Henry Mount Charles, whose castle was a mecca for rock, dies at 74

Boston Globe

10-07-2025

Slane Castle, some 35 miles north of Dublin, in County Meath, became internationally known as a rock destination. Bruce Springsteen, Guns N' Roses, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, Madonna, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bryan Adams, Eminem, 50 Cent, R.E.M. and Oasis performed there, while VIP concertgoers wandered in and out of the owner's 18th-century hilltop Georgian pile resembling Downton Abbey.
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Lord Mount Charles, an Anglo Irish peer turned rock 'n' roll promoter, died June 18 at a Dublin hospital at 74. His family said the cause was cancer.
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For much of his life, Lord Mount Charles, who was dapper and entrepreneurial but thin-skinned, experienced inner turmoil about belonging to the Anglo Irish gentry.
Originally from Scotland, his family, the Conynghams, was granted an Irish peerage by King George IV of England in the early 19th century, when the country was under British rule. In the modern-day Irish Republic, they were often identified with British colonialism.
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'I was an Irishman born and bred but viewed by many as a stranger in my own country,' Lord Mount Charles wrote in a 1989 memoir, 'Public Space -- Private Life.'
Before the first Slane Castle concert, he was vilified as 'a British toad' for staging a show while hunger strikers were dying in prison in Northern Ireland during the sectarian strife there known as 'the Troubles.'
Appearing on an Irish TV talk show the year the Rolling Stones played, he was asked by a tendentious host, 'Do you consider yourself English or Irish or some sort of strange colonial mixture?'
Lord Mount Charles, who became the eighth Marquess Conyngham on the death of his father in 2009, pushed back at what he called prejudice against his position, though it continued to haunt him, including in his fruitless stabs at electoral politics.
His reinvention as a rock promoter went a good ways toward restoring his morale, while the long-running Slane Castle concerts filled the accounts of his 1,500-acre estate. The money later helped fund a decade-long rebuild of the castle after a devastating fire in 1991.
After their first performance, U2 moved into the castle in 1984 to record an album, 'The Unforgettable Fire.' Brian Eno, who produced it, struggled with the uneven voltage from the estate's hydroelectric generator on the banks of the Boyne.
That summer, Dylan played at Slane, joined onstage by Van Morrison and Bono from U2. But the event was marred by violence the previous night, when a mob smashed shop windows in town and attacked the local police station.
Lord Mount Charles was blamed in the local press, though he did not end the shows. In 1985, Springsteen drew a record crowd of 100,000 fans to the castle. He rehearsed his full set the night before for an audience of just half a dozen, including the lord of the castle.
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In 1992, arguably the world's biggest rock band of the day, Guns N' Roses, was booked to play. A 'typhoon of chaos' ensued, Lord Mount Charles later recalled, when frontman Axl Rose became a no-show, keeping fans waiting for hours. Lord Mount Charles appealed to the band's lead guitarist, Slash, to find him, their agent having disappeared to fish on the Boyne. Rose was finally located in a Dublin pub, passed out, and was hustled to the castle to perform.
The last Slane Castle festival was in 2023, when Harry Styles played for a crowd of 80,000.
To further diversify the estate's income, Lord Mount Charles and his elder son, Alexander Conyngham, started Slane Irish Whiskey in 2009. The business was sold in 2015 to Brown-Forman, the powerhouse American maker of Jack Daniels, which built a $50 million distillery on the property.
The Conyngham family says that the estate has been its ancestral home since 1703 and that the current manor house dates back to 1785, when a reconstruction began.
Lord Mount Charles also persistently, if unsuccessfully, pursued a career in politics. He joined a center-right party, Fine Gael, and supported liberal social policies on abortion and divorce. But he failed to win a seat in the European Parliament in 1984 and in the Irish parliament in 1992.
Henry Vivien Pierpont Conyngham was born in Dublin on May 25, 1951. He was the eldest of three sons of Frederick Conyngham, the seventh Marquess Conyngham, and Eileen Wren Newsam. A lover of dogs and horses, his mother had grown up across the river from Slane Castle and later had a bit part in 'Captain Lightfoot,' a 1955 movie starring Rock Hudson that was filmed on the estate.
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His father had four marriages, and Henry, whose original title was Viscount Slane, was brought up largely by a housekeeper, Mary Browne. He affectionately dedicated his memoir to her.
Henry attended Harrow, a private boarding school in England, and Harvard University, graduating in 1973.
He was married twice, first in 1971 to Juliet Ann Kitson, whose mother, Penelope Kitson, was a decorator and companion to oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. Lord Mount Charles and his first wife married young, each seeking stability from the turmoil of their multiply-married parents. They divorced in 1985, and later that year he married Iona Charlotte Grimston, a daughter of the sixth Earl of Verulam.
He leaves his second wife; his children from his first marriage, Alexander, Henrietta and Wolfe Conyngham; a daughter from his second marriage, Tamara Conyngham; and brothers Simon and Patrick Conyngham.
In his memoir, Lord Mount Charles wrote that rock music's most rebellious bands, like the Stones and the Who, were his favorites, their music echoing his personal storms.
'The internal anger and frustration I have felt about being made to feel an outsider in my own country, and an irrelevant anachronism, has been eased by music,' he wrote, 'and most especially by the concerts at Slane.'
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