Shane Doyle, the Irish expatriate 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 Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues and a springboard for the shooting-star career of Jeff Buckley, died on April 22 in Manhattan. He was 73.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was septic shock after a series of unsuccessful lung surgeries, his wife, Mimi Fisher, said.
Mr. Doyle opened Sin-é (pronounced shih-NAY) in 1989 at 122 St. Marks Place in the East Village, in an era when that neighborhood was still known for beer-soaked punk clubs, outsider art galleries and squatters in abandoned tenements who would soon be immortalized by the hit Broadway musical “Rent.”
“Sin-é” means “that’s it” in the Irish language, and that pretty well summed it up. With sparse décor and secondhand wood furniture, the venue (a cafe by day) was about the size of an East Village living room, as Ms. Fisher put it. There was no stage and, in the early days, no P.A. 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?,’” Tom Clark, a singer-songwriter who had a weekly gig there, said in an interview.
Nor did Sin-é have a liquor license, although it did sell beer on the sly, and food options were limited. Mr. 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 — Irish for “here.”)
He was every bit as casual when it came to compensating performers. Mr. Clark remembered when Mr. 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 like the Hothouse Flowers, Ms. O’Connor and Mr. MacGowan (who was born in England, but was as Irish as soda bread), some of whom would occasionally perform.
A wide array of other stars, including Iggy Pop, Matt Dillon, Michael Stipe from R.E.M., Daryl Hannah, Marianne Faithfull, Gabriel Byrne and Allen Ginsberg, also dropped by.
“This place is a sanctuary from the hype of the music business,” Mr. Doyle said in a 1993 interview with Billboard magazine. “I mean, where else could you hear Sinead 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,” Mr. 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.”
That low-key approach was the secret to his success, Lenny Kaye, the guitarist and rock savant, said in an interview: “He quietly encouraged anything to happen there. To me, that’s a mark of a great club owner. Hilly Kristal” — of the hallowed punk club CBGB — “had it. You don’t try to guide it, you don’t try to mastermind it, you give it a place to happen.”
Shane Christopher Doyle was born on Dec. 20, 1951, in Dublin, the fourth of eight children of Brendan Doyle, who ran a company selling family crests, and Cathy (O’Brien) Doyle.
He attended Blackrock College, a secondary school in Dublin, where he befriended Bob Geldof, the future Boomtown Rats singer and organizer 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.
Mr. Doyle was hardly overflowing with ambition in opening Sin-é. “I liked to drink coffee, and I liked to hang out with people,’” he told The Irish Daily Mail. “A cafe seemed like a good idea.’”
One artist who wandered in was Mr. Buckley, the troubadour son of the singer-songwriter (and absentee father) 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 to record his second album.
But he was just another dreamer with a six-string when he approached Mr. Doyle, hoping to find a low-pressure place to hone his craft, “because I didn’t have any teachers,” he said in a 1994 interview. “There were teachers around Sin-é to teach what I needed to learn.”
Initially, Mr. Doyle showed little interest. “He gave me a tape wrapped up in a bit of paper, which I may still have somewhere,” Mr. Doyle said in a 2007 interview with Melena Ryzik of The New York Times. “I didn’t like listening to tapes.”
Mr. Buckley finally earned Mr. 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 the 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,” Mr. Doyle told The Times. “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 Brooklyn. 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 told The Times. “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 like 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.
In addition to his wife and sons, Mr. Doyle is survived by two sisters, Neasa Doyle and Aoibheann Pratt; and four brothers, Malachi, Declan, Brian and Ronan.
Upon closing the third Sin-é, Mr. Doyle told The 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.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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