The Rolling Stones at Slane Castle

It is pissing down on the queue for buses to Slane: a queue that winds back from Parnell Square to past Moore Street. Gentleman that I am, I jump most of it, and by the time we hit the gig, the rain has stopped.

Guys piss in hedges, girls writhe in wait for awful portaloos. Gardai sneer at local wideboys flogging rainwear and bottled water. Country boys in pink cowboy hats guzzle hot dogs leaking mustard and tomato sauce. Lots of vodka and lager gets necked. All struggle through liquid chocolate mud. “It’s like,” says a girl in purple boots, “Fraggle fuckin’ Rock on acid.” I negotiate the straw-strewn mudslide to Gold Circle B (standing). Big stage. Security fling out various gouts for having the wrong passes. How I laugh.
A reader: “How do you reconcile this with your earlier queue jumping?”
Myself: “I eat my shorts.”
A very fat girl who appears to have been mud-wrestling with her anorexic friend dances to The Charlatans’ ‘Love Is The Key’.
No one else bothers. Stephen Rea shlepps by. Copters buzz overhead with green lights blinking. Australians high on cheap kangarouge strum air guitars, howling “Mick, Mick,” at throat-lacerating volume. The Charlatans beat it. Dusk sets in. Discs are spun - ‘The Passenger’, ‘Children Of The Revolution’. A wet poncho blows into my face.
At 9:00, the big screen explodes with jet fighters, Jagger’s lips and Mick himself, and the boys crank out ‘Start Me Up’. Mick’s learned some Irish, which he gets off Cead Milé faultlessly. Then we all sing the chorus of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. Mick has trouble with the lyric though. Nor is Keef much cop. In fact, Ronnie does most of the guitar honours tonight, and only Chuck Lavelle’s keyboards hold this together. James Brown’s ‘I Go Crazy’, greatly enhanced by the vocals and gyrations of Lisa Fisher, leads into a relatively lacklustre ‘Tumblin’ Dice’, notable principally for the moment when the normally Keaton-faced Charlie raises his eyebrows to Ronnie.
‘Midnight Rambler’ really kickstarts things, however, as Mick plays what that girl next to me unerringly identifies as a harmonica, strutting and pouting like a man half his age. Keef, louche as ever, shambles about looking twice his. Looking pretty fucked, actually. Time has ravaged him horrendously. His is not a face for 40-foot enlargement on screen. ‘Dead Flowers’ suffers from Mick’s acoustic guitar and so-so vocals, but Charlie saves the day.
Then it’s Keef’s finest moment, a heart-stopping vocal on ‘You Got Silver’. This is what he loves. And Woodie, fag in mouth, plays faultless blues. A stompin’ ‘Hold You’ follows, after which the jaded old weasel smiles. When he smiles, his tongue comes out.
When a section of stage snakes out over the crowd, Jagger seems to think that this James Bond hoopla entitles him to phone in his vocals. ‘Only Rock And Roll’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’ and especially ‘Satisfaction’ (into which he somehow manages to cram six syllables) veer into self-caricature. On the main stage, the giant blow-up mouth bobs in the wind, all too reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s half-inflated Dark Lord. A sea of arms grab ant-size mobile camera momentos. Forbidden flashbulbs pop in the seated blocks, and gals sway on beast of burden boyfriend’s shoulders.
Back on terra firma, Mick climbs the architecture for a scorching ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ against a shifting snakeskin/Rorscharch red and black projection. Sax and keyboards are superb. Wooo Wooo indeed. A splendidly bleak ‘Paint It Black’ redeeems the theatrics.
‘Brown Sugar’ comes with background projection of a 100-foot high Sugar Momma chumming up to various phallic structures - the great pyramid, Big Ben, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, M. Eiffel’s iron cobweb etc (though not, inexplicably given the ‘Hello Ireland’ stuff, The Spike). The band bows. The crowd calls out for more. More it is. Then, in a Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s all over. Off go the fireworks. And us.
On the late bus, my eyes keep closing. The girls asleep on the floor have mud up to the knees of their Levi’s. The badge on the blonde’s black hat (Mick’s lips) flash on and off and on again. And the songs fade as we go into the dark. But they will not fade away.