Séamas O'Reilly: Garth Brooks is a winking colossus, a playful God in quintuple denim

Was it not Albert Einstein who said: some of God’s greatest gifts, are unanswered prayers

Garth Brooks will play Croke Park later this month. Picture: Mark Stedman

I spent a strange two weeks in 2014 trying to explain Garth Brooks to quite a few people. Firstly, the Londoners with whom I found myself living and working, who had never heard of the man, nor any conceivable comparison to his popularity in my homeland. The 500,000 tickets he sold to those ill-fated Croke Park shows amounted to almost a tenth of the entire island’s adult population, so their disbelief was understandable. 

The current record for a UK tour is Take That’s 2011 Progress Live, attended by a staggering 1.8 million people. Brook’s five nights in Croke Park, however, were the equivalent of an artist selling five or six million tickets in the UK, achieved by an artist maybe 1% of Londoners could identify on sight.