Peter Crawley/Rock 2005: There's nothing like the homecoming show of the biggest act in rock to lay the live music experience bare.
For a while the concerts were just a rumour; soon they had become a scrummage for tickets; and eventually they were a three-night, utterly sold-out reality.
In the gap between fawning anticipation and inevitable carping (poor sound, dwarfing spectacle, and, come to think of it, the new album wasn't all that good), U2 laid siege to Croke Park in June. In the process, they broke box-office records. This year live pop and rock scaled some dizzyingly high peaks; or, as Bono put it, they were in a place called Vertigo.
Live concerts, in fact, have never mattered more to pop music. This year, the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) began aggressively suing filesharers (or "serial uploaders" as Irma identified them) in an effort to curb declining record sales.
Although traditionally considered less lucrative and requiring more effort than mass-produced recordings, the live industry has proved more resilient than ever. If punters will do anything to get recorded music for free, it seems no price, however high, nor ticket-selling monopoly, however exploitative, will dissuade the same people from clamouring for admission. (U2's first two dates sold out in less than an hour.)
It's no coincidence, then, that the major players in rock and pop found their way this year to the nation's dark hovels, cavernous depots, enormous stadiums and rambling country estates - the live industry with its generous box-office split and attendant T-shirt hawking generally rewards bands more than a piffling percent from CD sales. And, unless you happen to be Eminem, Gorillaz or, indeed, Crazy Frog - each of whom had their reasons, I'm sure - music stars can't afford not to tour.
And so they did. This year's marquees and billboards have borne the names that have sculpted contemporary music into what it is (Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Kraftwerk, REM, Willie Nelson, Public Enemy); those who have chipped away at it with exciting results (Pixies, Beck, Eels, Green Day, Dizzee Rascal); the acolytes who sifted among the pieces and reassembled them into comfortingly familiar shapes (Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs); and those who just want to party (Girls Aloud, Destiny's Child, Snoop Dogg).
Though the numerous stages and open-air setting of the outdoor music season expose the live music reviewer to two bewildering phenomena - namely, daylight and exercise - Oxegen, Heineken Green Energy, Bud Rising and Electric Picnic work as a handy summary of the state of pop.
You couldn't fault Oxegen's unsurprising mix of vital young bloods such as Las Vegas new-new-wavers The Killers or Britpop revivalists Kaiser Chiefs - although three months after the Chiefs proved such a delirious prospect at their first Irish appearance in the Ambassador, it was hard not to feel slightly short-changed.
And while Green Day's anthemic punk might have made for a plausible headline act, their rebellious, politicised spirit couldn't distract from what had become a slavishly branded experience. The shops, the promotional tents, the restricted choice of beer, the on-site ATMs - this year they became a presence as heavy as the music.
Irma might have appreciated the atmosphere: at times it felt like a re-education camp for errant music consumers.
Drink sponsorship doesn't have to leave a bitter, yeasty aftertaste, though, and if Bud Rising afforded you just one brew (oh go on, guess which), its show-off booking and decentralised programming was frothingly varied.
The magnificent Weezer made a brilliant first Irish appearance in Vicar St (suitably chastened, they returned to the Point the following month), Beck somehow shoe-horned his exhilaratingly chaotic Guero show into the Olympia, and, best of all, the Pixies headlined Lansdowne Road, their bulging set brimming with prickly classics and unexpected bonhomie, the iconic members looking, with a becoming contradiction, like comfortable misfits.
The emergence of Electric Picnic in Laois - the "boutique music festival", as they insist on calling it - as a pleasingly anti-corporate major player on the rock calendar could soon render it a "souk music festival", but with a line-up this startling, who's complaining? Goldfrapp, The Flaming Lips, Kraftwerk, Mercury Rev, The Human League, Asian Dub Foundation - it was deliciously random, a disorder that unfortunately extended to its car parking.
What could possibly compensate for the hellish ordeal of searching for your car, in a pitch-black field, by the dim glow of your mobile phone?
Only The Arcade Fire, whose sole Irish appearance had to be my highlight of the year.
From the soul-lifting orchestral pop of Wake Up - a song that provided the epic music cue to herald U2's every appearance to the Vertigo stage - to the pounding chorus of Rebellion (Lies), the performance of Montreal's Arcade Fire proved that critical darlings can have more than cult appeal, that music can be anthemic without being condescending, and that the right group in the right place at the right time can represent live music at its stirring and redeeming best.
Highs & Lows
Highs
Where to begin? The forlorn beauty of Eels, who brought to Mr E's new album and select cuts from his back catalogue
the warm embrace of a string section?
Rod Stewart's mortified face upon discovering he had knocked over a greying fan with a kicked football?
KT Tunstall at the Sugar Club, just before she popped?
The nail-biting but wonderfully egalitarian trend - demonstrated from Devendra Banhart to Green Day to U2 - of inviting amateur musicians from the audience to share their stage?
The simple incandescence of The Arcade Fire at Electric Picnic? Or, perhaps it was Elton John's mad dash from Live 8 in Hyde Park to the RDS, reminding us that - however briefly, however naively, however ineffectively - it was a year in which live music, once again, tried to change the world.
Lows
With the Anger Management Tour scheduled to roll into Slane in September, it was widely anticipated that Eminem would make his final bow in Ireland; short of drawing down a pension and padding around in his slippers, the rapper has given every impression that he's ready to retire.
Instead, Marshall Mathers cried off his European tour four weeks before the date, citing "exhaustion". Diddums.
As Slane was forced to bite the bullet, Lord Henry Mount Charles - and 80,000 ticket-holders - were not impressed.
