Tickets for James Vincent McMorrow's Iveagh Gardens gig, the first of a series of live music pilot events taking place this summer, sold out within 30 minutes this morning.

Only 500 hundred tickets were available for the event and were sold on the National Concert Hall's website, which crashed for some users within a minute of the tickets going live at 10am this morning.

The NCH confirmed by 10.30am that all the tickets had been sold, calling the demand 'absolutely phenomenal'.

On Twitter, James Vincent McMorrow apologised for the website going down, but commented that it showed how many people were desperate to get back to live music.

"End of the day this is the first show back and its only 500 tickets, the tickets were gone in 30 seconds, it was always going to be chaos," he tweeted.

I know a lot of people are frustrated, it was basically 10s of thousands of people trying to get 500, it was always going to be chaos. But the tix did go to real people, not friends of friends, not bots…

— James Vincent McMorrow (@jamesvmcmorrow) June 3, 2021

He also said they would be working on a free live stream of the event for those not in the lucky 500 to grab tickets.

The concert will go ahead next week on Thursday June 10th at 7pm, with special guest Sorcha Richardson supporting.

Tickets were sold in 'pods' of four people total, and the NCH said they will have in place measures such as staggered entry times and social distanced queuing to ensure concert goers protection and safety.

It's the first in a series of pilot music and sporting events that have been organised for this summer as Covid restrictions ease.

James Vincent McMorrow's forthcoming album Grapefruit Season is available for pre-order and is set to land on July 16th.