American country singer Garth Brooks has said he will take a break from stadium tours after his five Irish dates in September.
The star announced on Monday that additional tickets for his Croke Park concerts will go on sale on Thursday. The five-night run in Dublin is to be recorded and filmed.
“Now that plans around this filming, camera positions in the stadium etc have been finalised by the director, a limited number of production holds will be released for sale,” a statement issued on Monday said.
Brooks announced in November 2021 that he would play two concerts at Croke Park, on September 9th and 10th. Three more dates were then added to meet demand.
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The singer said he decided to stop stadium tours in the future to take his “band and crew into consideration”.
“I’m the last guy in and the first guy out. For me, it’s like eating dessert. The band and crew, I’ve never seen them this busy,” he told Moncrieff on Newstalk.
“These guys haven’t been home in four months, while I get to go home after a gig and spend time with the love of my life and I get to experience my children any time I want. It’s been a real haul for these guys.”
Brooks said, for him, music has never been about the number of people in a crowd but about the sincerity of who’s there.
“You can find that [sincerity] in dive bars, you can find it in arenas, you can find it in fairs. It would be nice to just start the grass-roots thing all over again. When you did this before you had one single out. Now you have a catalogue of songs that people know every word to. You start a song and they finish it; you start the next one and they finish it,” he said.
“[Music] is all about how you feel when you’re playing it. We get so caught up in doing this for a living, and the gold records and the charts and all this stuff — it’s so neat to be reminded that music has no price tag on it.
The country singer’s previous five concerts at Croke Park in 2014 had been cancelled because of objections from locals and a refusal by Dublin City Council to grant planning permission for the events.
