The Irish concert summer began last May with four Bruce Springsteen concerts and will end this weekend with four Coldplay concerts in Croke Park.
By Monday night, the equivalent of almost one in 20 people on the island of Ireland will have seen the English band perform.
Coldplay have sold all 320,000 tickets for their shows on Thursday, Friday, Sunday and Monday night. There aren’t many acts in the world who could sell so many tickets.
On Thursday evening, the Ticketmaster booth outside Croke Park was displaying no less than three sold out signs in case latecomers didn’t get the message. Their Music of the Spheres world tour is one of the most popular in history with a total of 9.1 million tickets worldwide being sold to date.
A Coldplay audience is among the most diverse in terms of age of any of this summer’s large Irish concerts, which also included visits to Dublin by Taylor Swift and AC/DC. As fans gathered, the crowd looked evenly divided between men and women.
The faithful turned up hours early outside the Cusack Stand to be first into the pit for Thursday night’s concert.
Mercedes Gonsalez, a Spanish woman living in Sandyford, Dublin, booked her standing tickets a year ago. Now, on the day of the concert, she was seven months pregnant. “It’s my first baby and my first Coldplay concert,” she said. In deference to her pregnancy, two friends, Elaena Dominguez and Anny Torres, kept a place in the queue for her.
“I didn’t think I would be pregnant. I’m a big fan of British groups like the Beatles and Oasis too. I love their music,” she said.
Their fellow Spaniards Alejandra Gutiérrez and Isabel Rojas used to live in Ireland and have come back to Dublin just for the Coldplay concert. “We have been friends of Coldplay since were were little,” said Isabel. “They are not playing in Spain even though they have a song called Viva La Vida - but they don’t sing in Spanish.”
Pat Bannon from Limerick went to see them in Buenos Aires. “I was working there at the time. They are unique performers. It was an unbelievable show.”
Diana Merkalydn flew in from the Netherlands for the Croke Park gig. She has been to 16 shows on the current tour, 19 in total. “We are travelling everywhere we can for the last two years. We have been in so many places we haven’t been to before. It’s absolutely awesome. Every concert is a little bit different.”
She and her friend Melissa Heinhuins could only get tickets for the Thursday night concert in Croke Park, such has been the demand in Ireland.
Coldplay already delighted their Irish fans when singer Chris Martin turned up on Grafton Street on Wednesday evening to promote their newly-released collaboration We Pray. A video of his performance in front of the large crowd which had gathered on the street was later exclusively released on TikTok.
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