40 years later: Ultimate satisfaction for Rolling Stones fans at Slane Castle in 1982
Mick Jagger performing at Slane Castle, Co. Meath in 1982. Picture: Eddie O'Hare/Examiner Archive
The news in April 1982 that the Rolling Stones would perform their first gig in Ireland for 17 years was huge. There was a rush on tickets — 70,000 sold at a price of £12 each.
Irish music fans hadn’t seen the likes of it before. The concert dwarfed the scale of Slane Castle’s first outdoor gig a year earlier — when Thin Lizzy, supported by U2 and other bands, sold 20,000 tickets. According to a contemporary RTÉ report, the Stones gig at the same venue was going to be “the biggest event of its kind ever held in this country”.
The gig was set for July 24, 1982, a Saturday. On the Thursday evening before the concert, Mick Jagger had dinner with his Slane Castle host, Lord Henry Mountcharles. The band’s production crew slept in the drawing room of the castle the following night. Thousands of fans also flocked to the County Meath village on the eve of the gig, finding patches of ground outside the castle grounds for their tents.
The concert almost never happened: at the eleventh hour, the Rolling Stones threatened to pull the plug on their show because of the IRA’s bombing campaign in London. Four days before the gig, bombs in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park at military ceremonies killed 11 military personnel and several horses. Keith Richards wrote to Bill Graham, the organiser of the European Tour, threatening to cancel the Slane Castle gig. It went ahead, however, with assurances that all profits went to victims of the bombings.
At the time, the Stones were at a crossroads. They were at the peak of their popularity but also they were falling apart. There was infighting in the band. Co-founder and tour manager, Ian Stewart, was touring with the band for the last time. Bassist Bill Wyman had just released his third studio album, hinting at an exit that later materialised. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were growing apart. Richards’ drug problems were an issue. Jagger — like Wyman — was getting bored with the band and dreaming of a solo career.
“Jagger seemed in pursuit of a youthful 80s relevance that should have been beneath him,” says Anthony DeCurtis, author of and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
“His athletic stage wear looked ridiculous, and the band's stage effects seemed pointless. As Keith Richards told me in an interview, ‘We don't need the lemon-yellow tights and we don't need the cherry picker.’ That says it all.”
The band were 20 years on the road. Critics said they were dinosaurs.
“I remember all the jokes at the time were about ‘the strolling bones’ and that the band members would be on Zimmer frames on stage. They were formed in 1962, so surely they had enough now. This kind of talk,” says Dave Fanning, who reported for radio on the day of the Slane Castle gig from an RTÉ roadcaster.
DeCurtis confirms this view that the band were a bit long in the tooth: “Punk had presented a challenge to the Stones. They were all into or nearing their 40s, an age that at the time was considered inconceivable for a rock band. Let alone 80! Some critics and fans spoke dismissively of the band for that reason. The Stones were covering Eddie Cochran's 'Twenty Flight Rock' on the tour [and performed it at Slane Castle]. Some reviewers pointedly noted the lyric, ‘When I get to the top, I'm too tired to rock'."
The fans at Slane Castle didn’t pay much heed to the obituary writers. There was a huge buzz of anticipation on the morning of the gig, as the band’s appeal was already spanning the generations.
“I was 13 at the time, but was already into the Stones,” says Des O’Driscoll, arts editor, Irish Examiner.
“Like many music tastes formed in that era, I’d gotten into them from an album a friend’s sibling had — was part of the Griffin family’s collection in McGrath Park, Blackrock. It had some of the band’s classic hits, as well as covers like 'Poison Ivy' and 'Fortune Teller'. The album had also been released the year before, so the singles from that were also getting plenty airplay."
“My mother was a huge Stones fan from the 1960s, and had always regretted missing the Cork gig in 1965, so she decided to bring me to Slane. Pat Egan’s shop on Patrick Street was organising buses so we went up on one of them, setting off really early in the morning. I remember being blown away by the sheer scale of it all. Seventy thousand people in that natural amphitheatre in Slane was spectacular.”
Fiachna Ó Braonáin, co-founder of the Hot House Flowers, was a 16-year-old Stones superfan at the time — he even smoked Marlboro cigarettes because he knew it was the brand his hero, Keith Richards, smoked. He got a bus to Slane Castle from Dublin at 7am with a French friend of his.
“We were one of the first to arrive. We wanted to get into the venue early to get close to the stage,” he says.
The gates opened at 10am. The Stones were due on stage at 6pm, an early kick-off for the main event to ensure the gig was wrapped up in daylight, owing to infrastructure/lighting reasons.
The support acts on the day included the Chieftains; George Thorogood & the Destroyers; and the J Gails Band, whose lead singer got a big cheer when he told the audience he wanted “to apologise to the world for giving it Ronald Reagan”.
Helicopters landed intermittently to drop off VIPs by castle.
The novelist Colm Tóibín, who was covering the gig as a reporter, was watching events unfold from the wings.
“Henry Mountcharles was trying to win favour at the time with the people,” says Tóibín.
“He invited journalists to come into the castle. He fed us and we got drinks. You could see the whole thing from the perspective of his ‘house’. This wasn’t enough for an article so I decided to go upstairs, to give myself a private tour of Slane Castle. I opened every door and went into every room. I discovered that the beds were unmade, all of them. I decided to report on this — the state of the bedrooms. I made an enemy for life. He would still glower at me if he saw me.”
Dave Fanning also hung out in the castle for a while, eavesdropping on conversations: “Henry Mountcharles was on the phone at one stage. He was talking to someone in England, possibly an older relation. I could hear him say ‘because we have a band here playing in the garden’. I didn’t hear the next bit, but he replied ‘the Rolling Stones’. Silence again. Then he said ‘I will’. The person must have said something like ‘enjoy yourself’ or ‘be careful’.”
Fans were enjoying a festival-like atmosphere. One heretic held aloft a banner proclaiming: “I like the Beatles better”.
Maev Kennedy, reporting on the gig for the Irish Times, painted a Dantesque vision of some bikers who were enjoying the sunshine, eating Choc-Ices: “a ferocious, savage, vicious, terrifying gang of Hell's Angels, from the badlands of Waterford, sat in a reeking huddle on the grass, shunned by 20 yards by the rest of the crowd”.
Ó Braonáin recalls their presence but was less perturbed: “I was aware of the Waterford Freewheelers at the gig. They came across all menacing, but they were sweethearts.”
The Rolling Stones arrived on stage a few minutes after 6pm. Hundreds of balloons were released into the air to celebrate their arrival.
Derek Speirs, a photographer covering the gig for Magill Magazine, had planted himself close to the front of the stage: “I was in amongst the crowd, which I don’t do anymore because it’s too crazy."
“I got in early, and ate nothing or drank nothing all day. I remember the whole atmosphere was heating up.
"The organisers decided they needed to cool us down so they fire-hosed us, with water from the river. It was like they were putting out a fire.
"Fortunately, I had a plastic mac in my bag so I was able to protect my cameras and equipment. Their opening song was 'Under My Thumb'. It was quite astonishing, with that jazz riff intro.”
The band ran through several classics, including 'Angie', 'Brown Sugar' and 'Honky Tonk Women'.
“The Stones don’t have four or five good songs. They have 50 brilliant songs,” says Fanning. The biggest audience response during the performance was when the audience joined Jagger in the chorus for 'You Can’t Always Get What You Want'.
Tóibín was into the swing of it by the time the Stones came back on stage for their encore, a rendition of '(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction'.
“I found a bottle of Tequila in the castle,” he says. “I’d never drunk Tequila before. It was delicious. I had a pair of binoculars. I found them tremendously exciting. It wasn’t my sort of music, but I found the noise and the way Mick Jagger moved around the stage, singing 'I Can’t Get No Satisfaction', 'Jumpin’ Jack Flash' — I suddenly became a fan, a rocker.”
The gig was a huge success for Irish promoter Jim Aiken, possibly the most memorable of several at Slane Castle in the 1980s, as Bob Dylan (1984), Bruce Springsteen (1985), Queen (1986) and David Bowie (1987) followed suit. It sparked a flame.
Now Aiken’s son, Peter Aiken, is an important concert promoter in Ireland. He was at the gig, which made an impression.
“I was only 12, but I was working, giving my dad a hand. My main job was with a brush at the side of the stage, and if any of the bands dropped what they were smoking I had to sweep it up. I remember seeing the Stones backstage and thinking they looked so cool.”
The Stones returned to Slane Castle in 2007. “It’s great to be here,” said Keith Richards. “It’s great to be anywhere.” Hopefully, they’ll make it a hat-trick further down the trail.
The Rolling Stones announce at a press conference they will play at Slane Castle, as part of their Tattoo You European tour. It is their first European tour in six years.
The band kicks off the tour, playing the first of three concerts at Feyenoord’s football stadium in Rotterdam.
The Stones play Wembley twice, their first gigs at the stadium; Ringo Starr attends the first night.
The band performs in Turin on the night which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Stones' first live gig at London’s Marquee Club.
Slane Castle concert.
The band closes the tour with a gig in Leeds, the night before Mick Jagger’s 39th birthday and the band’s last paid public performance for seven years.
