sean! We also popped up at their wedding a few years later :)
We’re gonna need a bigger boat. Oliviam, Ger, and Irene join the team.
We head over to Latitude in the UK and Lollapalooza in Berlin. We do a wedding in Spain. We have a corporate event in California.
We’ve gone international, baby!
2020
To try to stay connected with people, joy, and lols, we launched our Sing Along Social Distancing with truly ridiculous antics over Zoom, Instagram and Facebook Live. Our community really supported us through this year by buying lots of merch, and we appreciated it so, so, so much.
We really really missed having the craic with everyone this year, and we were so happy and grateful when it was safe to return to work.
2021
We stepped back slowly into work after the global pandemic. The first events back were our beloved weddings in July 2021. Festivals, corporate, and residency events were still on a hiatus.
2022
We are BACK, baby. This year we fully got back into our flow of residences, weddings, corporate events, and festivals. The singing was louder than ever.
The crowds at All Together Now, Body & Soul, and Electric Picnic were spectacular. And they kept growing.
We did a nationwide tour in autumn with gigs in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Kerry, Wicklow, Clare, Monaghan, Dublin, Waterford and Kilkenny.
2023
With so much work coming our way, it was time to expand the team from eight Craic Mechanics to over twenty people. We welcomed Ciara, Emma B, Emma D, Georgina, Hebah, Maria, Mo, Polly, Roisin, Ruth, Selina, Shauna, and Siobhan to the team.
We did regular residencies throughout the year in The Pav in Cork, Dolan’s in Limerick, The Roisin Dubh in Galway, and The Sugar Club in Dublin. We celebrated so many beautiful weddings all around Ireland. We were flying out the doors with corporate events, especially at Christmas time.
2024
As well as popping up at weddings, corporate events, and festivals including Feile na Bealtaine, Mother Pride Block Party, and Electric Picnic, we had our first Main Stage Appearance at All Together Now. We weren’t sure if anyone would come. But, boy, did they come! In their thousands.
I know! We were as surprised as you are.
We went to Spain twice this year for two beautiful weddings, and pressed play on many a first dance song all over Ireland. We continued with our schedule of corporate parties and regular residencies.
2025
Our pop up at Dick Mack’s Pub at Feile na Bealtine in May 2025 is a career highlight and a great warm up to our second Main Stage Appearance at All Together Now where the crowd peaked at 10,000 people.
We continued to provide beautiful and wholesome entertainment at weddings and private parties all over Ireland.
It was a huge year for Sing Along Social behind the scenes when the Holy Trinity of Emmas emerged. Emma B came on board as Chief Craic Mechanic and Managing Director, Emma D was crowned Queen of Admin and Corporate Coordinator, Emma G took on the role of cultural guide of the future of Sing Along Social as well as being crowned Princess of Admin, and Irene stepped up as Creative Director of Festivals, Residencies & Community Events.
What do you think, should we keep going for another ten years? Let’s press play and see what happens.