Born: December 20th, 1951
Died: April 22nd, 2025
Shane Doyle, a Dublin-born entrepreneur who founded Sin-é, a matchbox of a cafe and music venue in New York City that in the 1990s became a retreat for the likes of Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of The Pogues and a springboard for the shooting-star career of Jeff Buckley, has died aged 73 in Manhattan.
Doyle opened Sin-é in 1989 at 122 St Marks Place in the East Village, an area known at the time for beer-soaked punk clubs, outsider art galleries and squatters in abandoned tenements.
“Sin-é” pretty well summed it up. With sparse decor and second-hand wood furniture, the venue (a cafe by day) was about the size of an East Village livingroom, as Fisher put it. There was no stage and, in the early days, no PA system, which forced guitar-based solo acts to stand against a wall and strum behind a microphone stand, looking more like indoor buskers than marquee toppers. “I remember people coming in from other countries and going, ‘Where’s the rest of it?’” said Tom Clark, a singer-songwriter who had a weekly gig there.
Nor did Sin-é have an alcohol licence, although it did sell beer on the sly, and food options were limited. Doyle would occasionally whip up a pot of Irish stew in his apartment on East Seventh Street and lug it over for patrons. (He also owned a nearby bar called Anseo.)
He was every bit as casual when it came to compensating performers. Clark remembered when Doyle – gifted with words, if sparing in their deployment – invited him to become a regular performer. “The first thing I said was, ‘How much does it pay?’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Your friends can bring their own beer.’” Remuneration, such as it was, came from a tip jar.
But thanks in part to its proprietor’s quiet charm, Sin-é became a retreat for visiting Irish musicians including the Hothouse Flowers, O’Connor and MacGowan, some of whom would occasionally perform.
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A wide array of other stars, including Iggy Pop, Matt Dillon, Michael Stipe from REM, Daryl Hanna, Marianne Faithfull, Gabriel Byrne and Allen Ginsberg, also dropped by. “This place is a sanctuary from the hype of the music business,” Doyle said in a 1993 interview with Billboard magazine. “I mean, where else could you hear Sinéad O’Connor play every night for a week without waiting in a line a block long?”
One night, Bono and the Edge of U2 unexpectedly showed up. “We were floating a bit after that,” Doyle said in a 2016 interview with the Irish Daily Mail.
“Bands are always looking for a place to hang out after a gig,” he told Billboard. “I opened this place for them to feel at home.”
Shane Christopher Doyle was born in Dublin, the fourth of eight children of Brendan Doyle, who ran a company selling family crests, and Cathy (née O’Brien) Doyle.
He attended Blackrock College, a secondary school in Dublin, where he befriended Bob Geldof, the future Boomtown Rats singer and organiser of Live Aid. He moved to the United States in the late 1970s – because, as he once put it, “there was nothing going on in Ireland” – and eventually settled in New York, where he worked as a bicycle messenger and restaurant host.
Doyle was hardly overflowing with ambition in opening Sin-é. “I liked to drink coffee, and I liked to hang out with people,” he said. “A cafe seemed like a good idea.”
One artist who wandered in was Buckley, the troubadour son of the singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, who had died of a drug overdose in 1975 at age 28.
Like his father, the younger Buckley, with his ethereal aura and celestial tenor voice, burned brightly, if briefly; he drowned at 30 while in Memphis, Tennessee, to record his second album.
Initially, Doyle showed little interest. “He gave me a tape wrapped up in a bit of paper, which I may still have somewhere,” Doyle said in a 2007 interview with Melena Ryzik of the New York Times. “I didn’t like listening to tapes.”
Buckley finally earned Doyle’s attention and a weekly gig. He put his own haunting spin on an eclectic mix of covers of songs by Led Zeppelin, Bad Brains and Édith Piaf while also developing his own songs, including Mojo Pin (written with guitarist Gary Lucas) and Last Goodbye, which would be critically hailed after the release of his only studio album, Grace, in 1994.
A four-song EP, Jeff Buckley: Live at Sin-é, was released the same year, giving the venue a national profile. In 2003, the record was reissued in expanded form as a two-CD collection.
In the mid-1990s, Sin-é fell victim to gentrification. “The anarchist bookstore went, the apartments went from $400 to $1,200,” Doyle said. “Boom, I couldn’t keep going.”
Instead, he opened a more traditional rock club, Arlene’s Grocery, on Stanton Street on the Lower East Side, although he eventually sold his stake to open a supersized reinterpretation of Sin-é in the Williamsburg section of New York’s Brooklyn borough. That sequel lasted only a few months because of tangles with the local community board. “I’m walking around, thinking to myself: What the hell am I going to do?” he said. “I have no profession. I have no skill.”
His solution: open yet another Sin-é, a medium-sized club on Attorney Street on the Lower East Side, which lasted from 2001 to 2007 and hosted bands including The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In his later years, he owned a liquor store in East Harlem, and he had been scouting locations for a new version of his storied venue with his sons, Brendan and Jack.
Doyle is survived by his wife and sons, two sisters, Neasa Doyle and Aoibheann Pratt; and four brothers, Malachi, Declan, Brian and Ronan.
Upon closing the third Sin-é, Doyle told the New York Times that he had no regrets about his up-and-down nightlife career. “You want to see how far enthusiasm can get you,” he said, “just look at me.”
