Garth puts his friends up in high-end places
HE insists he has friends in low places, but Ireland’s favourite country star Garth Brooks will be living the high life during his stay here.
After enough Croke Park letdowns in 2014 to rival the Mayo football team, Brooks will finally take to the stage at GAA HQ for three nights this weekend and two next weekend, in what will be his first Irish performance since 1997.
And while the 25-year gap may raise a question or two about his professed love for performing in Ireland, his presence will certainly provide a major cash injection to local hospitality.
The Irish Mail on Sunday understands Brooks has booked out a floor at the plush Marker Hotel in Dublin for the five nights of the shows.
The presidential suite at the five-star hotel – a 10-minute drive from Croker – costs around €2,500 per night, which is hardly excessive for a man with an estimated net worth of around $400m.
His crew is believed to be staying in 180 rooms at the Croke Park Hotel, within spitting distance of the concert venue.
And before, after and in between the two sets of shows, it is rumoured that the
Oklahoma singer is making the luxurious Beaufort House near Killarney his base. The old country house sits on 40 acres of woodland around 10 minutes outside the town, and is described on its website as ‘an elegant mid-18th century country house overlooking the River Laune’.
Brooks had got locals talking in Killarney after a scene in his 2020
Netflix documentary in which he sings the Irish-American ditty TooRa-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby) along with his mother. The song features the lyric ‘Over in Killarney, many years ago…’
The 60-year-old was due to touch down in Kerry Airport aboard his private jet this weekend, and is expected to use the plane to fly between the Kingdom and the capital for the shows – to be attended by around 400,000 fans.
Kerry councillor John O’Donoghue said locals are ‘delighted and very honoured that he’s chosen Kerry’.
‘And I suppose, speaking personally from a Killarney perspective, that he’s chosen the greater Killarney area as his base. Everybody is very proud of the fact that such a global superstar is coming down,’ Cllr O’Donoghue told the MoS.
Whether the record-breaking singer – he has sold more albums in the US than any other solo artist – will don his Stetson and venture into town to mingle with the locals remains to be seen, though Cllr O’Donoghue expects that ‘everybody will be happy, I hope, to respect his privacy and let him get on with what he does best, which is singing songs in front of lots of people’.
Brooks’s wife Trisha Yearwood celebrates her birthday on September 19 – the day after the final Croke Park concert – and a lavish bash before returning to the US is rumoured to be on the cards.
The singer confessed he is feeling the pressure after a build-up that goes back to the 2014 debacle in which all five planned live shows were pulled due to objection from residents.
He said: ‘There’s one thing I do want to say to everyone, including myself, my band and the crew – don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just go over there to have fun.
‘Right now I can’t sleep. I’m thinking I don’t want to make any mistakes. Let’s just go over there and turn up, flaws and all.’
He teased details of the shows’ elaborate, custom-built rigging during a Facebook livestream earlier this week, saying: ‘You can just see the pitch and the first leg of this massive structure that they’re going to do solely for the Irish shows. I haven’t even seen it yet, so we’re pretty excited.’
‘Locals are very honoured that he’s chosen Kerry’
‘Everyone will be happy to respect his privacy’
He said the stage will be ‘longways, going out into the crowd’.
‘They have to elevate the stage so people at the back can see.
‘This is going to be elevated quite a lot.
‘We do confetti off the rig as well, it lowers up and down. This thing is monstrous and it’s set in stone.’
The cost of the elaborate production also came up, with Brooks revealing that half had been brought over by boat.
‘All of that stuff has to go over early,’ he said. ‘A lot of the stuff has been specially created and has been flown over there.
‘It’s extremely expensive. It’s funny, you can play five nights to 80,000-plus people a night and monetarily you won’t earn as much as one show [in the US] just because the expenses are so crazy to get stuff over.’
However, echoing his 2014 vow to ‘crawl, swim or fly’, he added that he would ‘do it for free as I can’t wait to just get over’.