Rolling back the years

BACK in 1982 I saw — or, rather, endured — the Rolling Stones at Slane Castle and, after a couple of hours of ostentatious tedium, concluded that they were a spent force, a bunch of washed-up forty-somethings cynically content with going through the motions and collecting a fat cheque.

Last Saturday, I took a chance and accepted a late invitation to revisit Slane and — whaddya know? — 25 years on, the self-same Stones were improbably, ridiculously good, a bunch of sixty-somethings who had somehow rediscovered the raison d’etre which had made them so vital and exciting all of 40 years before.

In the annals of the miraculous, it would be as if Pele came out of retirement and showed the world that he is still every bit the genius he was when he helped inspire Brazil to their greatest ever World Cup triumph in Mexico in 1970.