Live music - Forbidden Fruit

Royal Hospital, Kilmainham

For those ancient enough to recall the mid ’90s, the weekend’s Forbidden Fruit festival will have carried a peculiar whiff of deja vu. Abandoning its previously indie-centric sensibility, the three-day event instead felt like a giant valentine to dance music and hip-hop past and present — with an unmistakable emphasis on ‘past’. Friday was headlined by big beat sergeant major Fatboy Slim; on Saturday the curtain was brought down by Wu-Tang Clan, a New York rap collective whose debut LP came out all of 22 years ago.

The back-to-the-future sensibility similarly applied lower down the bill. On Saturday, walking past one of several secondary stages, you may have been detained by Mr Scruff, spinning a languid mash-up of hip-hop, trip-hop and house that would not have felt out of place in a mega-club circa 1995. So it was remarkable that the audience was overwhelmingly fresh-faced 20-somethings. How curious that the grooves of yesterday should be conspicuously irresistible to the youth of today