Arriba! It's Saturday night in Smithfield, and there's a fiesta in full swing. The former marketplace has become Dublin's Latin quarter, and nearly 10,000 revellers are dancing to the Cuban beat.
OK, they're kind of swaying from side to side a bit, and some are even swinging their elbows, but for an Irish crowd, that's tantamount to complete abandon. If only the babysitter could see us now.
The Buena Vista Social Club travelled from Havana to play for us as part of the Heineken Green Energy Festival and, thoughtfully, they brought the sun with them. As dusk faded on a warm May day, a troupe of veteran musicians arrived on the Smithfield stage, and it would probably take a quantum mathematician to calculate their combined ages.
As soon as they began playing the bright, Latin rhythms of salsa, samba and merengue, however, the years fell off, and we were transported back to the halcyon days when Cuba was young, and Havana was the hot spot of the world.
The Buena Vista Social Club is a loose collective of Cuban musicians, famously gathered together by Ry Cooder and captured on celluloid by Wim Wenders. The world caught on, and musicians who had plied their trade in relative anonymity for most of their lives suddenly found themselves performing to sell-out crowds around the world. Talk about an Indian summer.
This team of 15 or so veterans performed on stage for two-and-a-half hours, leaving most of us young 'uns exhausted. The main man is 70-year-old Ibrahim Ferrer; in true showbiz style, he waited till nearly halfway through the show before making his entrance. The whole evening was superbly paced, building nicely to a festive finale.
It only remained for Dave Fanning to present the Buena Vista Social Club with two platinum discs for Irish sales in excess of 34,000.
The Buena Vista Social Club was undisputedly the highlight of the Heineken Green Energy Festival, but there were other events worthy of celebration. On Friday night, Welsh band The Manic Street Preachers entertained the faithful with incendiary tunes such as Everything Must Go, Motown Junk, You Love Us, So Why So Sad, and A Design For Life. French dance act, St Germain, brought the trendy punters to the Olympia on Saturday night, and few of them needed a babysitter.
The Divine Comedy acquitted themselves well at Dublin Castle on Saturday night, performing tracks from their excellent new album, Regeneration, while Elbow confirmed their next-big-British-thing status with a Saturday gig at the Temple Bar Music Centre. The dull-but-worthy Travis packed in the punters at Dublin Castle last night, and they will be doing a second show tonight.
While the sun shone outside, a panel of music industry types selflessly shut themselves indoors to chair seminars on such subjects as touring, public relations, copyright and independent labels. In various pubs around town, young hopefuls battled it out in the Heineken Hot Press Band Challenge. The final takes place at the Music Centre tonight for a £20,000 prize.
