Despite the fact that they can play venues ten times the size they are, and the failure to get tickets results in riots in Dublin streets, U2 cover their horrendous daily expenses with allegedly ‘intimate’ venues (between say 10,000 and 20,000 people) and charge £50 a ticket. Of course, the only chance you have of getting a ticket is using the Internet and a credit card. Nice. Might as well call it the “Screw The Unemployed Tour”. Bluntly put, it’s too much money. I’d rather pay half and see them in Wembley Stadium than pay twice as much and see them here.
That’s what I did last time. The last time I saw U2 Bono was a little dot in the distance and at least I could watch it on big video screens. Tonight, in the 8,000ish capacity Manchester Evening News Arena, he’s still a little dot in the distance and I paid almost twice as much this time to see them. And the video screens are about the size of a portable television.
There’s no dispute that U2 are bluntly put, a very good, slightly adventurous rock band. They put on a slick, well rehearsed, funny show. Moves are timed to split second perfection. Drapes fall and rise in perfect synchronisation. Bono knows exactly where to stand and when to create maximum effect.
Going to do an acoustic set? Why not wander down the front of the admittedly impressive heart shaped stage during a guitar solo, and then get the guitarist to rock out down the walkway during the same solo. Easy. Then you can start an acoustic set without any embarassing pauses. Ensure you have a big bongo drum handily placed on stage in case spontaneity strikes.
They claim this is a ‘back to the basics’ tour, but it’s just as vast as the enormous PopMart and Zooropa tours. An enormous heart dissects the venue floor, walkways and lights hidden inside, backed with movable, rotating vidiwalls, draps and projections. It looks expensive. Guess where the money’s coming from?
So, all gripes about artifically controlling and abusing the laws of supply and demand through obscenely priced tickets and absurdly complicated routes that yer average punter must follow just to be able to buy tickets aside, it is an excellent rock band playing at full strength, and it does seems as if despite Bono being cursed with sincerity and good intentions, they do at least try to subvert the traditional stadium rock route.
The opener Elevation is a good point here – the U2 set starts with the house lights on, and the opening throb and rumble of the track rising gently through the slowly-fading between band CD. The show starts slowly, easing gracefully into the realisation that there are four blokes on stage called U2. Cue whole crowd going mad, chattering into mobile phones, jumping up and down, and singing along at the weirdest places, and since all the house lights are on, the view is both fabulous and hilarious. Even Mulletboy in front of me punches the air, jumps up and down horrendously out of time, claps along at all the wrong moments, and sings incredibly off-key.
Much like Bono, whose voice is more shot than say, your average Genoa summit protestor. He proffers the mike to the crowds to sing his falsetto moments, stalks the stage in a giant bomber jacket, and just – doesn’t seem very well actually. Sounds bounces all over the place and sounds at best, hollow. In a metal tin above a train station, I suppose it’s the best you can expect. Edge grooves away with his small army of guitars, Larry just pounds away, and Adam looks perpetually 1985 to me. Above the stage the video screens show nothing but closeups of individual band members, and well, I realise most of Edge’s guitar genius comes out of looped FX boxes and most of Larry’s drumming is very, well, rigid. Especially on Sunday Bloody Sunday.
But overall, they are a tight rock band that should concentrate more on being good value than a rally for the Best Intentions party. The Discotheque and Staring At The Sun medley is a gentle, beautiful shimmering thing. Eased in on a ghostly, picked version of the intro, Bono serenades the crowd before the definitive, 60-foot-clockwork-lemonless version of the song is dispatched like a firing squad. As the middle eight ushers in the band quietly shift gears into Staring At The Sun. Shame there’s none of thet Village People grunting, but none the less, it’s one of a few surprises they give tonight. And for someone whose seen a lot of rock bands, this is one of the better ones.
Kite is next, dedicated to Bono’s dad, after some snot-ridden speech about the fact that cancer will take him in the next few days. There is a thing known as wearing you heart on your sleeve Bono. You don’t have to do it all the time. I don’t mean to sound disparaging, but the sound is still bouncing off the walls of the venue, and I can’t really make any words out.
I Will Follow sounds as fresh as the day it was uncanned somewhere in Dublin when the Great Riff Lorry dropped it off outside the Edge’s house. But Sunday Bloody Sunday seems to me like being hit over the head repeatedly by the Conscience Police at an Oliver Stone film.
I know Bono means well, but I’m tired of him telling me that WAR IS BAD (clang!), PEACE IS GOOD (clang!), and other statements. I know he’s got a Jesus-complex, but in fact he’s just King Of The Obvious. I also somehow doubt that the relevant movers’n’shakers within the IRA are going to be swayed by a millionaire rock star in a leather jacket waving a flag. See, Bono’s problem is that he’s too damn sincere. He can’t help but try to save the world every day. Which is all well and good, but he is just a rock star, and not a politician. Though the moments where the crowd all (excepting me and Mrs. Me) clap in time to given queues, rhythm signatures, and good old fashioned riffola. It kind of feels well, like, Germany in the thirties sometimes.
I’ve spent some time examining U2. I’ve been looking at newsgroups and all that stuff to find out what makes the average U2 fan tick… and the answer is not much. Some of them have wireless laptops and fly across the world posting setlists from their seat at the gig instead of watching the band. Others just post reviews along the lines of “this rocks! The support band sucks!”. Intelligence it seems, may not necessarily be a requirement.
So generally speaking, a band gets the fans it deserves, but the drawback of this is, some bands try to do better, and still end up with idiots in the fanbase. I can think of several examples : the Manics, Radiohead (who have jock’s yelling out Creep at gigs, not smart enough to see the irony), and U2.
It seems to be night of the deaths for U2. So far he’s mentioned his dad, the Sunday Bloody Sunday massacre, Michael Hutchence, and Joey Ramone. By the time they get to the end of Stay, the beautiful, wandering ballad from the massively underrated Zooropa, he’s namechecked Martin Hannet, Frank Sinatra, and Ian Curtis.. changing the last line of Stay to “How I wish Ian Curtis Was Still Around.” You and me both. During the next song, the shimmering Bad, he also throws in lines from Isolation and Atmosphere by Joy Division, before the song is cut abruptly short and moves to Where The Streets Have No Name in midflow.
It’s almost predicatable, but Bono is jogging around the stage when he sings “I want to run / I want to hide” from the song. I get the feeling he does it every night.
It’s just Bono’s been playing stadiums so long, it’s become a habit he cannot break to bring out the Big Rock Moves and it detracts, only slightly from the event, from the huge, beautiful heart shaped stage that flickers and shimmy’s impressively at the just the right moments, from the unescapable intimacy of U2’s work, which has been unavoidably shoehorned by circumstance into the Big Rooms.
Mysterious Ways is a funky, slinky thing, and a half cut version of The Fly, again, like Discotheque, gently eases in through a half-played, half-picked, half-speed ghostly intro into a rampaging rock beast. As the song ends, Bono runs around and around the stage before – in a priceless moment – he ends up stuck, squashed against a video screen. Like A Fly against a car windscreen. It’s about the only moment of Big Rock Moves that seems spontaenous, unpredictable, and bloody funny.
The encores are just as good. Bullet The Blue Sky is a tired, boring cabaret piece. Please Bono. It’s old, and jaded, and stop it. It’s about the only low point. With Or Without You (probably the best title for a modern rock song, well, ever) is beautiful, bolstered again by Bono seguing the song effortlessly into Joy Division’s marvellous Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Finally, comes the emotional high point of One, which as we all know, is their best song. After this unifying moment, the rest of the evening is sort of a letdown, with a thoroughly morbid Wake Up Dead Man, and the actually greatly misplaced Walk On, which, whilst ending the set on a positive note, seems more suitable for first song of the encore time than the grand finale.
Now don’t get me wrong. There are very few bands with longevity who deserve the tag of being “Great”. People seem to mistake a stubborn inability to split up as a sign of a great band. The Rolling Stones are probably the biggest example of haggard old dinosaurs who defile their past when the future dries up. U2 are probably the only band in that strata who actually deserve the tag of being “Great”, who do not feel the need to vampirically exist on past glories, but who still challenge, excite, and create. It’s good that even they – at the stage when they don’t need to make the effort anymore – at least try.
Elevation, Beautiful Day, Until the End of the World, Discotheque - Staring at the Sun, Kite, New York, I Will Follow, Sunday Bloody Sunday, In My Life - Stuck in a Moment, In a Little While, Desire, Stay, Bad - 40, Where the Streets Have No Name, Mysterious Ways, The Fly - Bullet the Blue Sky, With or Without You / Love Will Tear Us Apart, One, Wake Up Dead Man, Walk On.
U2 - Manchester Arena