Having seen more than his fair share of shows on the current U2 tour, Brian Boyd sketches the repetition and histrionics behind the Croke Park gigs.

God be with the days when the only time rock stars got on the front page of newspapers was for a drugs bust or an overdose.

The media coverage afforded U2's homecoming shows seemed to be pitched somewhere between the JFK assassination, the lunar landing and the papal visit.

Was there really a story in the paper about how a fan had paddled in his canoe all the way from the Amazon to the Royal Canal just outside Croke Park to see the band? Was there really a radio interview with a bus conductor who had taken Bono's fare in August 1974? Or did it just seem so?

To those of us who make a living from lurking in small, dank basements having our teeth rattled and ears bled by raucously arrhythmic music, there was something obscenely comfortable about the Croke Park shows. There was a man who took your ticket and escorted you to your seat (just like at the Abbey - I imagine) and, after the show, there was a nice room (with carpet!) to chill out in.

How us full-timers enjoyed being sniffy about all these one-gig-a-year people crowding the pitch in front of us. This rock 'n' roll thing you've all suddenly become interested in is not always as easy as this. It's not usually presented with all these bells and whistles - massive video banks, extravagant lights and big television screens that stopped just short of action replays.

For many of the hundreds of thousands at Croker, the usual pre-gig ritual of getting loaded up on flagons of cider was not on the agenda - it was more hostage-style negotiations with baby-sitters about "handover" times.

But so what if these come-lately types would burst into applause before the song was finished? No matter if they insisted on executing those excruciatingly embarrassing "Mexican waves" during a lull in proceedings; these were gigs that they were probably talking about for three months before they happened - and will talk about for three months after.

It's not important that the older end of the audience probably still think that all punk rockers (the scene that produced U2) should be sent to boot camp. Or that the younger end of the audience weren't even alive when Bono was terrorising middle America with a mullet haircut and a big white flag during the 1980s.

A brief etiquette note to the Ladies Who Lunch: it's not really necessary to wear perfume when attending a rock gig. And to beer-bellied middle-aged men: please don't do your drunk-at-a-wedding "dance" in the aisles. It's very distressing.

That said, U2 back in the 'hood was a "Come All Ye" - one of those very rare "event" gigs where being present (and being seen to be present) was perhaps more important than the music itself. You couldn't get a ticket? You're so out of the loop.

When you've traipsed around the world on the coat-tails of the "Vertigo" tour; when you've been checked-in, checked-out, upgraded, downgraded, misplaced, misdirected, backstage, frontstage, sidestage; when you've got so close to the band that you can now exclusively reveal that one of them needs a filling on his upper left; when you've seen this show so many times you could get up and take the place of any band member if they fell ill (yes, even Bono), your attention can wander. You don't ooh! and ahh! at the whole son et lumière extravagance of it all, you sit there in Croke Park noting pedantically that Bono didn't thump his chest at the end of Miracle Drug as he usually does.

You get a bit confused when the band walk out on to the stage half-way through the last pre-show song (Arcade Fire's Wake Up - I know it off by heart), instead of at the very end of it. You giggle at how many times Adam Clayton now takes solo excursions down the oval runway. Back in March when the tour first started in San Diego, he did it once (when Bono wasn't looking). Now he's up to six times a night. And why didn't Larry Mullen wave to his left as he walked down to the small stage to play drums on Love or Peace or Else as he always does? These things take on their own fascination when you've spent as much time as I have in a place called Vertigo.

When you're on first-name terms with the road crew and can happily spend an hour after the show telling people with shiny laminates hanging from their necks where, and where not, they can get access to, you wonder if you have a problem.

When you can nudge the person sitting next to you and tell them what Bono is going to say even before he has said it, you know you have a problem.

As they lock and load after the last show tonight, this thrilling/exhausting travelling circus will spend the rest of the summer mopping up the rest of Europe before heading back to the US in September for further box-office record-breaking manoeuvres. Next year, it looks like they'll be opening up a new front in Japan and Australia. After that there could quite possibly be the first rock gig on the moon (do not put it past them).