Childhood soundtracked by Slane

A MEATHWOMAN'S DIARY: SALLY HARDING

Some of my earliest memories revolve around concerts I was far too young to attend.

There is a photo somewhere of me as a baby in 1986 wearing a Queen headband, proudly modelling the latest piece of concert merch despite having absolutely no idea who Freddie Mercury was.

There's another of me standing beside my older brothers in 1987 wearing David Bowie T-shirts that almost certainly hadn't come from an official merchandise stand. Back then, the unofficial traders lining the roads into Slane did a roaring trade and somehow those souvenirs always found their way home. That's the thing about growing up in Slane. Even if you never set foot inside the concert, it still became part of your childhood.

I was seven when Guns N' Roses came to town in 1992 and I remember suddenly seeing people you simply didn't encounter in rural Meath in the early 1990s. Leather jackets, bikers, long-haired rock fans and people covered in tattoos weren't exactly an everyday sight in Slane. Then concert weekend arrived and, for 24 hours, it felt as though we'd borrowed another world.

As children, we'd stand by the roadside counting coaches and lorries, convinced every blacked-out bus carried the band. We watched the helicopters circling overhead and peered through gaps in fences as the stage slowly took shape behind the castle walls. It all seemed impossibly glamorous.

One of my favourite memories isn't even about the music. I think it was around the time Neil Young played in 1993 when I bought The Bodyguard soundtrack on cassette from one of the roadside traders and I spent the rest of that summer listening to Whitney Houston. To this day, I still can't hear I Will Always Love You without thinking of Slane!

As children, we never thought about traffic management plans, road closures or months of planning. We just knew something exciting was happening. Our quiet village suddenly became the centre of attention, and we had front-row seats to the build-up.

These days, I find myself noticing the things I never gave a second thought to as a child. I appreciate the extraordinary effort it takes to transform a quiet village into one of the world's most famous concert venues for a weekend.

There will be children in Slane this weekend who are too young to remember Luke Combs in years to come. But they'll remember the helicopters, the crowds and perhaps a cowboy hat or T-shirt bought from a roadside stall. Just as I still have photographs of a Queen headband and a David Bowie T-shirt, they'll have their own little souvenirs of a weekend when their village became the centre of the world.

That's the real magic of growing up in Slane. The concerts weren't just something that happened inside the castle walls. They spilled out into the village, into family photo albums, into childhood summers and, in my case, into a well-worn cassette of The Bodyguard that became the soundtrack to one of many unforgettable summers in Slane.