What is the best-selling Irish song of the 21st century?
Curiously enough, the artist who takes Ireland’s gold medal in the country’s top 21st-century UK sellers only features one massive hit among the list’s gaggle of usual suspects.
As you’d expect from the Republic’s biggest-selling band of all time, U2 crop up twice with 2004’s ‘Vertigo’ rocker and ‘Beautiful Day’s immortal anthem four years earlier, probably the last bona fide anthem the Dublin export has ever come up with.
Then there’s the names you likely completely forgot about, Ronan Keating’s unexpectedly massive solo stardom yielding the mammoth ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes’ and ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster’, and remember Samantha Mumba? It’s easy to forget how big the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ wrecker actually was, boasting two early 2000s numbers in the Irish hall of unit shifters.
There’s one big pop name you just can’t get rid of, however. Among hits from The Script, The Corrs, and Damien Rice, Louis Walsh’s boyband behemoth knocks any competition out of the park in entries, Westlife counting a whopping seven singles that took the UK charts by storm, discounting the 1990s hits, raking in similar sales. In at number five of the 21st century’s big Brit shifters, Westlife’s 2001 cover of Billy Joel’s blue-eyed soul ‘Uptown Girl’ selling over 700,000 copies for the tawdry Comic Relief charity lark abouts.
Bronze medal goes to The Script with Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am doing the heavy lifting for 2012’s ‘Hall of Fame’, but in at the top swoops in a virtual unknown at the time of their defining number, seizing the UK pop charts along with the rest of the world.
So, what is the best-selling Irish song of the 21st century?
It’s unlikely Hozier knew just what a pop beast he had dreamed up when cutting the demo of ‘Take Me to Church’ back in 2013. A struggling artist and a regular of Dublin’s open mic nights, a recent relationship break-up inspired the singer to put lyrical pen to paper and, for three months, work on a metaphorical piece, blurring his lost love with the Catholic Church’s complex presence in Irish heritage and its prurient stranglehold on sexual expression.
The demo managed to land on the desk of the Rubyworks label, which saw to it to add some live overdubs under Rob Kirwan’s production watch but kept his aching vocal takes, reportedly cut in the early hours in his parents’ attic in County Wicklow’s Bray.
Promoted with a gripping video exploring homophobia in Cork, ‘Take Me to Church’ went viral and saw the single spread like wildfire around the world’s charts, reaching number two in Ireland, the UK, and the US, but topping the singles rankings in countless countries and standing as 2014’s most streamed song on Spotify with over 87million plays.
It made a shift in pop tastes across the Irish sea, Hozier’s indie sermon counting nearly 4million sales to date in the UK and attesting to pop fans’ embrace of singer-songwriter depth over the pop formulas the industry can keep pushing on to the music world.
