Recently I found myself standing at the edge of a sloped field that led down to a wide river. It was scenic and unspoilt, but it was also a damp Friday afternoon in March, and even with the undeniable presence of a castle in my peripheral vision the green space before me didn’t look like anything magical or extraordinary. Yet it absolutely felt it.
I was outside Slane Castle, and the field was empty of everything except the memories of Slane 1995 I was recovering in real time. With no photographs from the day to aid me, mapping those memories on to the topography of the site wasn’t an automatic process. I was 15 when REM headlined, with Oasis second on the bill, and it was my first gig. Slane to me was an expanse of excitingly adult possibilities in which it was easy to lose yourself, lose your religion, lose a shoe.
Now it just looked ... small.
Some of the people I was with, from “first Slane” generations both before and after mine, were also confused. Surely this postage stamp of a field wasn’t the site of all those rite-of-passage concerts of such outsize significance in our lives. Could as many as 80,000 humans really squeeze into this innocuous-seeming incline?
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Amazingly, on July 22nd, it will be a full 20 years since that big REM gig. (I say 20 because there’s simply no way that 1995 is actually 30 years ago. I refuse to accept that calculation. I’m not three times the age I was then. That’s just fantasy maths.)
Since my semi-unexpected March visit to Slane in its undressed, non-concert mode, I’ve had another opportunity to think about “REM plus special guests” and work out why no summer music adventure I had later could ever compare to its heady rush. It wasn’t just that it was my first.
When I talked to the music-industry expert Michael Murphy, a lecturer at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, for an article about the flourishing of the Irish summer festival scene, he gave me a historical and sociological context that I didn’t have at my fingertips in 1995.
The first Slane in 1981, with Thin Lizzy headlining and U2 second on the bill, was a landmark moment in the professionalisation of Irish concert promotion, he said. So by the time I reached the banks of the Boyne, legions of nostalgics were probably already reminiscing about the good old days, but the culture of outdoor megagigs in Ireland was still in its relative infancy. Dates on the summer music calendar remained sparse.
Murphy also spoke about how festivals sit at the intersection of the corporate experience and our desire for freedom – an intriguing source of potential tension.
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By corporate experience he was referring to the influence of huge international companies, from global event promoters to drink-giant sponsors, on what is now called the “experience economy”. It’s no surprise that some recoil from this and seek alternatives.
For many, however, I suspect that their sense of freedom is compromised not because of no-choice bars or sensibly tight security but because their employers, their parents and maybe even their children have the capacity to haunt them at gigs and festivals like ticketless stalkers. They do this via a powerful tracking device known as a phone.
Everybody at Slane 1995 would have been there without a phone, which is to say they were really, really there. The world beyond was a gruelling woodland hike away. For first-timers like me it was all one big discovery, worth every penny of the £25.50 plus return £10 bus fare we paid (the combined equivalent, according to the consumer price index, of not quite €66.50 today).
Pre-Slane televisual reference points were relatively few. Already a decade had passed since Live Aid. It was only the second year that Glastonbury had been televised (then by Channel 4). RTÉ was a month away from broadcasting a sunny Féile. When Liam Gallagher made a pre-charts battle jibe about Blur, his onstage aside wasn’t clipped up a million times.
It was in a frenzied surge early in the Oasis set that I temporarily parted company with one of my crappy plimsoll-type shoes – never wear anything that resembles a plimsoll to Slane. We now have better trainers, better crowd control and immeasurably better portable toilets, but everything is mediated and everyone is being surveilled. Suddenly 1995 being equidistant from 2025 and 1965 doesn’t jar. It sounds right.
When I searched the Irish Times archive, I found a Slane preview piece headlined “Rarin’ to Rock ’n’ Roll”, plus a landline-touting advertisement for VIP tickets costing £50. Confirmation received. This all happened in the strange currency of another century.
Luckily, I don’t need video to remember the collective emotional swoon as Michael Stipe sang REM’s new single, Tongue, his falsetto floating out across the Gen X crowd as we spent lighter fuel and a mirrorball glimmered above.
