“No, I didn’t know anything was happening. Garth Brooks is, literally, the talk of the town as these ten snippets heard throughout our Garth ‘pilgrimage’ reveal. He is a PR dream and we are suddenly aware that we’ve been using the term ‘superstar’ far too freely before now. We take the lift (in which a new Garth-themed restaurant menu has been placed offering ‘Shameless Desserts’ and ‘Thunder Rolls’) up to our room where the main TV channel is showing a one-hour special on this Garth ‘homecoming’. At our hotel lobby two young women (in outfits which would make Dolly look demure) ask us to take their photo with a life-size cardboard Garth. Now, at last, we arrived for the last of Garth’s five sold out Dublin stadium shows (yes, he’d sold over 400,000 tickets in one city).īreaking away from the stream of cowboy hats at Connolly station, we walk past chancers selling fancy-dress cowboy hats at every major junction, and pubs which have temporarily rebranded themselves, like ‘Garth Central’.
“Sure,” we said “it’ll be an experience.” It turns out we hadn’t even begun to grasp how this one event would consume the whole nation. We thought we had an idea of how big Garth Brooks in Ireland was going to be when we bought our tickets almost a year ago.
