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labyrinth2015...only to be with you, only to be with you...
As some of you know, I’d headed out to Melbourne this last week, only to be with U2 and the 360 Degree Tour. The concert was amazing, you guys; I know nobody but Beth and Julia and Clio will care, but this 3,000-word concert recap is for me to hold to my U2-loving and Bono/Edge-shipping heart when I’m cold and in need of something to warm me ;)
I got to watch the Zoo TV Tour when I was barely out of my teens, when the lads were young and vital and at (IMO) music’s cutting edge – they immersed themselves in mass media, music sampling and electronica, and the whole stadium rock performance art experience, all big screens and pirate radio stations run out of Trabants, with absurd smash visuals and deliberate sensory overload like Baz Lurhmann on acid – it was an amazing, life-changing trip. (Producer Nellee Hooper famously told Bono that Zoo TV "ruined irony for everyone", and OMG did it ever.)
Over the years the lads changed, but always stayed relevant, always current, always larger-than-life. You loved them for their focus on the world's issues or hated them for their pompous grandiosity, but you’d have to acknowledge they became the biggest rock band in the world. I was keen to see how they’d stack up now I’m in my thirties and the lads are that much older...and I wasn’t disappointed.
Recap follows:
2 pm It's hot out - high summer's come early to the Melbourne Docklands. I take off my Elevation '06 t-shirt; in my white tank and jeans, I blend in with the other urban Australians riding the tram this afternoon. The little boy's a trouper - he shrugs off his jacket, carries his little bag and holds my hand, and doesn't complain about the heat at all, bless him.
The boy and I prowl around the Etihad Stadium. We get accosted by earnest Amesty guys asking us to sign U2’s One petition, a campaign to stop poverty in Africa. This guy's name is Ian and he used to work on the Island (he lived in AMK!). We sign, and he gives us a cool wristband: “one for you and one for your little man!”
When we're there, the soundcheck starts up. "Is that Edge's guitar?" Ian asks. "Probably his guitar roadie," say I, cynically.
230 pm The boy and I decide to have a gelato on the docks. We hear the soundcheck play the guitar intro to "Where The Streets Have No Name". I squeal. We listen to the helicopters overhead, wondering if they're news ‘copters, or if B. and gang are flying in early.
3 pm Harbour Town, where we meet the rest of our entourage. Not a moment too soon, it starts to rain. Late lunch and arcade and shopping stuff happens here.
530pm We bundle the kids off and get on the tram for the stadium. It continues to rain. We hit the merchandise store and I end up buying tour merch for the team at work, then we join the queue.
615 pm After some queueing, we make it inside the stadium.
Would you look at that supersized revolving spaceship stage? A huge contraption that looks like a giant claw arches some five storeys over the stage, and it hoists state of the art screens, lights and speakers for the much-advertised 360 Degree view. Around the structure is a ring of catwalks and moving bridges, which is supposed to let the band get closer to fans in an intimate experience you might not expect a stadium venue to ever provide.
So: I ask for, and am brought beer. The rotating video screen that spins around the stage displays a countdown to JayZ.
630 pm We meet these guys from Adelaide, Gary and Boris. The stadium plays Viva La Vida and I break out my concert pipes!
7 pm JayZ! No offence, dude, but you look older than you are in my head. I’m not really a fan of rap, but I appreciate his talent and appeal, and I totally get why U2 asked him to open for them out here. The lads have always had a finger on the pulse for the popular music demographic, and reaching out to younger musicians is how they keep reinventing themselves and keeping things new.
I don’t know JayZ’s set, but I recognize “Empire State of Mind”, and I aww together with the rest of the early crowd when he sings a tribute line to Beyonce: "there's no one like 'chu". Then he sings "Young Forever", which is his take on Alphaville's "Forever Young" - "for the fallen soldiers", Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Aaliyah.
815 pm Goodbye Z, countdown to B! The neon clock spins on the screen overhead.
845 pm Hey, with a playlist that spans nearly three decades, I don’t get why the concert venue doesn't even play U2 songs in advance of a U2 concert? This happened with Archuleta, which I chalked up to Island-fail, but maybe it’s industry standard? The neon clock reaches 930 very quickly, and we realize that the clock is spinning faster than normal. Trust the lads to mess with time, and us, in their own style :)
9 pm Right on time, U2 takes to the stage. (Please to note this, David Archuleta.)
The cameras catch the lads as they stride across the stadium in slow-mo - as cool, as gun-slinging, guitar-toting swaggering as they'd been in the 90s. Their every action is projected onto the massive circular video screen that wraps around the underbelly of the Claw.
B's in his rock god black leather, long hair and stubble, pointy-toed boots, twirling and rocking on his heels like a wrinkled Pan. The screens love Adam's granite face and round lenses; linger over Larry, who was the most beautiful of them all. Edge wore plaid before the grunge movement made it fashionable, and wears it now, with his beanie hat and goatee and ageless profile – he, amongst the four of them, most takes my breath away.
The lads circle the 360 stage, pace up and down its circular, elliptical ramps - first Bono, then Edge and his lead guitar line, and Adam's pounding bass. Larry raises his guitar sticks on the stripped-bare center stage, and they all crash into what I later find out is a new mini-song, “Return Of The Stingray Guitar.”
Photos: Paul Rovere for www.theage.com
This soon becomes "Beautiful Day”, which it indeed is – the rain’s stopped, the night sky is cloudless. ”See the world in green and blue, see Larry Mullen right in front of you,” B sings, with a sly wink to his drummer, before segueing into "Here comes the sun - little darling, it’s all right." I just bet Bono was hoping it’d still be raining at this point, he was always one for irony.
"Hey, Melbourne! What do you think of our space station?" Bono asks the 60,000 strong crowd, and it roars its approval as the lads tear into “I Will Follow” and the rocking “Get On Your Boots”.
Overhead, the video screens alternate between the live action and pre-packaged video of old concert footage and other images.
B keeps with the space station "Where are we going?” theme – he repeats the question, then asks, rhetorically, “St. Kilda, Fizroy, Richmond?" The other guys ignore him; clearly they’ve heard this shtick before.
The guys pound into “Magnificent”, and do it justice; and then I'm screaming, because there's the snaking lead guitar hook, the distinctive bass line of "Mysterious Ways", my favorite U2 song on any given day. "If you wanna kiss the sky, gotta learn how to kneel - on your knees, boy!" howls B, shaking his hips at Adam’s side like an older but still attractive odalisque.
B races to the main bridge and throws kisses down each side. “Put your hands in the air! Then over to the Edge!” As bidden, Edge obligingly throws himself into the guitar solo, straddling center stage like he owns it.
Then B heads into the last verse and starts a slow, meaningful stalk towards the stage, where Edge is waiting for him to arrive with the patience of 20 years of touring together.
They stand there, rocking out together, Edge a tower of calm strength, Bono all frenzied, wheeling movement that pulls Edge into his orbit. It’s a lead singer/guitarist dynamic I’ve seen before and adore on others (ahem, Cookmann). They put their heads close and sing together, It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right...lift my days, light up my nights, and I melt into a pile of shipper goo.
“Elevation” is next, and the stage lights up with enough brightness to power a small city. B pretends to be buffeted by the lights; fights against them before falling to his knees, in a conceit that delights me. They slide into “Until the End of the World”, where Bono hooks his arm around his bass guitarist’s neck and sings into his ear, then gives a shout-out to their drummer and sings a snippet from “Anthem”. Waves of regret and waves of joy / I reached out for the one I tried to destroy – truly, there isn’t a single weak song off Achtung Baby, still my favourite album.
Bono says how grateful he and the other guys are to be in Australia, and to be here. They’ve been doing this a while; it’s a strange thing to say, but they’re still figuring out so much, spiritually, still searching for ways to make music.
"We're still pilgrims,”, he says, and right on cue, there’s the iconic six-note arpeggio guitar intro to “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For”, which is the rabble-rousing anthem it has always been, and I sing my lungs out together with B.
The lads debut a new song, “Mercy”. And then they pull the elegiac “Bad” out of their back catalogue. The song was one of the key songs of the 1985 Live Aid concert for the victims of the Ethiopian famine; it seems they haven’t played it in a while. The lads have moved on to other causes, of course, but this song was used to headline the OST to last year’s Elijah Wood/Natalie Portman movie “Brothers”, about Iraq, and it sounds as current and spine-chilling in the 2010s as it did in the 1980s.
Vid from Daniel, off www.u2gigs.com
This song is for Paul, he says; he’d said before that the song was for one of his friends who’d been given an overdose of heroin on the streets of Dublin. If I could, you know I would let it go. I know, I know. But you can’t, can you, B? I’m not sleeping.
“In a Little While” is next, and to lighten the mood, B does his usual trick of pulling a doe-eyed brunette onstage; they lie down at the edge of the stage, and he serenades her as they look at the stars. He kisses her hand when they’re done, as well he might, that sly old dog ;)
Next up, B attempts “Miss Sarajevo”, and gives it his best Luciano Pavarotti – to my untrained ear, the soaring, coloratura timber of his voice lends itself to the operatic very well.
“City of Blinding Lights”, and the space station screen's party trick is revealed – it expands its honeycomb structure like something out of Transformers to drop and touch the stage, looking less like a complex LED curtain and more like a harmonious shimmering sculpture that’s become an icon of the 360 Degree tour.
The lads next make a cute mishmash of “Vertigo”, “Highway To Hell” and “Devil Inside”, presumably as a shout-out to Australian band INXS, “Funky Town”, “Crazy Tonight” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes/Relax”.
The screens flash with composite images of the lads’ talking heads. Everyone does a circuit of the walkways, this time including Larry Mullen, who frees himself from his drumset and takes to a shoulder-strapped bongo.
"Is there a time? Am I a good father? Is that you?" the screens ask. "What is your wavelength? Can you hear us?"
It would seem the lads can, as they tear back into the past for “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a backlit emerald green stage the colour of Ireland. Bono welcomes the “heavyweight” JayZ back to the stage, and he raps an extra verse to the much-loved song, about political prisoners and Aung San Suu Kyi, interspersed with the chorus from “Get Up Stand Up”:
And it's true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On... Sunday, Bloody Sunday
How long, how long must we sing this song
'cause tonight...we can be as one
Tonight...tonight.
In keeping with the times, Jay Z leaves the stage with a "Welcome home, Aung San Suu Kyi." "For 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest, and U2 fans all over the world have been holding signs up for her," says Bono, somewhat hopefully but not necessarily inaccurately. Which leads the boys into the revolutionary "Scarlet", complete with a video package of Ms. Aung, recently released from house arrest in Burma. It’s moving despite the grandiosity of its gesture and I am thrilled to see that JayZ has either bought into U2’s activism Kool-Aid or they’ve all traded off each others’ huge senses of self-importance to create this massive superego for good.
It’s fitting that they end on “Walk On / You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and it’s the end of the show proper.
1030 pm Of course the crowd doesn’t let them go, and of course they return, with the glorious “One”, which is my favorite song on any other given day. Bono straps on a green guitar, and he trades guitar licks with Edge from across the stage.
Then the stripped-bare first verse of “Amazing Grace”; which makes B. sound like the gorgeous last-ditch plea of a man finally convicted of his own sin. I don’t expect the opening bravura guitar hook of “Where the Streets Have No Name” that follows. Still building then burning down love...and when I go there, I go there with you, it’s all I can do.
And then, the inevitable happens: the screen is taken over by cartoon images of cute little aliens in a cute red spaceship. There’s adorable spaceship whistling - the aliens land! "What time is it?"
"Baby, turn on your radio!" And, the cute aliens are singing, and a red neon circular space pod flies slowly towards Bono onstage, and it’s in fact a microphone which he can sing into, and somehow this isn’t cheesy!
To amp up the cheesiness factor, because nothing says cheese quite like the James Bond franchise, Bono launches into “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me”; he actually sings the last verse while riding on the red space pod like an oversized pendulum. It does kind of thrill me beyond words!
Then the stage is bathed in blue light, and the space pod turns a brilliant azure, and there’s the shimmering intro to my favourite song on the third alternative day: “With Or Without You”. B. sings My hands are tied, my body bruised, and E. harmonizes with nothing to win and nothing left to lose, and you give yourself away. B hangs on the blue space pod like it’s a lover, and then says “Goodbye!” to it, as it flies back off into the sky.
So, the 1st of December is World AIDS day, and “Moment of Surrender” is the time for B. to make his pitch for freely available AIDS drugs. Bless him, he sounds like he still believes it, after all these years, and bless me for so do I. And, when 60,000 mobile phones wave in the darkness, it sounds like so does everyone else in the Etihad Stadium this night.
It's not if I believe in love But if love believes in me.
"It's a beautiful sight," Bono sighs, and I sigh with him; I still believe, too.
And 11 pm - promptly, the boys bid us good night. Oh my good God, where did the time go? We shake hands with Gary and Boris and leave the stadium; there’s hardly any jostling or unpleasantness as 60,000 fans file out of the stadium, shoulder to shoulder.
I’m buoyed by the irresistible sense that U2 fans are all connected somehow, in our respect for our world and for each other. It’s a grandiose thought, worthy of the lads themselves – but it keeps me warm as we walk the four short blocks to our hotel.
As some of you know, I’d headed out to Melbourne this last week, only to be with U2 and the 360 Degree Tour. The concert was amazing, you guys; I know nobody but Beth and Julia and Clio will care, but this 3,000-word concert recap is for me to hold to my U2-loving and Bono/Edge-shipping heart when I’m cold and in need of something to warm me ;)
I got to watch the Zoo TV Tour when I was barely out of my teens, when the lads were young and vital and at (IMO) music’s cutting edge – they immersed themselves in mass media, music sampling and electronica, and the whole stadium rock performance art experience, all big screens and pirate radio stations run out of Trabants, with absurd smash visuals and deliberate sensory overload like Baz Lurhmann on acid – it was an amazing, life-changing trip. (Producer Nellee Hooper famously told Bono that Zoo TV "ruined irony for everyone", and OMG did it ever.)
Over the years the lads changed, but always stayed relevant, always current, always larger-than-life. You loved them for their focus on the world's issues or hated them for their pompous grandiosity, but you’d have to acknowledge they became the biggest rock band in the world. I was keen to see how they’d stack up now I’m in my thirties and the lads are that much older...and I wasn’t disappointed.
Recap follows:
2 pm It's hot out - high summer's come early to the Melbourne Docklands. I take off my Elevation '06 t-shirt; in my white tank and jeans, I blend in with the other urban Australians riding the tram this afternoon. The little boy's a trouper - he shrugs off his jacket, carries his little bag and holds my hand, and doesn't complain about the heat at all, bless him.
The boy and I prowl around the Etihad Stadium. We get accosted by earnest Amesty guys asking us to sign U2’s One petition, a campaign to stop poverty in Africa. This guy's name is Ian and he used to work on the Island (he lived in AMK!). We sign, and he gives us a cool wristband: “one for you and one for your little man!”
When we're there, the soundcheck starts up. "Is that Edge's guitar?" Ian asks. "Probably his guitar roadie," say I, cynically.
230 pm The boy and I decide to have a gelato on the docks. We hear the soundcheck play the guitar intro to "Where The Streets Have No Name". I squeal. We listen to the helicopters overhead, wondering if they're news ‘copters, or if B. and gang are flying in early.
3 pm Harbour Town, where we meet the rest of our entourage. Not a moment too soon, it starts to rain. Late lunch and arcade and shopping stuff happens here.
530pm We bundle the kids off and get on the tram for the stadium. It continues to rain. We hit the merchandise store and I end up buying tour merch for the team at work, then we join the queue.
615 pm After some queueing, we make it inside the stadium.
Would you look at that supersized revolving spaceship stage? A huge contraption that looks like a giant claw arches some five storeys over the stage, and it hoists state of the art screens, lights and speakers for the much-advertised 360 Degree view. Around the structure is a ring of catwalks and moving bridges, which is supposed to let the band get closer to fans in an intimate experience you might not expect a stadium venue to ever provide.
So: I ask for, and am brought beer. The rotating video screen that spins around the stage displays a countdown to JayZ.
630 pm We meet these guys from Adelaide, Gary and Boris. The stadium plays Viva La Vida and I break out my concert pipes!
7 pm JayZ! No offence, dude, but you look older than you are in my head. I’m not really a fan of rap, but I appreciate his talent and appeal, and I totally get why U2 asked him to open for them out here. The lads have always had a finger on the pulse for the popular music demographic, and reaching out to younger musicians is how they keep reinventing themselves and keeping things new.
I don’t know JayZ’s set, but I recognize “Empire State of Mind”, and I aww together with the rest of the early crowd when he sings a tribute line to Beyonce: "there's no one like 'chu". Then he sings "Young Forever", which is his take on Alphaville's "Forever Young" - "for the fallen soldiers", Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Aaliyah.
815 pm Goodbye Z, countdown to B! The neon clock spins on the screen overhead.
845 pm Hey, with a playlist that spans nearly three decades, I don’t get why the concert venue doesn't even play U2 songs in advance of a U2 concert? This happened with Archuleta, which I chalked up to Island-fail, but maybe it’s industry standard? The neon clock reaches 930 very quickly, and we realize that the clock is spinning faster than normal. Trust the lads to mess with time, and us, in their own style :)
9 pm Right on time, U2 takes to the stage. (Please to note this, David Archuleta.)
The cameras catch the lads as they stride across the stadium in slow-mo - as cool, as gun-slinging, guitar-toting swaggering as they'd been in the 90s. Their every action is projected onto the massive circular video screen that wraps around the underbelly of the Claw.
B's in his rock god black leather, long hair and stubble, pointy-toed boots, twirling and rocking on his heels like a wrinkled Pan. The screens love Adam's granite face and round lenses; linger over Larry, who was the most beautiful of them all. Edge wore plaid before the grunge movement made it fashionable, and wears it now, with his beanie hat and goatee and ageless profile – he, amongst the four of them, most takes my breath away.
The lads circle the 360 stage, pace up and down its circular, elliptical ramps - first Bono, then Edge and his lead guitar line, and Adam's pounding bass. Larry raises his guitar sticks on the stripped-bare center stage, and they all crash into what I later find out is a new mini-song, “Return Of The Stingray Guitar.”
Photos: Paul Rovere for www.theage.com
This soon becomes "Beautiful Day”, which it indeed is – the rain’s stopped, the night sky is cloudless. ”See the world in green and blue, see Larry Mullen right in front of you,” B sings, with a sly wink to his drummer, before segueing into "Here comes the sun - little darling, it’s all right." I just bet Bono was hoping it’d still be raining at this point, he was always one for irony.
"Hey, Melbourne! What do you think of our space station?" Bono asks the 60,000 strong crowd, and it roars its approval as the lads tear into “I Will Follow” and the rocking “Get On Your Boots”.
Overhead, the video screens alternate between the live action and pre-packaged video of old concert footage and other images.
B keeps with the space station "Where are we going?” theme – he repeats the question, then asks, rhetorically, “St. Kilda, Fizroy, Richmond?" The other guys ignore him; clearly they’ve heard this shtick before.
The guys pound into “Magnificent”, and do it justice; and then I'm screaming, because there's the snaking lead guitar hook, the distinctive bass line of "Mysterious Ways", my favorite U2 song on any given day. "If you wanna kiss the sky, gotta learn how to kneel - on your knees, boy!" howls B, shaking his hips at Adam’s side like an older but still attractive odalisque.
B races to the main bridge and throws kisses down each side. “Put your hands in the air! Then over to the Edge!” As bidden, Edge obligingly throws himself into the guitar solo, straddling center stage like he owns it.
Then B heads into the last verse and starts a slow, meaningful stalk towards the stage, where Edge is waiting for him to arrive with the patience of 20 years of touring together.
They stand there, rocking out together, Edge a tower of calm strength, Bono all frenzied, wheeling movement that pulls Edge into his orbit. It’s a lead singer/guitarist dynamic I’ve seen before and adore on others (ahem, Cookmann). They put their heads close and sing together, It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right...lift my days, light up my nights, and I melt into a pile of shipper goo.
“Elevation” is next, and the stage lights up with enough brightness to power a small city. B pretends to be buffeted by the lights; fights against them before falling to his knees, in a conceit that delights me. They slide into “Until the End of the World”, where Bono hooks his arm around his bass guitarist’s neck and sings into his ear, then gives a shout-out to their drummer and sings a snippet from “Anthem”. Waves of regret and waves of joy / I reached out for the one I tried to destroy – truly, there isn’t a single weak song off Achtung Baby, still my favourite album.
Bono says how grateful he and the other guys are to be in Australia, and to be here. They’ve been doing this a while; it’s a strange thing to say, but they’re still figuring out so much, spiritually, still searching for ways to make music.
"We're still pilgrims,”, he says, and right on cue, there’s the iconic six-note arpeggio guitar intro to “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For”, which is the rabble-rousing anthem it has always been, and I sing my lungs out together with B.
The lads debut a new song, “Mercy”. And then they pull the elegiac “Bad” out of their back catalogue. The song was one of the key songs of the 1985 Live Aid concert for the victims of the Ethiopian famine; it seems they haven’t played it in a while. The lads have moved on to other causes, of course, but this song was used to headline the OST to last year’s Elijah Wood/Natalie Portman movie “Brothers”, about Iraq, and it sounds as current and spine-chilling in the 2010s as it did in the 1980s.
Vid from Daniel, off www.u2gigs.com
This song is for Paul, he says; he’d said before that the song was for one of his friends who’d been given an overdose of heroin on the streets of Dublin. If I could, you know I would let it go. I know, I know. But you can’t, can you, B? I’m not sleeping.
“In a Little While” is next, and to lighten the mood, B does his usual trick of pulling a doe-eyed brunette onstage; they lie down at the edge of the stage, and he serenades her as they look at the stars. He kisses her hand when they’re done, as well he might, that sly old dog ;)
Next up, B attempts “Miss Sarajevo”, and gives it his best Luciano Pavarotti – to my untrained ear, the soaring, coloratura timber of his voice lends itself to the operatic very well.
“City of Blinding Lights”, and the space station screen's party trick is revealed – it expands its honeycomb structure like something out of Transformers to drop and touch the stage, looking less like a complex LED curtain and more like a harmonious shimmering sculpture that’s become an icon of the 360 Degree tour.
The lads next make a cute mishmash of “Vertigo”, “Highway To Hell” and “Devil Inside”, presumably as a shout-out to Australian band INXS, “Funky Town”, “Crazy Tonight” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes/Relax”.
The screens flash with composite images of the lads’ talking heads. Everyone does a circuit of the walkways, this time including Larry Mullen, who frees himself from his drumset and takes to a shoulder-strapped bongo.
"Is there a time? Am I a good father? Is that you?" the screens ask. "What is your wavelength? Can you hear us?"
It would seem the lads can, as they tear back into the past for “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and a backlit emerald green stage the colour of Ireland. Bono welcomes the “heavyweight” JayZ back to the stage, and he raps an extra verse to the much-loved song, about political prisoners and Aung San Suu Kyi, interspersed with the chorus from “Get Up Stand Up”:
And it's true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On... Sunday, Bloody Sunday
How long, how long must we sing this song
'cause tonight...we can be as one
Tonight...tonight.
In keeping with the times, Jay Z leaves the stage with a "Welcome home, Aung San Suu Kyi." "For 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest, and U2 fans all over the world have been holding signs up for her," says Bono, somewhat hopefully but not necessarily inaccurately. Which leads the boys into the revolutionary "Scarlet", complete with a video package of Ms. Aung, recently released from house arrest in Burma. It’s moving despite the grandiosity of its gesture and I am thrilled to see that JayZ has either bought into U2’s activism Kool-Aid or they’ve all traded off each others’ huge senses of self-importance to create this massive superego for good.
It’s fitting that they end on “Walk On / You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and it’s the end of the show proper.
1030 pm Of course the crowd doesn’t let them go, and of course they return, with the glorious “One”, which is my favorite song on any other given day. Bono straps on a green guitar, and he trades guitar licks with Edge from across the stage.
Then the stripped-bare first verse of “Amazing Grace”; which makes B. sound like the gorgeous last-ditch plea of a man finally convicted of his own sin. I don’t expect the opening bravura guitar hook of “Where the Streets Have No Name” that follows. Still building then burning down love...and when I go there, I go there with you, it’s all I can do.
And then, the inevitable happens: the screen is taken over by cartoon images of cute little aliens in a cute red spaceship. There’s adorable spaceship whistling - the aliens land! "What time is it?"
"Baby, turn on your radio!" And, the cute aliens are singing, and a red neon circular space pod flies slowly towards Bono onstage, and it’s in fact a microphone which he can sing into, and somehow this isn’t cheesy!
To amp up the cheesiness factor, because nothing says cheese quite like the James Bond franchise, Bono launches into “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me”; he actually sings the last verse while riding on the red space pod like an oversized pendulum. It does kind of thrill me beyond words!
Then the stage is bathed in blue light, and the space pod turns a brilliant azure, and there’s the shimmering intro to my favourite song on the third alternative day: “With Or Without You”. B. sings My hands are tied, my body bruised, and E. harmonizes with nothing to win and nothing left to lose, and you give yourself away. B hangs on the blue space pod like it’s a lover, and then says “Goodbye!” to it, as it flies back off into the sky.
So, the 1st of December is World AIDS day, and “Moment of Surrender” is the time for B. to make his pitch for freely available AIDS drugs. Bless him, he sounds like he still believes it, after all these years, and bless me for so do I. And, when 60,000 mobile phones wave in the darkness, it sounds like so does everyone else in the Etihad Stadium this night.
It's not if I believe in love But if love believes in me.
"It's a beautiful sight," Bono sighs, and I sigh with him; I still believe, too.
And 11 pm - promptly, the boys bid us good night. Oh my good God, where did the time go? We shake hands with Gary and Boris and leave the stadium; there’s hardly any jostling or unpleasantness as 60,000 fans file out of the stadium, shoulder to shoulder.
I’m buoyed by the irresistible sense that U2 fans are all connected somehow, in our respect for our world and for each other. It’s a grandiose thought, worthy of the lads themselves – but it keeps me warm as we walk the four short blocks to our hotel.
