Boot-cut jeans, cowboy hats and brown leather shoes made up the marching uniform for the thousands of people who made the trek – or pilgrimage, depending on your persuasion – to Slane Castle on Saturday.US country music star Luke Combs is due to take to the stage for the first of two nights at the Co Meath venue. My Kinda Saturday Night is the name of the tour, and definitely the vibe here.Luke Combs onstage at Slane Castle. Photograph: Kieran Frost When Suzy Stafford and Alice Adomeit-Lavoine, two friends from Northamptonshire, England, learned about the European tour dates being announced, they thought of organising a road trip around Ireland.“We knew we were going to come over a week in advance,” Stafford said, “and then we just plotted out the route, with Slane being the last stop. We’ll be on the ferry back tomorrow.”While Stafford has been a fan of Combs for some time, Adomeit-Lavoine said she “was dragged along for the road-trip. I didn’t even know who he was two months ago, but I started listening to his music because I didn’t want to be left out”.Friends Alice Adomeit-Lavoine and Suzy Stafford soak up the sun at Slane before the show “I like the music now, it’s quite varied, he has great songwriting and melodies, too. But I’m not like proper ‘country, country’ now,” she said.Stafford said: “I’ve got an eclectic music taste, too. Next year we’re off to see [rock band] Blink-182 in France. So, it’s pretty random.”If there is a big American country music scene in Northamptonshire “then I don’t know about it”, she said.And she probably will not be joining in anytime soon. “I think the music is my limit; I’m not going line-dancing any time soon. I mean, I don’t even listen to that much country music besides Luke Combs.”Fan Séverine Gruner arrived in Dublin at 10pm on Friday and just over 12 hours later was walking down country roads towards Slane Castle.The Swiss native could have chosen one of the many cities in which Combs is stopping off on the European leg of his international tour: Paris, Amsterdam, London or Edinburgh were calling. Instead she chose the Co Meath town for its country vibe as the venue for her first Combs concert.Séverine Gruner, from Le Bémont Jura, in Switzerland, at Slane “We’re surrounded by the countryside here,” she said. “There’s fields of horses and cows all around us. It’s the perfect atmosphere for country music.”She said she finds cities, even Dublin, far too loud, and travelling to one for a large concert would only make this worse. “The people are so stressed in big venues, but here it’s super calm and lovely, very slowed down,” she said.Gruner’s love of American country music goes back to her early childhood, visiting car shows in Switzerland to see Mustangs and Chevrolets. “Country music was what we would listen to in the evening – well, actually, for the whole day,” she said.Two years ago, a friend introduced her to Combs’s music. “The sound is incredible. It’s deep. It’s heavy. It’s emotional. That’s what I love,” she said. “When he sings, it sounds like thunder.”The expected 160,000 people who are coming to see Combs perform this weekend will surely give him an equally thunderous applause, turning Slane Castle into a Nashville-style party.