A big summer gig without tracking devices? There was only one for me
Recently
I found myself
standing at the edge of a sloped field that led down to a wide river. It was scenic and unspoilt, but it was also a damp Friday afternoon in March, and even with the undeniable presence of a castle in my peripheral vision the green space before me didn't look like anything magical or extraordinary. Yet it absolutely felt it.
I was outside
Slane Castle
, and the field was empty of everything except the memories of Slane 1995 I was recovering in real time. With no photographs from the day to aid me, mapping those memories on to the topography of the site wasn't an automatic process. I was 15 when REM headlined, with Oasis second on the bill, and it was my first gig. Slane to me was an expanse of excitingly adult possibilities in which it was easy to lose yourself, lose your religion, lose a shoe.
Now it just looked ... small.
Some of the people I was with, from 'first Slane' generations both before and after mine, were also confused. Surely this postage stamp of a field wasn't the site of all those rite-of-passage concerts of such outsize significance in our lives. Could as many as 80,000 humans really squeeze into this innocuous-seeming incline?
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Amazingly, on July 22nd, it will be a full 20 years since that big REM gig. (I say 20 because there's simply no way that 1995 is actually 30 years ago. I refuse to accept that calculation. I'm not three times the age I was then. That's just fantasy maths.)
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Slane: Oasis before their concert in 1995. Photograph: INM/Getty
Since my semi-unexpected March visit to Slane in its undressed, non-concert mode, I've had another opportunity to think about 'REM plus special guests' and work out why no summer music adventure I had later could ever compare to its heady rush. It wasn't just that it was my first.
When I talked to the music-industry expert Michael Murphy, a lecturer at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire, for an article about the flourishing of the Irish summer festival scene, he gave me a historical and sociological context that I didn't have at my fingertips in 1995.
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The first Slane in 1981, with Thin Lizzy headlining and U2 second on the bill, was a landmark moment in the professionalisation of Irish concert promotion, he said. So by the time I reached the banks of the Boyne, legions of nostalgics were probably already reminiscing about the good old days, but the culture of outdoor megagigs in Ireland was still in its relative infancy. Dates on the summer music calendar remained sparse.
Murphy also spoke about how festivals sit at the intersection of the corporate experience and our desire for freedom – an intriguing source of potential tension.
When Liam Gallagher made a pre-charts battle jibe about Blur, his onstage aside wasn't clipped up a million times
By corporate experience he was referring to the influence of huge international companies, from global event promoters to drink-giant sponsors, on what is now called the 'experience economy'. It's no surprise that some recoil from this and seek alternatives.
For many, however, I suspect that their sense of freedom is compromised not because of no-choice bars or sensibly tight security but because their employers, their parents and maybe even their children have the capacity to haunt them at gigs and festivals like ticketless stalkers. They do this via a powerful tracking device known as a phone.
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Everybody at Slane 1995 would have been there without a phone, which is to say they were really, really there. The world beyond was a gruelling woodland hike away. For first-timers like me it was all one big discovery, worth every penny of the £25.50 plus return £10 bus fare we paid (the combined equivalent, according to the consumer price index, of not quite €66.50 today).
Pre-Slane televisual reference points were relatively few. Already a decade had passed since Live Aid. It was only the second year that Glastonbury had been televised (then by Channel 4). RTÉ was a month away from broadcasting a sunny Féile. When Liam Gallagher made a pre-charts battle jibe about Blur, his onstage aside wasn't clipped up a million times.
It was in a frenzied surge early in the Oasis set that I temporarily parted company with one of my crappy plimsoll-type shoes – never wear anything that resembles a plimsoll to Slane. We now have better trainers, better crowd control and immeasurably better portable toilets, but everything is mediated and everyone is being surveilled. Suddenly 1995 being equidistant from 2025 and 1965 doesn't jar. It sounds right.
When I searched the Irish Times archive, I found a Slane preview piece headlined
'Rarin' to Rock 'n' Roll'
, plus a landline-touting advertisement for VIP tickets costing £50. Confirmation received. This all happened in the strange currency of another century.
Luckily, I don't need video to remember the collective emotional swoon as Michael Stipe sang REM's new single, Tongue, his falsetto floating out across the Gen X crowd as we spent lighter fuel and a mirrorball glimmered above.
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
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Thomas Mann's 150th birthday present to Germany and the world: a warning from history
Thomas Mann and James Joyce never met in life but, especially in death, found much in common. Both were writers of challenging fiction who ended their days in self-imposed exile in Zürich. Both are buried there, at opposite ends of town. During their lifetimes their respective homelands rejected them first with mockery, then hatred – Joyce's works were banned, Mann's burned. After decades of posthumous apathy, both were resurrected by their homelands for praise and monetisation purposes. Just 10 days before another episode of Ireland's Bloomsday malarkey, Germany is celebrating Thomas Mann's 150th birthday in a state of nervous jubilation. A new, hefty biography heads the long list of books, while critics and essayists have delivered fresh prophetic framings for Mann's major works in the present. READ MORE Is modern Germany and Europe, some wonder, heading back to the Zauberberg (Magic Mountain)? Mann's 1924 novel tells of a healthy young engineer, Hans Castorp, who visits a friend in a Davos mountain-top clinic only to succumb to its self-indulgent charms of introspection, hypochondria, disease and death. Running through the book, two polar-opposite patients - one a humanist democrat and the other a fascism-adjacent communist revolutionary - debate 'power and law, tyranny and freedom, superstition and science'. Mann was channelling the debates that dominated his world a century ago - and ours today. [ The Magician by Colm Tóibín: Beautiful, sweeping exploration of Thomas Mann's life Opens in new window ] For German writer Thomas Wiedermann, who wrote a novel based on the author, the Zauberberg is 'about a pre-war world, a burnt-out society … where the smallest spark is enough to make the world explode'. A century on, he fears the modern world is 'not repeating [the past] but at least mirroring it'. Others see worrying contemporary parallels to Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, drawing on his early years in the northern city of Lübeck where he was born on June 6th, 1875. This debut novel, published when he was 26, sweeps the reader through the rise and fall of a wealthy merchant family whose business is built by the first generation, managed by the second and ruined by the third. Last February, the Neue Zürcher daily suggested Switzerland was suffering from third-generation 'Buddenbrooks syndrome', happily living off the family fortune, 'studying art history, working less, retiring earlier'. Rather than citizens, the NZZ argued, 'the Swiss have become consumers of their own state'. Similar arguments can be heard in Germany, trapped in a never-ending recession, and a recent warning from Chancellor Friedrich Merz that holiday-loving Germans 'need to work more'. Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 for his work, packed with universal, timeless themes that are finding new relevance and attention today. His 150th birthday today became a dual celebration of sorts. [ Opens in new window ] It marked the reopening of the fabled villa that Thomas and Katja Mann had built in California's Pacific Palisades. It was purchased and restored by the German state a decade ago - but it's a miracle there is even a house left. Last January, as wildfires raged through nearby Santa Monica and edged into Pacific Palisades, villa staff raced through the house, snatching the writer's handwritten papers, paintings and beloved Goethe complete works - but had to leave behind thousands of personal mementos and rare books. Much of the neighbourhood was consumed by fire but the worst damage to the Mann villa was a thick coating of soot on the facade, which has been scrubbed and repainted for Friday's party. Mann knew personally how quick disaster could strike. He was on a lecture tour of Europe a month after Hitler took power in 1933 when he decided not to return to Germany and settle in Switzerland. His denunciations of the Nazis from there saw them revoke his citizenship and burn his books. After their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mann resettled his family in the US. Asked by a reporter there how he felt living in exile, Mann replied: 'Where I am is Germany! I carry my culture within.' It was here that Mann produced his perhaps most relevant works for our time. Not novels, but accessible and urgent essays and public lectures about democracy, its strengths and its enemies. In 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Mann warned radio audiences that the greatest danger to democracy was the fascination and novelty of fascism. His observations carry eerie echoes today. 'Once [fascism] has subjugated the body through fear,' he warned from personal experience, 'it can even subjugate thought.' 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In another broadcast he lectured the Germans, literally, about the terrible irony of their situation: a dictator dangling before the noses of a people he viewed as 'cowardly, submissive and stupid' a bright future as a 'race destined for world domination'. In an open letter, published four months after Germany's capitulation, Mann insisted he would not return to a 'stupid, empathy-free' German people who 'would like to pretend that 12 years never happened'. The final kick came with his remark in the letter about the Allied bombings of German cities: 'Everything must be paid for'. No wonder, then, that his eventual return to Germany in 1949 was a chilly affair. Many Germans saw Mann as a traitor, even more so after he visited East Germany to accept a literary medal of honour. Two years later, learning that Mann had resettled in Switzerland, the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily denounced him as 'an exponent of an aversion to Germany that goes as far as stupidity'. Germany fell out of love with Mann but eventually warmed again to him in the 1980s. Mann didn't live long enough for that reconciliation - nor to fall back in love with America. A decade after taking US citizenship in 1944, Mann was dubbed a 'suspected communist' and brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There he heard himself described as one of the 'world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company'. A chastened Mann warned his adoptive homeland that, with its embrace of witch-hunts and 'loyalty checks', it was 'well on [its way] to a fascist police state'. To his diary, Mann confessed he was 'shockingly touched by the dwindling sense of justice in this country, the rule of force'. Given that, it doesn't take too much effort to imagine what Thomas Mann would have made of German-American president Donald Trump. 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When and where did you sit the Leaving Cert exams? 2003. I went to school at Sancta Maria College in Dublin. I had just given birth to my daughter 13 days before, so I was in a room alone with a supervisor. What is your most vivid Leaving Cert memory? Opening English Paper 1 on the first day, and panic setting in that I wouldn't be able to do it. I was reading it, but nothing was sinking in. I took a deep breath and had a talk to myself. Who was your most influential teacher and why? My drama teacher, Ms Martin, told me I'd be good on television and I never forgot it. I had loads of really kind teachers in sixth year. Another teacher, Ms Hiney, even offered me childcare if I needed it, so that I could do my exams. What was your most difficult subject? Probably honours Irish. I learned an essay that I was doing regardless of what title came up. If it wasn't past tense, I knew I was pretty much lost. READ MORE And your favourite? I loved art, and the fact that you could be tipping away at it all year, and it didn't all come down to one exam. Can you recall what grades or points you received? I forget my PIN for my bank card most days, but I know I got 335 points. How important were the results for you ultimately? At the time, they were very important. I didn't want to repeat the Leaving and put myself under huge pressure to make sure I got into a degree course. In my mind, I had to get a degree and get a good job. I started at the school as a teenager and finished it as a single mother. Getting 'enough' points was a huge personal focus. If I got what I needed, then in my mind, it meant I wasn't a complete failure. What did you go on to do after secondary school? I went to IADT [Institute of Art, Design and Technology] and did a degree in business and arts management. What would you change about the Leaving Cert? Ask me in six years when my son is doing it! What advice would you give to your Leaving Cert self? I don't think 18-year-old me would listen to 40-year-old me, and she'd start asking me what questions came up. I could tell my 18-year-old self that the Leaving Cert doesn't matter, but I feel that would be unfair. In the context of my life [back then], it felt very important. You can't teach hindsight. In conversation with Tony Clayton-Lea. Emma Doran's UK and Ireland tour, Emmaculate , begins next September.
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Joyce on Trial - Frank McNally on a landmark libel case of 1954
When Gerry Adams took his successful libel action against the BBC in a Dublin court recently, reader Ronan Dodd reminds me, he was following a path that had been trod as far back as the 1950s, in a landmark case involving James Joyce. Joyce was dead by then, but his writings lived on. And when BBC radio's Third Programme marked the 50th anniversary of Bloomsday with a dramatisation of Paddy Dignam's funeral, it was sued by one Reuben J Dodd Jnr, from whom Ronan is laterally descended. Reuben J Jnr had been a classmate of Joyce in Belvedere College. Unfortunately, the two did not get on, continuing a feud that originated with their fathers, Reuben J Dodd Snr and John Joyce respectively. The older Joyce borrowed money from the older Dodd in the 1890s and seems to have been quite resentful that Dodd expected it to be paid back. The younger Joyce inherited the grudge. And when writing Ulysses, one of the great literary masterpieces of 20th century, he managed to include this personal vendetta, using the protagonists' real names. READ MORE Hence he has the Dignam funeral cortege pass Dodd Snr on what is now O'Connell Street, teeing up some casual anti-semitism from the mourners (even though Dodd was a Christian). 'Of the tribe of Reuben,' says Martin Cunningham, nodding towards the footpath. His gaze is followed there by Simon Dedalus, Joyce's fictionalised father, who speaks in the direction of the 'stumping' figure: 'The devil break the hasp of your back!' A conversation on money-lending ensues. The Joyces, senior and junior, were regularly in debt. In the earlier Nestor episode of Ulysses, where the author's alter ego Stephen collects his wages as a teacher from the bigoted northern schoolmaster Mr Deasy, the theme of insolvency also features. Deasy argues that the proudest boast of any Englishman is 'I paid my way', and challenges his young teacher: 'Can you feel that? I owe nothing . Can you?' Whereupon Stephen does a quick mental reckoning: Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea. Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, five weeks' board… For the moment, no, Stephen answered. But the immediate source of the eventual libel case was not the debt. It was a story recalled by Leopold Bloom, who is also in the funeral carriage, and who himself will later be the subject of anti-semitism (although technically not Jewish either). It was based on real events too, although they hadn't happened yet then. In most ways meticulously faithful to the Dublin of 1904, Joyce in this case backdated an incident from 1911 for the purposes of his family feud. What is beyond dispute about the events in question is that on 26th August 1911, Reuben J Dodd jumped into the River Liffey. In Ulysses, this is presented as a suicide attempt. In the 1954 case (for which the plaintiff's lawyer was a young Ulick O'Connor) Dodd argued that, on the contrary, he was just trying to save his hat, which had been blown into the river. His father, with whom he had been in conversation or argument beforehand, was nearby on the quays. But it fell to a heroic docker, Moses Goldin (an ironic name in the circumstances, since it suggests he was Jewish, although I can't find that confirmed anywhere), to drag Dood Jnr to safety. Goldin was a serial saver of lives, apparently. According to the Daily Worker, which wrote an editorial about the incident, he had rescued 'some twenty' people from similar situations. Suffering from heart problems by the time he fetched Dodd Jnr out of the water, he lived in a slum with his wife and four children, and ended up in hospital from exposure after his latest heroics. But the main point of the Daily Worker's write-up, gleefully amplified by Joyce via Bloom – wad Dodd Snr's alleged meanness. When prompted to reward the docker, he settled on a sum of two shillings and sixpence. 'Mr Dodd thinks his son is worth half-a -crown,' sneered the DW editorial. In Ulysses, this is downgraded to a 'florin' (two shillings). 'One and eightpence too much,' quips Simon Dedalus, provoking laughter in the carriage until they all remember they're at a funeral and decorum is resumed. The 1954/5 libel suit did not trouble a judge, eventually. As Joycean scholar Pat Callan writes in a paper on the subject: 'The BBC settled as it did not wish to have an Irish court determine if a potential libel was committed at the point of reception or the point of transmission.' Dodd Jnr thereby became the only character in Ulysses to win a case for defamation arising from the novel. Joyce had died 13 years earlier. But while alive, he knew that in Ulysses he had given certain hostages to fortune. That may be one of the reasons why, after leaving Dublin in 1912, he never again came home.
