For one night only, George Michael brought Las Vegas to Ballsbridge, and it seemed like the entire thirtysomething female population of south Dublin came out to the RDS to greet the former teen idol.
His bleached blonde big hair, slim figure and ravishing good looks may be a distant memory, but the ladies ignored his podgy figure (not to mention the fact that he’s long since come out of the closet, in extremely public fashion) and pretended they were back in the ’80s, and that George was their fantasy sex god all over again.
However, expectations here were perhaps unrealistically high. Michael’s run of sell-out concerts at the Point last December had been hailed as some of the most memorable nights in Irish concert history, but the RDS crowd seemed predominantly to be the same Celtic tigresses coming back for more.
The big brassy cabaret band was never going to have the same impact on an outdoor stage, and as the ex-Wham singer himself said early on, the girls in the crowd knew what to expect.
So there were no surprises, apart from the fact that this veteran performer of 25 years twice killed the good-time atmosphere completely; first with a depressing ballad about his uncle’s suicide – preceded by an unnecessary rant about how the 21st century is a great time in which to be a gay man – and then with a cover of an obscure and morbid Elton John song which received the muted response it deserved.
However, the ladies – and quite a few of their camp-for-the-night male partners, it has to be said – danced with glee for the majority of this competent and polished romp through a back catalogue that does contain some of pop music’s most glorious moments, ‘Everything She Wants’ and ‘I’m Your Man’ among them.
Predictably, the encore consisted of ‘Careless Whisper’ – delivered more like a dated showbiz standard rather than the timeless pop classic it is – and a reprise of ‘Freedom’.
The elated if not ecstatic 30,000-strong crowd transformed itself into Dublin 4 gridlock within minutes, many switching on their car radios to be greeted with news that the singer had postponed the following night’s concert due to “technical difficulties”.
Time will tell if this is the last we have seen of George around these parts, but one suspects he has a big future ahead of him in Vegas.

Photograph by Enda Doran.