He’s touring this year and has just sold out 5 nights at Dublin’s Croke Park (GAA stadium). This place has a capacity of 80,000. He sold 400,000 tickets very fast on an island with 6.4 million people. I suspect there have been a lot of sales abroad because otherwise 1 in 16 people in Ireland will be attending the concerts. Anyone a fan? I haven’t heard tell of him since he released a dodgy pop/rock album in the late 1990s. The strangest thing to me having seen footage of people queuing up all night to acquire tickets is that he has somehow amassed a new, young fanbase that can’t have been very old the last time he was majorly in the limelight here.
I saw him in a small venue in Seattle before he made it big*, and was a fan until he dumped his wife and tried to take on a rock star persona. The wife dumping was to be expected, but going the Pat Boone route wasn’t. The guy’s got talent – doesn’t need to play games.
*My husband is tired of me telling him that I was once only a foot from Brooks’ crotch. He was walking around in the audience. 
Is he still a big deal in the US?
I don’t think so, but I don’t pay attention to country music anymore. Maybe he is. He was on Leno’s last show, and those spots are usually reserved for big names.
There is more popular but worse country out there. Not my cuppa tea, but he seems decent and not a complete redneck.
His 2013 album (a compilation, even) went:
#1 in Billboard Country Albums, top 200, and Independent Albums
#16 in Ireland IRMA
#20 in Canada Billboard
So pretty big, yeah.
There’s been a lot of commentary with more hip types getting all wound up about his resurgence of popularity but I have no major problem with him. Country has always been huge here and we even have our own terrible version of it “Country and Irish” which is like country except with everything good about country removed.
Aw, come on, never heard of it, but it can’t be that bad. Here, let me search for “Country and Irish” on youtube and…
Oh dear lord.
I can’t get it out of my head! I can’t get it out of my head!
All I know about Garth Brooks is that he’s an old French whore.
And I don’t know if every country music star would like being insinuated that he was homosexual (clips seem to all be dead).
Well, like many things in Ireland, this has all ended in farce. The promoters failed to secure permission in advance to put on five shows in a row in Croke Park. The local council allowed them to have three instead. Garth Brooks has pulled out saying five or none. So there’ll be no Garth Brooks concerts in Ireland this year.
Dodged a bullet there, didn’t ya.
I wasn’t aware the Garth is big in Ireland, but a LOT of American country artists have long been popular over there. I know old-timers like Johnny Cash and WIllie Nelson had loads of fans in Ireland even when mainstream American country fans had forgotten about them.
I was reading an article on this situation. How could the permit denial be anything other than a pure power trip by a bureaucrat?
Because it was predicated on promises and assurances made to local residents as regards the frequency of music shows in Croke Park.
He kind of retired in the late 90’s or so. I haven’t heard anyone talk much about him in a decade.
Oddly enough, Dara Ó Briain brought him back to my mind when he tweeted about him the other day.
I assume he just saw him at one of those Ireland shows you mentioned.
I like a lot of country music. I like a lot of Celtic music. That didn’t appeal to me. At. All.
What really sucked was that the youtube video was not a video at all, it more like the album cover slowing zooming in, then pop back to where it was, over and over.
That describes most “music videos” on Youtube, using a very flexible definition of legal. At least a minimum of effort was put into animating this one rather than grabbing a pixelated album cover and downsampling an mp3 to hell.
I don’t like most country music, but it was okay.
“Scrumpy & Western” (West Country England ooh arr ooh arr) is sometimes intriguing.
The shows aren’t going ahead. His tweet is referring to the fact Brooks has refused to do the three shows that have been allowed if he can’t do all five he had been booked for.
Yeah, I was on the RTE website the other day and saw this. My thought was, “that’s kind of random, why do Irish people give a rip about ol’ Garth?”
He was massive in the early 90s. I don’t particularly like country but I have a copy of *No Fences. *When I was in college, “Friends In Low Places” was pretty much broken out at every party. (What did you expect? I went to school in Texas.)
There was a time when I would pretty much rate Garth and MC Hammer as the kings of crossover. I was convinced they would duet at some point. Then he kind of faded away (on the pop side at least) and came up with the Chris Gaines thing… that’s when I think he lost the plot. I don’t think he’s been seen much musically since then in America.
He always struck me as a pretty decent guy, so glad that he’s having a resurgence.
I always find it interesting when artists become massive in another country but couldn’t get arrested in their home country. Obviously Garth is light years from that, but I remember a band that was huge in the UK (not sure about Ireland) was Fun Loving Criminals, from New York. I only know of them from copies of Smash Hits that my auntie sent from England, but I was always thinking, “who the fuck are these guys? They’re American and I’ve never heard of them.”
I frequent Renaissance and Celtic festivals where his song " Ireland, I’m Coming Home " is pretty popular. One group has a running joke of asking each set if anyone in the audience can guess who wrote it. They proceed to mock the very idea, assuming a ghost writer did the heavy lifting. Apparently he wrote it after returning home from an Irish tour. Nothing else of his is played at all.
I’ll look it up.
“In 1994, when Garth played Dublin, Ireland, he drew the biggest crowds there since a 1979 visit from the pope.”