This is what Neil Mc Cormick things and frankly...we agree!!
OK, I know I’m biased. I grew up with this group and have a long, personal history with them and, of course, it influences how I feel. The past was very present to me, this weekend, when I found myself in Rome watching the last night of the European leg of U2’s 360 tour.
Looking out from an aeroplane window over a sea of clouds, I thought about how I used to catch the 31 bus to see this group play in pubs, clubs, colleges, hotel bars, school discos and church halls in Dublin. Now I have to fly across a continent, ride in taxis, trains, planes and coaches, to stand amongst 89,000 others in the enormous Stadio Olimpico in this ancient centre of classical civilization. So I don’t know what anybody else was feeling, gazing up at the hi-tech, alien sci-fi Claw that forms the centrepiece of the U2 stage show, but I was experiencing an intense sense of dislocation, a bafflement at how something that was such an intimate part of my youth had expanded to such a ludicrous scale.
Hundreds of working people moved around beneath the towering Claw, a small army equipped with two-way radios and laminated passes, focussing on the thousand little component tasks that need to lock together to make this show come to life, night after night. And at the centre of everything are four musicians. A rock band. The very same band that I saw start up in the school gym playing a Peter Frampton song in 1976, but not really the same band at all.
The U2 show in Rome was absolutely breathtaking. Here in a city where bloodshed at the Coliseum was once the greatest show on earth, U2 delivered its 21st century counterpart. Only this time the peaceful Christians weren’t being thrown to the lions, they were the new Gladiators, cheered by the multitude as they took the stage, carrying instruments instead of weapons, making music, not war.
U2’s 360 show is state of the art, with a great beating heart. The dazzling lights, the ever shifting screens expanding and illuminating the action, the sheer physical presence of the Claw itself, the crystal clear sound being beamed to every corner of the stadium, all of this locks together to create a mind bending, mass-entertainment spectacle at the very cutting edge of modern technological possibility. And on the stage in the round, there are four tiny figures playing often rather structurally peculiar and sonically inventive rock songs, with lyrics that provoke and challenge, and choruses that suddenly soar into the ether, carried aloft on the voices of tens of thousand fans, lustily singing together. What really struck me was that you can’t actually compare the experience of a U2 show to anything else. You can’t even compare U2 to themselves, or at least not to the band I saw starting out.
I was carrying an access all areas pass. For a time I watched the action unfold in the hi-tech centre known (to the crew) as Willie’s World, where stage designer Willie Williams and a team of about eight stare intently into computer monitors, shaping the action of the Claw itself, while on the deck below, sound veteran Joe O’Herlihy and his team massage the sonic envelope. There are people working here who have never actually seen a U2 show, all they ever see is the displays on their screens, their jobs requiring they cannot lift their eyes up to take in the onstage action. I got a little closer, watching for a while from inside the legs of the Claw, mere feet away from the band themselves. And as the Edge strode past me on the runway, fingers picking out lateral riffs on his guitar, multiplied by effects units to take on the dimensions of a one-man orchestra, all the while singing his backing vocals into a headpiece mic, eyes focussed into the distance, I got a glimpse of how far U2 have come, and what a strange place they find themselves in now.
There was Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Junior, locked tight into one of their counter-intuitive rhythm patterns, pounding it out. There was Bono, pumped up, bunched over, fiercely gripping his microphone, roaring an open throated note that surged from his chest via the giant speakers overhead and out into the night. And although they were so close we could have all been back in McGonagles bar in Dublin, their eyes were focussed on another space altogether, over my head, beyond the packed inner ring. So I turned to see what they see, and watched the mass of people, the crowd spreading out across the stadium floor and rising vertiginously up the sides, just a dense, pulsating throb of humanity, absorbing all that music and emotion and powering it back at them, hands aloft, mouths open in song. There was a mad energy to the moment, an intense feedback of feeling. And so I gave up my spot, and went back out into the audience, standing back far enough to see the tiny figures onstage and the images overhead, and the lights, and all the action, because back in the cheap seats is where this show really comes into its own.
U2 make big music, for moments like this, in places like these.
I’ve seen the 360 tour in other cities, and you can read reviews of it elsewhere (including mine), but this was the best I have seen it. The set has shifted away from promoting the most recent album, No Horizon, to just digging into U2’s extensive back catalogue, and the band no longer seem in any way overwhelmed by the technology and the sheer spatial dimension of the Claw. The whole experience has become more integrated, visually, sonically, emotionally, and the band are on fire, playing with the intuitive connection that comes with relentless touring, delivering a set with a paradoxical combination of fierce intensity and comfortable assurance.
For me, personally, the most hair raising moment was Bono’s operatic aria, standing in for Pavarotti at the climax of the intimate, tender “Miss Sarajevo”, really belting out the soaring final Italian language libretto, hitting the notes with the raw throated exuberance of a big chested bar room opera buff. But there were many great moments, where song and performance and display and crowd all came together in euphoric rushes of emotional unity, inspiring the kind of profound feeling of shared experience that makes rock music sometimes feel like just an amplified version of a primitive religious rite.
I know that not everyone shares my love of U2, and why should they? Some people would never go to a gig like this, and apparently consider stadium rock to be a term of abuse. That’s a matter of taste. And then there is the more personal carping and abuse, which fills up the comments box at every mention of U2. But if we can put aside, for a moment, all the nonsense about U2’s wealth (despite what sceptics frequently suggest, it should at least be recognised that U2, like most global rock bands, are tax efficient, not tax evaders) and perhaps agree to disagree about the effectiveness of celebrity charitable missions (some may be heartily sick of hearing his opinions, but Bono uses his personal time and the platform of his fame and a considerable portion of his own wealth to very actively support and promote third world charitable initiatives), then maybe we could remember that, bottom line, U2 are a rock band, writing songs to express themselves as best they can, and performing around the world for an audience that loves them.
You might see a more thrilling gig in a local pub (I have seen many), and you might be more touched by one man with an acoustic guitar in a club (it has happened to me), and you may well prefer music that is more lateral, extemporised, simple, complex, whatever. But nobody does stadium entertainment like this.
I hung on till the last note of the final encore at the Stadio Olimpico, and there was no visible movement towards the exits, none of the usual trickle of early escapees determined to beat the rush. Instead, audience and band remained locked together in the moment. It was as if every last drop of this extraordinary experience was being savoured to the full. The roar as they finally left the stage was deafening, even louder than the show that preceded it. On their own terms, and with their own crowd, U2 are impossible to beat. On Saturday night in Rome, for 89,000 fans, this really was the greatest show on earth.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/neilmccormick
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