Almost thirty years after the very first Féile, a special edition of this week's Nationwide will take its own trip to Tipp to relive the glory days of an era when Thurles rocked and the youth of Ireland seemed to lose its mind.
The Tipperary town hosted five Féile festivals in Semple Stadium between 1990 and 1994, with numerous international acts taking to the stage, including Van Morrison, Meatloaf, Happy Mondays and INXS - but Féile was always a thoroughly Irish festival.
The Trip to Tipp was revived last year and sold out in minutes and the two-day festival makes a return this September 20 to 21, with a line-up featuring Féile veterans The Sultans of Ping, Therapy?, The Stunning and Something Happens, and newcomers Sinéad O’Connor and Horslips.
This Friday evening, Nationwide presenter Anne Cassin looks back at Ireland’s first major weekend music festival, which for a certain generation became a cultural rite of passage, and a baptism of fire for numerous Irish acts.
Guests on the show include Tom Dunne of Something Happens, Sinéad O Connor, Steve and Joe Wall of The Stunning, Jerry Fish of An Emotional Fish, and local TD Michael Lowry TD.
"I think it was the younger generation saying we need to be entertained. We are into music. It wasn't just the bands that were centre stage - it was the crowd as well." - Lise Hand
"Arriving into Thurles was like the fall of Saigon," says Steve Wall. "There was people jumping on the back of the van - there were bodies on the street - people setting up tables in their front gardens selling mars bars and crisps and water and soft drinks. It was hilarious."
Féile was the brainchild of Michael Lowry, the local TD who was looking to find a way to save Semple Stadium, which had a debt of £1.2 million after being refurbished for the Centenary of the GAA in 1984 - and he had to fight off objections to the whole idea of a rock show on hallowed GAA turf.
"I can quite clearly recall people saying - we are GAA people and we should never allow foreign bands or young people to dance on the sacred soil of Semple stadium," he tells Nationwide.
"It was that type of atmosphere. There were Festivals in Europe - so in a way this was Ireland catching up."
Sunday Tribune rock columnist Lise Hand, who now works as a political correspondent, recalls. "I think it was the younger generation saying we need to be entertained. We are into music. It wasn’t just the bands that were centre stage - it was the crowd as well.
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A look back at Féile '94
"It was where the shift happened. Health and safety you have to laugh. It really was different times.
"There were no camera phones and you know that whatever you got up to it wasn’t going to be recorded for posterity and your boss or your ma weren’t going to see it on Facebook."
Féile is back this year for another dose of nostalgia with a bill that also includes The Frank and Walters, Mundy, The Fat Lady Sings, EMF, Eleanor McEvoy, and Picturehouse.
Looking back on last year’s weekend of music in Semple Stadium, Steve Wall says, "Here you had the same people all grown up in their Regatta and North Face jackets standing outside bars with their proseccos - but you could tell there was still a glint in their eye."
"They are very much the same gang," Tom Dunne tells Anne Cassin on Nationwide. "That was one of the sayings from last year. 'Get the gang back together’. I thought it was a glib marketing phrase - but when we got down there - I started to realise that this is the gang."
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A look back at Féile '92
Casting his mind back to the first day of the very first Féile in August, 1990, Michael Lowry recalls: "I remember the first year on the Thursday, I was in my office looking out and I saw the first train arriving in the station nearby.
"It was guys in long hair and big boots and dressed in all sorts of dishevelment and it really frightened me to the extent that I actually sat on the toilet for hours on end I was so petrified."
Nationwide Special: Féile 19 - Return of the Trip to Tipp airs on Friday, September 6 at 7.00pm on RTE One
More music news, reviews and interviews here.
