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Don't Stop The Music

The recent tragic events in the Phoenix Park should not be used to prevent music lovers from attending and enjoying gigs to the max.

Niall Stokes, 29 Aug 2012

If those dramatic and deeply upsetting events hadn’t taken place, then the rest of what went on during the day in the Phoenix Park would almost certainly have passed unremarked. The Stone Roses and Snow Patrol gigs on either side went off without blemish and Swedish House Mafia’s outing would doubtless have been seen as a more boisterous but still essentially ordinary day out in the park if no-one had been stabbed. A lot of people went, had a great time and saw nothing seriously untoward.

However, the horrific nature of the knife attacks invited a different level of media attention, which spun out over the airwaves and in print throughout the following days. There were lots of eyewitness accounts suggesting that, during the build-up on the afternoon of the gig, conventional restraints had been abandoned by fans heading for the show. 

Well, let’s be honest. Rock ’n’ roll music, and its dancier derivatives, has always had the power to affect audiences in this way. People dance like dervishes. They get out of it. They take off their clothes. To one degree or another, they abandon their conscious selves and dig into something more elemental. They shout and scream and roar and behave in a way that their mothers – or some of them at any rate – might not like. Sometimes they go a bit bananas. In itself, that’s okay. 

If people end up getting their rocks off in a good-humoured, hedonistic way, then there’s no harm done. Festivals the world over have always had a bacchanalian aspect to them. You only have to think of Woodstock, the event that defined the modern festival template, to know that the idea of letting it all hang out is nothing new. In relation to this, Ireland was never likely to be an exception. 

Going back as far as the first Fleadh Ceols, that bacchanalian spirit was always to the fore. The host town was taken over, in effect, for the weekend, by music fans in search of the craic. There was drunkenness aplenty, for sure, but most people’s response was, ‘So what?’ And if there was less fornication than nowadays, that was a function of the generally more conservative attitude to sex back then.



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