Not a hipster haircut, crossover pop anthem or celebrity girlfriend to be had and yet here are Matt Berninger & Co. playing over two nights to roughly 2,630% more people than they did in 2002 when they popped their Dublin cherry in The Cobblestone.
That they’ve come this far is testament to their self-belief, a record company, 4AD, prepared to play the long game and - going on tonight’s t-shirt evidence - Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam fans broadening their musical horizons a smidgen.
Anyway, that “This is all a bit unlikely, isn’t it?” moment comes three songs in when the band exhume Alligator’s ‘The Geese Of Beverly Road’, a tune that’s not even cheery enough to qualify as maudlin, but which still manages to transfix everyone including the burger-munchers at the back of the gardens.
Whilst brilliant evening sunshine isn’t The National’s natural habitat, the likes of ‘Mistaken For Strangers’, ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ - loving the elongated new intro, chaps - and ‘Demons’ are still dispatched with the prerequisite amount of melancholia, menace and other words beginning with ‘m’.
It’s all a little, well, polite though until a technical glitch during ‘Hard To Find’ causes Matt to petulantly throw down his mic and indulge in some quality cursing of, I presume, the sound crew.
Confident enough to keep shifting gears - following the hyperactive ‘Squalor Victoria’ with the Leonard Cohen-esque ‘I Need My Girl’ really shouldn’t work, but does - the chaps start throwing some serious shapes during the mass singalong versions of ‘Pink Rabbits’, ‘England’, ‘Graceless’ and ‘Fake Empire’ that round out the main set.
Having long since had that crazed look in his eyes, you just know that Mr. B’s going to swan-dive into the crowd and, sure enough, your humble correspondent gets to sing a very out of tune verse of ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’ with him right at the death. He’s still AWOL in the crowd as the rest of The National take their bow; a chaotic end to a show that just intensifies their Irish love affair.
STUART CLARK

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