There were no screaming girls this time. Most of the fans present were less interested in pulling their hair out than on holding on to what was left of it. But insofar as it as possible, Paul McCartney rolled back the years at the RDS last night, with his first Dublin concert in four decades.
Prior to the show, a giant screen flashed text messages from the audience one of which read: "Hi from all the gang in GPO 1916, and Adelphi 1963."
This was a humorous exaggeration of the age of some of those in the RDS, but only just. Forty years and 40 shades of grey later, there were plenty there who could plausibly claim to have been in the Adelphi.
There were a few teenagers too, to testify to the enduring appeal of a brand of rock some of which dates from the late carboniferous period. Probably the majority of the audience, however, were the in-betweenies, people old enough to remember when the Beatles were together but just too young to have attended the last Dublin gig. Another typical text message was from a mum and dad apologising to their kids for not bringing them.
McCartney has not wasted the intervening decades. After opening the show with Hello, Goodbye and Jet, he yelled: "Oiche mhaith, a Dubh Linn" in an accent good enough to suggest he'd been taking lessons in the years since he and the rest of the Fab Four were smuggled out of the Adelphi in the back of a van.
"It's truly great to be back in Dublin," he added, as the screen flashed black and white pictures of the Beatlemania years.
When he sang Getting Better, a song written in the 1960s but never performed live by him until this tour, he wasn't describing the weather unfortunately. The skies, which had mirrored the audience's prevailing hair colour all evening, chose this very moment to spit rain again. But for the 30,000 crowd - the concert finally sold out yesterday evening - a few rain drops couldn't ruin the evening.
Yet another text message said simply "Here comes the sun". Here comes the blue moon would be more like it given the infrequency of Beatle Irish appearances. But whether it was a song request or a weather forecast, the message was equally unsuccessful. Even so, on a night when the star performed a hit for nearly every one of the intervening years since his last Dublin concert, nobody was complaining.