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Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Lord Mount Charles obituary: aristocrat who turned castle into rock venue
'Lord Henry', as the 8th Marquess Conyngham liked to be known in his native Ireland, was a figure of riotous incongruity. Aristocrat and entrepreneur, bohemian and businessman, a sometime poet, journalist, publisher, parliamentary candidate, publican and peer of the realm; he was primarily known as the man who transformed his family's estate at Slane, Co Meath, into one of the most glamorous rock venues in Europe. Though born into the purple of the Anglo-Irish nobility, he realised from an early age that it was a birthright which might, had he embraced it more fully than he did, have excluded him from his claim to his Irish identity. Accent, class and an English public school education were usually enough to cause people like Mount Charles to be frequently asked in their own country the derogatory question: 'How are you enjoying your holiday here?' However, Mount Charles ignored the naysayers. He went on to forge an exceptional career whose apogee is sometimes described as the moment he introduced U2 at one of their first main public appearances at Slane Castle in 1981. Had it stopped there, this would have been sufficient to grant him a place in the pantheon of music promoters. A veritable cornucopia of headline acts followed at Slane, including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, David Bowie, Oasis and Neil Young. The pastoral setting, provided by a natural amphitheatre that sloped down to the River Boyne, wasn't always tranquil. Shortly before Dylan took to the stage, a wave of drunken fans rioted in Slane village, smashing windows and attempting to burn the police barracks. Security was tightened for later events at the 80,000-capacity venue, and Slane Castle achieved something akin to Glastonbury in the international concert calendar. Henry Vivien Pierpoint Conyngham, 8th Marquess Conyngham, Earl of Mount Charles, Viscount Slane and Baron Minister of Minster Abbey in the County of Kent was born in 1951. His mother, Eileen (née Wren Newsome), was of Anglo-Irish stock and a legendary huntswoman. She showed the doughty spirit inherited by her firstborn, Henry, when Slane Castle was invaded by protesters objecting to the Mount Charles ownership of fishing rights over the River Boyne. She let in 50 rescuing police officers by throwing the castle key in a jar of face cream out of her bedroom window. Lady Mount Charles's divorce from her husband, Frederick Conyngham, the 7th Marquess, known as Mount, divided Anglo-Irish Society. From the dashing couple who hosted hunt balls and glamorous dinners, they became estranged when Mount married a lover. Henry's mother never married again. The marquess moved to the Isle of Man as a tax exile when Ireland introduced a wealth tax. Lady Mount Charles lived on in Ireland until the age of 92, claiming, jokingly, that her longevity was solely aimed at annoying her children. Mount Charles was educated at Harrow and Harvard. His father was disappointed that he did not take the more traditional Oxbridge route, dismissing Harvard as 'not the sort of place where a descendant of Sir Christopher Wren will find solace'. At Harrow, he was known for his wit and dramatic flair rather than for any scholastic achievements. Prowess on the sporting field also evaded him. He only ever won a running event, memorably wearing odd socks, a habit he then adopted as being talismanic for the rest of his life. The young Viscount Slane, as he then was, adapted quickly to the American way of life. He described his time at Harvard as 'both a cultural awakening and a moral education, which shaped my confidence to speak out on a whole range of topics that might have escaped me had I become one of the oafs at the Bullingdon'. One of the topics was the Vietnam War. In his journalism, he often referenced his Harvard-era student debating background, especially noting the parallels between Nixon's Watergate and later American political turbulence. Mount Charles married Juliet (née Kitson). They had a daughter and two sons, the eldest of whom, Alexander, succeeds his father in the peerage as the 9th Marquess Conyngham. He divorced his first wife in 1985 and married Lady Iona Grimston, daughter of the 6th Earl of Verulam, who was a Conservative MP and later sat as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. They had one daughter. He is survived by his wife, children and two brothers. In the mid-1970s, when Lord Mount Charles, as he had then become, took over Slane Castle from his father, Ireland was navigating a challenging economic malaise during which the large estates of the Anglo-Irish struggled to survive. Mount Charles had been working as an editor at Faber & Faber and enjoying a London life when he was obliged to return home to take over a chipped and faded mansion and a substantial tract of land. On inheriting, he said that he was 'ill-equipped' to run a large estate because the only thing he had learnt from his father was 'how to drink good claret at an early age and how to stand still while wearing heavy tweeds'. On moving into Slane Castle, he immediately set up a restaurant and a nightclub in the castle, which attracted patrons such as the controversial politician Charles Haughey, who had recently been embroiled in a law trial in which he was charged with the importation of arms into Ireland for use by the IRA in Northern Ireland. The Troubles cast a long shadow over Ireland at the time, and the houses of people like the Conynghams were sometimes viewed with suspicion by republicans. In his autobiography Public Space — Private Life: A Decade at Slane Castle (1989), he wrote: 'I was an Anglo-Irish anachronism … returning to an Ireland I loved but still a country bedevilled by division and much hypocrisy.'' In the television documentary A Lord in Slane (2024), he commented on the difficulties of navigating sectarian suspicion and the threats aimed at him by republicans when he hosted the U2 concert in 1981. Politically, he was aligned with the Fine Gael party, led until 1987 by Garret FitzGerald. Traditionally, it was seen as the Irish party more sympathetic to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy class as it embraced a policy of pluralism and inclusivity. In the 1992 Dail elections, Mount Charles stood as a Fine Gael candidate, polling a respectable 4,161 votes but failing to win a seat. He was also approached by the party to run for the European parliament, but eventually became disillusioned with what he called 'the stagnation of the party's constitutional agenda'. Mount Charles leaves behind a unique cultural legacy that paved the way for other enterprising landowners in Ireland to save their crumbling houses and breathe new life into an often-stagnating heritage. A gifted raconteur with a flair for publicity, he became a flamboyant media personality unafraid to express his controversial views on politics in a changing Ireland. He became the master promoter of the idea that the old Irish aristocracy could embrace change without surrendering its identity. Mount Charles was not beyond sending up his ancient background. He particularly enjoyed telling stories of his great-great-great-grandmother's affair with King George IV and pointing out items at Slane Castle which he would describe as 'got through the King's mistress'. Lord Mount Charles, 8th Marquess Conyngham, rock promoter, was born on May 23, 1951. He died of cancer on June 18, 2025, aged 74
Irish Times
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
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? READ MORE 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.) [ Liz Hurley playing The Deceased on a Channel 4 game show? It's camp and it's on-trend Opens in new window ] 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. [ Inside Ireland's music festival industry: Vibrant and resilient but 'you can haemorrhage money very quickly' Opens in new window ] 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. [ Festivals in Ireland 2025: From Longitude to All Together Now - a guide to 80 of the best Opens in new window ] 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.
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- The Guardian
Country diary: Ancient art to make the imagination soar
From the top of Knowth's great mound, my gaze leaps over its smaller satellite mounds and wanders across an expanse of summer-green fields. This is Brú na Bóinne, a vast neolithic complex looped by the River Boyne, where the landscape is dominated by three artificial 'hills' that were layered over passage tombs built about 5,000 years ago. The most famous of the three is to the south – Newgrange, which is aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. To the east is Dowth, which aligns with winter sunsets. And then there's this one beneath my feet, the great mound, containing two back-to-back chambers facing east and west. As ever with such ancient structures, the big question is: what was it for? The chambers could have been intended to catch the sunlight of the spring and autumn equinoxes (in March and September), when day and night are of equal duration. This is potentially affirmed by the equinoctial shadows cast by lone standing stones towards the east and west passage entrances. But Knowth was also a place of settlement and burial for thousands of years. All that human activity over the millennia damaged its passages, with the sunlight now only reaching a short distance along their lengths. Another intriguing possibility is that the great mound is the result of neolithic people's sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, which integrates an understanding of both the solar and lunar cycles. Knowth's megalithic art – the largest collection in Europe – hints at this purpose. Much of the artwork is on the massive kerbstones that ring the great mound like a giant's prayer beads. I head back down the slope and dawdle from stone to stone. The carved lines create abstract pictures that let the imagination soar. Concentric arcs could be the sun. Repeated waves might trace the moon's path across the sky. And dazzling spirals remind me of Van Gogh's Starry Night. A series of rapid chitterings makes me look up. I'm close to the east entrance, where the reconstructed woodhenge (a circle of timber pillars) stands above the sockets of the original neolithic one. I think of those first builders. They too must have watched chittering swallows. They too must have seen how a flock carves the sky. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
