What is Ireland’s best-selling classic rock song of all time?
Ireland has a massive history when it comes to music, and for a small island nation, their impact on the world has been remarkable in comparison to some of its more highly-populated neighbours.
A lot of people might think of them as being a country more infatuated with folk music, and this is true, with plenty of solid examples of folk that have reached a worldwide audience, having come from Ireland originally. You only have to look at the success endured by acts like The Pogues, The Corrs, The Cranberries and Enya to be able to recognise the wealth of talent in a variety of different strands of folk music originating from the island nation.
There has been plenty in recent years that would show that it has transitioned towards other forms, with post-punk becoming a major force in Ireland’s continued cultural dominance. With artists such as Fontaines DC, The Murder Capital and even more experimental acts like Gilla Band all hailing from the same country, and with a history that boasts everyone from The Undertones to Sinéad O’Connor in earlier waves of punk, you can certainly see how they’re not a country that’s reliant on one particular form of music.
Things absolutely don’t stop there in Ireland either; you’ve got a rich history of shoegaze spanning from the days of My Bloody Valentine to modern acts like Just Mustard, and you’ve got pop superstars through every generation, whether that’s Boyzone or CMAT, who have proven themselves to have a reasonable degree of success in the charts.
But aside from pop, one genre that has historically performed well in the charts around the world is classic rock, and much like all of the aforementioned exploits that Ireland has been able to demonstrate, there are plenty of acts of this ilk to have proven their worth in terms of record sales across the globe.
Given this, who has the record for having released the best-selling classic rock single in Irish history, and just how popular has Irish classic rock been around the world?
So, what is Ireland’s best-selling classic rock song?
One might immediately think of tracks like Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, The Boomtown Rats’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ or anything from the career of Van Morrison, whether solo or with Them, as being likely candidates for having sold more records than any other classic rock act from Ireland. However, that would be ignoring the overwhelming amount of record sales that have been achieved by the country’s premier rock band, U2, and a gross underestimation of their popularity.
While various sources have some discrepancy over just how many copies their biggest singles have sold around the world, collating figures from multiple places reveals that their 1987 hit, ‘With Or Without You’, taken from their immensely popular album, The Joshua Tree, is the biggest-selling song in their catalogue, and has sold more than any other classic rock single from Ireland with approximately 4.5million units sold worldwide.
There’s no doubt that U2 remain one of Ireland’s most popular acts of all time, and while their recent work hasn’t managed to achieve the same level of success as songs such as ‘With Or Without You’, you can hardly expect a band to come up with something that trumps their signature song almost 40 years later, and it’s likely that this will remain top of the list for the foreseeable future.
