It is a record-breaking summer for outdoor events as we enjoy the thrill of being part of a big happy crowd, writes Hugh Linehan
The plain people of Ireland have always enjoyed a breath of fresh air. Towards the end of the 18th century, Exshaw's Gentleman's and London Magazine saw fit to publish "a curious Grub-street ode on that celebrated nuisance, Donnybrook Fair" penned by someone simply described as "a well known poetical genius".
"Behold what crowds in Donnybrook are seen, some clad in yellow, others dress'd in green! Boys in rags; swarthy hags; buckish wags, who ride their nags; Girls in tatters; wives in shatters."
Add in a few green-white-and-orange inflatable hammers and a couple of burger vans and you've got a pretty accurate depiction of Ye Olde Open Air Gig. All human life is there, and much of it is not pretty. But it's very happy.
Today, an Irish record will be set when the largest ever attendance at a concert on this island turns up at the Phoenix Park in Dublin. Under a (hopefully) cloudless sky, in temperatures not seen since John Bruton was taoiseach, 135,000 people will forsake the barbecue and the beach in favour of schlepping by car, bus and train through the sweltering heat of the city to designated assembly points, from whence they will be shepherded like livestock past phalanxes of security men in yellow bibs to present their precious Robbie Williams tickets.
Once inside the enclosure, they will mill about aimlessly, allow themselves to be overcharged for greasy fast food and plastic beakers of beer, queue patiently for toilets, and wait even more patiently for something - anything - to happen. When Williams finally bounces on stage, he will appear to most of the audience to be the size of a very, very small ant. This ant will run up and down the stage, it will encourage people to clap and sing along and it will generally be very energetic. But the majority of the audience will find their eyes wandering to the huge screens flanking the stage, where they can see . . . Robbie! In close-up. On the telly.
For this pleasure they will have paid €60 apiece, not including hefty booking fees. On average, they will probably spend close to €150 today, all for the privilege of "seeing" the former boyband mannequin, reformed substance abuser and current showman par excellence of British pop.
So let's just be clear about this. You're spending €150 to see Robbie Williams. On the telly. In a big field. With 134,999 other people. And yes, I know - it's going to be brilliant.
For Robbie himself, performing in front of 135,000 people is not such a big deal: last week, he played to a record-breaking 375,000 fans over three nights at Knebworth in England. But in a country the size of Ireland, 135,000 is an extraordinary figure. It seems that we really, really do like this sort of thing.
2003 may be remembered as the year of the open-air summer gig. There's never been anything quite like it. Since Paul McCartney kicked off proceedings with his well-crafted nostalgiathon at the end of May, we've had Bruce Springsteen belting out his back catalogue at the RDS, Bon Jovi reliving the heyday of poodle rock at Lansdowne Road, and REM growing old gracefully in Marlay Park. As if that didn't put enough pressure on your wallet, you could also have practised your line-dancing with Shania Twain in Kilkenny or your surfing harmonies with the Beach Boys in Roscommon.
You might have caught up with David Gray in Killarney, or you could have waited to see him headlining Witnness (if you missed him, don't worry, he's David Gray, he'll be back again soon). And if you like your pop idols pasteurised, there was always Samantha Mumba and co in a mobile phone-sponsored shindig in the Phoenix Park, or Westlife in Dublin and Sligo.
Paid-up members of the body-piercing set can still look forward to Metallica at the RDS and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Slane, both later this month. And you probably saw Eminem at Punchestown.
It may have something to do with our best summer in years (although even the wiliest music-biz entrepreneurs were hardly able to fix that one). It may be a consequence of the way the international touring circuit worked out in 2003. Or it may just be due to the fact that there are no major international soccer finals happening this summer. But Ireland seems awfully keen on going out to a good show under the stars these days.
It's not just music. Go to Croke Park for any of the big matches at the moment, and observe the sheer pleasure people take in just being there, festooned in their local colours under a summer sky. Seen in their entirety, there's something very amiable about Irish crowds. They're idiosyncratically dressed, boozily friendly and very unthreatening. They're a bit of a mess, really.
The good humour is palpable; regardless of the final result, musical or sporting. Irish people just seem to enjoy congregating together en masse. Why else would they turn up in huge numbers at meaningless soccer friendlies? It's more about the sense of occasion than what's happening on the pitch.
Nobody understands the thrill of these big, happy crowds better than Bertie Ahern; it's what underpinned his original vision for Abbotstown. It wasn't enough to have a respectably-sized stadium appropriate to a country of four million people. No, it had to be an enormodome, somewhere we could all traipse along to, stare around us and say: "my God, look at all these people". It's as if we like to be surprised by how many of us there are about the place these days.
Maybe it was the 1979 Papal visit which gave us the taste for abandoning our homes and going out to stand together in a big field (though purists will point to the 1977 Thin Lizzy gig in Dalymount Park).
But, as in so many things, Ireland was a late arrival on the open-air concert scene. The Summer of Love had been over for 10 years before they started to make an appearance at all - first with one-off gigs in football grounds; then with folk-oriented weekend festivals in the west. By the mid-1980s, Slane had become established as the biggest musical event on the calendar, while the annual Trips to Tipp in Thurles helped to swell the coffers of the GAA. The weekend away in a leaky tent with nothing but flagons of cider for sustenance became an obligatory rite of passage for Irish youth. It wasn't exactly Woodstock, or even Glastonbury: there wasn't an alfalfa sprout to be seen. The hippy ethos which sparked the original rock festivals in the US and UK had pretty much fizzled out under the three-pronged assault of Thatcher, Reagan and punk. It was all about hedonism on a shoestring budget. And who cared about the weather? Mudbaths were fun, too.
Of course, there were always a lot of people intent on stretching that shoestring budget to the limit. An essential part of the festival experience is the rip-off. Way back in 1980, reports were coming back from Lisdoonvarna about local traders fleecing festival-goers, with pints on sale for the exorbitant price of 70 pence, and a bag of chips going for up to 50 pence (a three-day ticket to the festival would have set you back a cool £10(€12.70)). The tradition continues to this day. From exorbitant booking fees to overpriced bottles of water, the open-air experience is a textbook example of what happens when you have a monopoly (the booking agency, Ticketmaster) or duopoly (the two promoters, MCD and Aiken Promotions, who between them control nearly every event of this kind in the country). And then there's the lucrative food and drink franchises. Think of a price. Double it. Add another 40 per cent for overheads. Then sit back and watch the suckers roll up.
These days, the open-air gig is a pretty professional, well-run affair, which usually takes place in controlled environments such as racecourses. Planning permission can be a problem. Dubliners have grumbled this week about how a large part of the Phoenix Park has been fenced off for a private event. Residents in many areas are strangely unenthusiastic about having their front gardens turned into teenage vomitoriums. Too much money, too much drink, too much traffic, planning problems: modern Ireland in a nutshell. An attempt to bring the Lisdoonvarna Festival back to west Clare this year foundered in the face of local opposition, which could be summed up as "they'll wreck the place". As a result, this year's "Lisdoonvarna" is happening in the RDS, which seems rather to miss the point.
And what exactly is that point? Musically speaking, the open-air gig can be a banal experience, especially for the support acts. Subtlety doesn't translate, sound can be muddy or fuzzy and there's always that tiny ant problem, unless you're willing to spend several hours with your face jammed in someone else's armpit. Most of the time, it's daylight, so that enormous lighting rig is no good to anybody. It is essentially an experience devised for the benefit of the young, the deranged and the artificially stimulated, although increasingly these days it is attended by the middle-aged, the self-deluded and the relatively sober. It is relentlessly hijacked by booze and telecom corporations intent on shoving their mass-produced crap down your throat.
And yet, there are still moments when something magical can happen. But hark! What strains inspire these jovial souls! The piercing trumpet makes its voice to roar, And now the drum its martial thunder rolls While prentice-boys robellow to the roar. Which is a pretty good description of what might occur in the Phoenix Park this evening, or, even more likely, at Slane in two weeks' time when the Red Hot Chilli Peppers play.
Slane is the original of the species, and possibly still the best, because of its spectacular natural amphitheatre above the Boyne. It hasn't always been musically memorable - the David Bowie and Bob Dylan years were particularly woeful, while the Stereophonics last year demonstrated that it takes more than a pub band to entertain 50,000 people. But there is something childishly exhilarating about seeing tens of thousands of people take off their shirts to whirl them over their heads like helicopter blades, while pogoing up and down in unison (as happened the last time the Chilli Peppers played Slane). Once you reach a certain age, though, it's even more impressive if you're comfortably perched above the fray among the liggerati in the press area.
Jack-ass drivers; Pocket divers! With numbers of those rhapsody enditers, Those famous quill-men, call'd news-writers; While Hate and Scandal as their Heralds fly, To beg them bread - or else, the devils die, All, all are here, to bless their happy stars, And view, with rapt'rous eyes, this Champ de Mars.