NORTHERN IRELAND: GARTH BROOKS STAGES THREE CONCERTS IN ONE NIGHT TO PROMOTE NEW ALBUM

Record ID: 387915

  • Title: NORTHERN IRELAND: GARTH BROOKS STAGES THREE CONCERTS IN ONE NIGHT TO PROMOTE NEW ALBUM
  • Date: 22nd November 1998
  • Summary: BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, UNITED KINGDOM (NOVEMBER 11, 1998) (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) (SOUNDBITE) (ENGLISH) BROOKS SAYING: "No idea there's nobody in this room that loves traditional country more than I do, but at the same time when the gentleman asked me about the Celtic songs, I must do what I do ... and do I want to get up there and sing 'sing me back home' from Merl Ha
  • Embargoed: 7th December 1998 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVA3DTFXC4R06GAYIB621RQ2VTPE
  • Story Text: Only days after performing live in Belfast, country singer Garth Brooks was back in the United States, staging three live one-hour concerts on the same night (November 18) to promote his latest offering "Garth Brooks Double Live", an album set to take him closer to one of his professional goals.
    While willing fans lined up at record stores to buy the latest album from the biggest selling country artist in history, Brooks prepared for the series of concerts he hoped would propel sales of his first live album.
    Brooks, 36, was hoping to sell 1 million albums and break Pearl Jam's one day sales record for albums; the grunge outfit from Seattle, Washington sold 950,378 copies of the album "Vs"
    the day it debuted in 1993.
    Those figures pale into significance however, when looking at the number of albums Brooks has already sold in the nineties - over eighty million albums.Brooks says he's enormously happy about these numbers, but is still setting his sights on the big one - one hundred million units.
    Speaking in Belfast last week he admitted that he's always needed goals (achievable or not) to keep him going and without them he's lost.
    "In '92 I had had held all the goals that we had set for ourselves and i found myself very lost and very wondering.
    It's what I call the dark winter of '92 and it was just a bad time for me because for the first time in my life, I didn't have something out ahead of me, that I was striving for.So I realised how important goals were for me in my life," he said.
    Brooks appeared in Belfast at the King's Hall November 11-15 and even managed to break records in the process.He sold 37,500 tickets for the concerts in under 4 hours - a new attendance record for both the venue and for Northern Ireland.
    "Garth Brooks Double Live" contains 25 live recordings by Brooks including three new singles.While each 2-CD set contains the exact same recordings, the artwork for each package, including the album cover, the booklet photos and special designs on the discs themselves, were changed after a run of 1 million copies.The result is a completely different package for every million copies of the album produced and shipped in the United States.Each CD booklet also contains a diary of Garth's personal reflections of his career milestones.
    On Tuesday (November 17) Brooks heralded the release of the album with an hour long concert in Los Angeles which was beamed by satellite to 2,300 Wal-Mart stores in the United States and Canada.According to sales figures, 20 percent of all Brooks' albums were purchased at Wal-Mart.
    Brooks is the biggest selling solo artist in the history of the United States music industry.He holds the record as the fastest selling album artist in the history of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and is the only male artist to have 2 solo albums top the 10 million mark.
    Despite his fantastic successes, Brooks remains clueless as to why its happened to him: "Trust me of all the people in this room that's very clueless why why this is happening to me I'm the one who is most clueless - why this is happening.I'm just still very thankful that it's still happening.I'd love to have some kind of really intelligent answer for you but I don't, other than it might be the first time that God's ever made a mistake," he said.
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