In what may be a truly disturbing development at Longitude, the three-day music festival in Dublin’s idyllic Marlay Park, the audience appears to have aged visibly.
Wise analysis suggests that a final day characterised by earnest guitar music rather than fresh beats and dope rhymes has drawn a more mellow intergenerational crowd. But to be more alarmist, one suspects that two days in near constant sunshine has moved Ireland’s youth into an advanced state of decrepitude.
Some people in attendance on Sunday look old enough to remember 1990s fashion, here enjoying an unearned reappraisal, or to know what a landline telephone is. Some have even brought their children.
Mutual incomprehension between the 90s revivalists and 90s originalists notwithstanding, everyone appears to be getting along just fine in the hot sunshine, sharing musical performances distinguished by unabashed use of archaic stringed musical instruments and actual, honest-to-goodness lyrics.
With shade at a premium, crowds flock to the relief of the Heineken Stage big top, which boasts other attractions. Irish guitar noiseniks All Tvvins crunch out rock songs, fast and heavy, as Conor Adams sings “There’s too much silence in this town,” as if they alone are the antidote. “Go bananas,” he later commands. “This is a dancey one.”
They are complemented on the Main Stage by Australia's Courtney Barnett, clad like her band entirely in black, pursuing the pump and throb of the moody Out of the Woodwork, like people not at all shy about emerging.
The more disinhibited dancing is confined to the Red Bull stage, from which anyone over 22 seems to have been comprehensively shooed away.
In a typical rash of moral panic, rumours have circulated about contaminated ecstasy, arrests, prominent use of pentagrams. Gardai however counted nothing more than minor offences, St John’s Ambulance reported very little, and although a member of the Red Cross considered their weekend “very busy”, it was “nothing out of the ordinary”.
On the main stage, Father John Misty, the enviably hirsute ironist, gives deadpan thanks to sponsor Heineken. “I don’t know how we’d do it without them.”
Beanpole slim and tall as a totem pole, Josh Tillman (for it is he) may be our great unifier: a hipster model with a old school subversive streak. He moves with the sure-footed gait and consummate shape throwing of a young Jarvis Cocker, with just as much lascivious wit. These country rock pastiches and folk strollers ring out through the softening evening light, bringing a certain accord: it feels again like a festival for all ages.
At the Whelan's stage, Perfume Genius is struggling to emerge from his shell, seated at his keyboard for the reflective chamber-pop ballads of a soulful introvert, on an occasion that asks for extroverts. He later obliges, with a magnificent slinkiness, rising to perform his excellent anti-homophobia song Queen with a regal display.
Crouched over his decks on a now cavernous-looking main stage, the solitary Jamie xx whips up an electronic storm beneath a ginormous discoball that looks like it could crush him at any moment. With one of the best records of 2015, and dance music still ascendant, his place here makes sense, but he never promised you spectacle. A DJ set that blends his remixes into his original floor fillers, trimmed with a few late-afternoon barbecue numbers, it’s terrific music that requires a more sympathetic setting.
It really takes Róisín Murphy, Ireland’s greatest ever dance diva, to remind us what we’ve been missing: a consummate performer. You may have seen more lavish costume changes at her other performances, but here she makes incremental adjustments with uncommonly good effect. Her band is as tight as a walnut, a seamless weave of electronic and instrumental, and she always keeps you riveted, transfixed and moving. “Hello my wonderful darling Irish home,” she says at one point. “I hope I’m not scaring you too much.” Why, no, Róisín, not at – “Boo!” she yelps.
Asked to go up against Murphy's glorious spectacle, a firework's display would probably phone in sick, so The National can only look dull in comparison, dressed in their mournful blacks. Bedraggled and bespectacled frontman Matt Berninger looms over his microphone, voice cracking with emotion, clutching the stand like it's the only thing holding him up. With a back catalogue coursing with their megaphone sensitivity, and a clutch of new songs that extend it, Ohio's finest bawl out their pain, fortified by sheer sound. Still, they're volubly happy to be here. And as Terrible Love brings all the co-ordinates of Longitude together in a rousing finish, you can see why.
