As rumours swirled around U2, Oasis and Fontaines DC, many will have been surprised to see Luke Combs announced as Slane Castle’s next headliner.
The Meath venue has been lying dormant since 80,000 people besieged Harry Styles there in June of 2023. Over three years will have passed by the time Combs takes to its stage on July 18th next year.
He may be unfamiliar to some, but Combs boasts more than 25 million monthly listeners on Spotify, placing him in the top 250 artists on the platform. The 35-year-old North Carolina native is a giant of country music, sitting alongside Morgan Wallen, Chris Stapleton and Zach Bryan as contemporary pioneers of the genre.
Devoted to international chart-topping, the modern country star is an emblem of broad appeal and, in many ways, Combs is the ultimate everyman. A beer-chugging, jeans-wearing all-American, his music is propped up on escapism and nostalgia for a superficial idea of the southern states.
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There are economic justifications for Slane’s first ever country headliner. Irish enchantment with the US may have declined over the years, but the country music genre is still a direct pipeline for those that want to believe in the star-spangled dream.
Organisers will be buoyed by evidence of that cohort’s appetite for major events.
Look no further than Garth Brooks’s run of sold-out shows at Croke Park in 2022 and, more recently, Dublin opening its arms for swarms of NFL fans attending the same stadium. Brooks even compared the feeling of playing his Irish gigs to winning a Super Bowl.
Early in his career, Combs suffered the ignominy of a rejection from reality singing competition The Voice on the basis that he wasn’t interesting enough to be on TV. This is the sort of rags to riches story that country music devours, and it may have been the day Combs vowed never again to be cast aside by the mainstream.
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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently anointed him the highest selling country music artist of all time. Over the past decade, Combs has twice won the Country Music Association Award for Entertainer of the Year (putting him level with the pre-folk-pop version of Taylor Swift) and been nominated for eight Grammy Awards.
Perhaps the most interesting part of his story is the timing. Combs sang throughout his youth, obsessing over acts like Brooks & Dunn, Eric Church and Vince Gill, but he didn’t pick up a guitar until he was in his early 20s. By that time, he was studying criminal justice at Appalachian State University with ambitions of becoming a homicide detective.
His earliest gigs came in his home state, but at 24, Combs made the move to country music’s Mecca – Nashville, Tennessee. He has lived there since 2014, recently spearheading a once-off relocation of the city’s most iconic stage, The Grand Ole Opry, to London’s Royal Albert Hall.
By 2017, he was an unstoppable force in the US charts. Hurricane was a catapult of a breakthrough single, laying the groundwork for his debut LP, This One’s for You, which stayed as Billboard’s number one country album for 50 weeks. Four more full-length records have followed, each seeming to commercially outdo the last.
Among Combs’s biggest hits are When It Rains It Pours, Beautiful Crazy and She Got the Best of Me; combined they have around three billion Spotify streams. Each fixes its attention on middle of the road heartbreak, a subject on which he is an expert. Other areas of interest include drinking, driving and working hard.
Despite a myriad of references to a simpler, more traditional life in his lyrics, a large part of Combs’s international success story is down to marketing and social media savviness. Like many artists from his generation, he built an online audience through covers on YouTube and Vine.
This wasn’t exclusive to the country genre – Combs dabbled in R&B and soul music. Just two years ago, he released an official version of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. It, too, is edging ever closer to a billion streams.
He has close to eight million followers on Instagram, where you can see him sing, play golf and teach Ed Sheeran how to fire shotgun a can. Incidentally, Combs has a song called Beer Never Broke My Heart, another called Beer Can, and who can forget The Beer, the Band, and the Barstool?
It is an impressive branding dichotomy of perceived authenticity and near impossible levels of relatability. Fans buy into the down to earth, humble persona, jeans and all. All of which is to suggest an army of happy cowboy hat-wearers will flock to Slane Castle next summer, much to the chagrin of the heartbroken bucket hat-wearers.
Joining Combs on the bill in Meath are compatriots Ty Myers and The Castellows, as well as Irish outfit The Script. It is a new era for the castle, 45 years on from Thin Lizzy headlining its inaugural event.
Some will have wished for something closer to Lizzy this time around. But whether or not you can fathom the love for American country music in Ireland, it is impossible to deny the breadth of its appeal. Slane has recognised as much.
