"...we have sensational 360° images from the shows in Denver and Salt Lake City but U2360° FANCAM is going to be covering the rest of the tour as well..."
Edge has posted a photo of Larry in Vancouver; seems taking pictures with his cell phone and twitpic them has become an important activity in the guitarist`s free moments and he`s getting better and better...
U2 joined the celebrations for the 50th Anniversary of Amnesty at the Canad Inns Stadium in Winnipeg, Canada on May 29th.
With a pint of Guinness in hand, Bono made a toast from the stage, “Tonight is Amnesty International’s 50th birthday. Fifty year’s ago Amnesty was formed because two Portuguese students were imprisoned for seven years for raising a toast to freedom… so in their honour - tonight we raise a toast to freedom and might you join us to sing happy birthday to Amnesty International”
The 50,000 strong Canadian crowd joined U2 in a rousing version of “Happy Birthday”.
Burmese pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi appeared on the cylindrical screen above the stage, with a video message for the crowd, “We are not bystanders in our own history, every one of us writes a story that is told… I see it through your support for Burma, for Amnesty International. Where basic human rights are denied or basic human needs are not met, the struggle may be hard, it make take time… but if we demand it, change will come.”
The Winnipeg show was U2’s first concert in Canada on this - the second leg of U2 360° Tour.
And when you're talking concerts, they don’t come any bigger — or better — than U2’s 360° Tour stop at Canad Inns Stadium on Sunday.
The Irish rockers’ first trip to Winnipeg in 14 years was historically humongous on several fronts: Contemporary rock’s biggest band were playing to a sold-out record crowd of 50,000 frenzied fans on the world’s largest and most intricate stage during the biggest-selling, best-attended tour in history (and easily the most feverishly anticipated show in this town for years, with fans flying in from as far away as Japan and camping outside the stadium for good spots).
But all those superlatives, and all that spectacle — the 50-metre-tall alien-spider Claw rigging, the eyepopping light show, the circular stage with its outer ring and moving bridges, the shapeshifting wraparound video screen, the (believe it or not) pre-concert fighter- jet flyovers — would have meant little without songs and showmanship to back it up.
Luckily, U2 were larger than life in that regard too. From the moment they took the stage around 9 p.m. to the strains of David Bowie's Space Oddity — and opened, ironically enough, with Even Better Than the Real Thing — the iconic quartet proved that pound for pound and night for night (including this Sunday, chilly Sunday), they may very well be the greatest live act on the planet.
Bono certainly earned his share of that accolade. Sauntering and bounding around his $35 million playground, the black leather-clad singer was the consummate frontman, energizing the crowd with every rock-star gesture, coaxing them to sing along with every soaring chorus — and winning them over by dismissing the unseasonably cool and breezy conditions.
“We don't feel the cold in Winnipeg,” he assured us. “You're Canadian; we're Irish.”
While Bono was the obvious focal point of the night, the rest of the band weren't playing second fiddle. White-haired (and white-suited) Adam Clayton, like all great bassists, was a study in understated cool, casually strolling and posing while unspooling thick, propulsive lines.
Guitarist The Edge — sporting his trademark skullcap and goatee — was only slightly more animated, focusing his concentration on picking his chiming guitar lines, manipulating them with his vast array of effects and handling backup vocal chores through his headset mic.
And drummer Larry Mullen Jr. — bundled up in a scarf and sweater as he thwacked away on his rotating drum riser — was more Ringo or Charlie than Neil Peart, but efficiently effective at his role: Holding down the centre of the sound (and the centre of the stage) so Bono and Edge can roam where they want and still find their way back.
That would come soon enough. First, the band dished up a handful of hits that literally spanned their career. Real Thing was followed by the rousing 1980 breakthrough I Will Follow (from their debut Boy) and the groovy Get on Your Boots (from their most recent outing No Line on the Horizon).
Then came a soothing Magnificent, a hypnotically funky Mysterious Ways, a fuzzed-up Elevation that included a "whoo-hoo" singalong refrain, and a clanging version of Until the End of the World, which ended with Bono and Edge joining hands across the gap of two moving walkways.
But the real fun began when Bono started to tweak and twist songs, sometimes on the fly.
He tossed a bit of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? into End of the World. One included a verse of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Walk On closed with You’ll Never Walk Alone. I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight (which allowed Mullen to leave his kit and slap a djembe while strolling the circular walkway) ended up sporting multiple personalities, with portions of Discotheque, Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime and Psycho Killer, among others. Of course, nothing hit home quite as solidly as Beautiful Day, which found Bono quoting Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, and Vertigo, which was spiked with BTO’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (earlier in the night, he pulled a young woman out of the audience to help him read the lyrics).
Fun as it was to follow his musical detours, it was hard not to become fixated on the production.
While it didn’t quite live up to its stated goal of being so big it made the stadium seem small, it couldn't fail to impress the bejeezus out of you. For instance: The video screen came alive during Miss Sarajevo, slowly stretttccchhhing downward from the underside of the Claw until it reached the stage and encircled the band. It raised up enough during City of Blinding Lights to reveal the musicians playing in lighted suits while the fully illuminated Claw and spire throbbed and flashed, with giant spotlights at the top shining upward to the heavens.
It was simply one of the most stunning rock-show spectacles I have witnessed — and I’ve watched Jimmy Page playing his Les Paul with a bow inside a giant green laser pyramid.
Twice.
From there, U2's creative arc ended more or less the way they had begun: With more hits, from the crushing Vertigo and the monumental Sunday Bloody Sunday to the anthemic One and the grand Where the Streets Have No Name.
For the second encore, Bono came out swinging on a microphone that was set inside a glowing red ring and suspended from the rigging. At any other show, it would have been a highlight; here it was only the third or fourth-coolest moment of the night.
Not that anybody complained about it — nor about the fact they skipped their usual closer Moment of Surrender (maybe the group weren’t quite as immune to the cold as they maintained; it was pretty nippy by that point).
By the time they wrapped with With or Without You, they’d supplied 130 minutes of the most powerful, passionate and stylishly presented rock this city has seen for some time. Or is likely to see for some time.
Yep, it’s all downhill from here. Even though it’s only May — and we’ve still got a slew of arena-sized acts coming down the pipe this summer — it seems fairly obvious that barring an unexpected visit from the likes of The Stones, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd or Bruce Springsteen, this baby was concert of the year. Maybe even concert of the decade.
That garish four-legged thing: they call it the claw, or the spaceship, or -- less fantastically -- the structure.
No matter what the name, the claw is, at 50 metres tall, the largest piece of rock 'n' roll furniture ever built. It is a looming aberration of olive-green skin pulled taut over scaffold bones and pierced by a spear of light.
t serves a purpose: its four talons shelter the stage and up to 2,000 fans, diehards who camped out for up to four days for the honour of being wrapped by its lurid embrace.
"The band wanted to get that intimate feeling," tour producer Jake Berry told a crowd of press at the Canad Inns Stadium on Saturday, as more than 100 workers scurried about the claw's skeleton. "If we build a big structure, then we can get the stadium to feel small."
The claw is predatory like that. It is arachnid, poised to swallow whole stadiums. It is also audacious, a fever dream pulled from the imaginations of four teen boys from the rough end of Dublin who dreamed they could be the biggest rock band in the world. Thirty-five years later, the echo of that reverie drove more than 50,000 people into Canad Inns Stadium on Sunday night for what was to be the biggest concert Winnipeg has ever hosted.
U2 360. The two-year tour is on track to rake in $700 million by the time it wraps up in July -- the most lucrative rock 'n' roll tour the world has ever seen.
That dream wasn't always so robust. The band woke up once, in 1989. That was when Bono, a.k.a. Bono Vox, a.k.a. Paul Hewson, stood on a stage near Dublin and told a stunned crowd it was time for U2 to "go away, and dream it all up again."
Fans feared they were being given the news of U2's demise. But having survived a bruising couple of years touring on The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, what U2 really meant was: You want to see rock stars? Fine. We'll show you some bloody rock stars.
What followed: the electro shockwave of Achtung Baby. Leather, sunglasses, the brazen satire of Zoo TV. Bono as the Fly, Bono as a salivating demon, Bono as a caricature of everything the band, back in their days jamming in drummer Larry Mullen Jr.'s family kitchen in Dublin, didn't want to be. And they brought tens of millions of fans in on the joke. They would pretend to be the most arrogant rock stars; and fans would pretend to believe it. But the truth was closer to the heart.
"U2 makes us feel as though they like us. Like we mean something," said one woman, No. 75 in the crush of fans who lined up as early as 5 a.m. for a chance to surround the circular stage for which the tour is named. "And people like to be liked."
The dream sharpened and gained shape outside the Burton Cummings Theatre over the weekend. But it finally became lucid at about 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, under the watchful talons of the claw.
Denver rockers The Fray had wrapped up their 30-minute set, the floor was an ocean of anxiously bobbing heads. A screen wrapped around the claw's heart broadcast global facts: the time in Tel Aviv, the number of babies born this year, the tallest building in "Winipeg" and another fact about the, um, "state" of Manitoba.
Critics on Twitter scoffed; fans seemed inclined to give producers a pass. After all, dreams are always marked by idiosyncracies. Those would not be the ones that woke the dreamers. "Hello Winnipeg, with two Ns," Bono quipped, after leaping onto the stage while Edge struck out the opening chords of Even Better Than The Real Thing.
The crowd roared its approval -- and tens of thousands of hands raised towards the stage.
The illusion that you might touch them: This is what U2 360 Tour set out to achieve, and Bono, his slight frame swathed in sleek leather, set out to build it. Strutting out along the circular outer stage that ringed 'round the claw, Bono played to the camera as much as the crowd -- recognizing that with the bandmates' every shake and shimmy broadcast over the giant video screen, those two things were one and the same. As he purred the verses to Elevation, he grabbed a camera and pressed his cheek close to the lens; his rakish stubble could be spotted from the nosebleeds.
In the first half of the concert, the rig stayed static while the band cavorted through some of their greatest hits, including the elegant Magnificent -- one of two songs in the first half of the set drawn from their 2009 No Line On The Horizon, the album to which the tour is attached.
And they had tricks up their sleeve, too: As dusk fell, Bono pulled a trembling fan from the floor on stage, wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and asked her to read a passage from a piece of paper. She did, and the words suddenly became familiar: "And she looked at me with her big brown eyes and said... you ain't seen nothin' yet."
But none of us had seen nothin' yet, not really. There were greater things in store -- including things for which a newspaper's press time came far too early to see. Just before 10 p.m., as the sun slipped below the horizon, the claw's real beauty rolled out. In the fresh darkness, the video screen stretched downwards like a flickering funnel cloud; beneath this veil, the band crashed into overdrive.
And the fans, those 50,000 fans who made this quite likely the biggest show Winnipeg has ever hosted, raved right along with them. They stamped their feet to the blazing beats of Vertigo, shaking the upper deck and giving a roaring backdrop to Bono's chorus cry; as Edge picked out the cutting opening riff to Sunday Bloody Sunday, the stadium exploded, hanging on a lyric that was not just a plea, but a promise: tonight, they could be as one.
After all, isn't that the goal to which all humanitarians aspire? At press time, the singer was paying tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi. "She lived for the last 20 years under house arrest in her native country of Burma... but she's out now," Bono said, before tilting back his head and shouting a gospel call into the microphone. "Rejoice."
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 30, 2011 D1
U2`s last performance in Winnipeg was in 1997 when they arrived in the city with the PopMart
Tour.Bono marked the occasion with a few tributes to the local music scene. He sang snippets
from both Neil Young and Bachman Turner Overdrive during the show and, rather than a poem
before "Beautiful Day," he has a fan read the lyrics to BTO's "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet."
'People have been saying it's cold? No, not at all!' mused Bono, as a huge Canadian audience cheered in agreement. ' I don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re Canadian…we’re Irish… and we have some real men in the band, you know who you are...
'Fourteen years ago we played a show here we will never forget. It's a privilege for us to come and play for you.
'What are you going to play for us The Edge?
The Edge had prepared a number called All I Want Is You and with its opening bars, Winnipeg could hardly have been hotter. Earlier, planes from the Canadian airforce aerial team The Snowbirds had offered us three dazzling fly-bys in the minutes before the show, including one which spectacularly circled the stadium, but it was Even Better than The Real Thing that signalled the arrival of the main space attraction of the evening.
'Hands in the air Winnipeg,' announced Bono, as the 360° space ship signalled take-off. 'That's 'Winnipeg' with two 'n' 's.' he added, referencing an earlier on-screen typo.
It's always good to be in Canada and although it was one of the coldest nights of the tour, the threatened rain never materialised and the warm reception of this capacity audience kept the temperature rising all night long.
'Winnipeg smells like Roses,' said Bono, holding up a bunch of flowers, handed to him towards the end of Until The End of the World. ' Flowers for Damascus, Flowers for Peace...'
Special mention to The Fray, who are playing support on these opening North American dates. 'Thanks to The Fray for coming on this adventure with us. They told us they'd take us out for dinner last night and stuck us with the bill. But its cool....'
Tonight will live long in the memory for being the fiftieth anniversary of Amnesty International and focussing on ' a beautiful spirit' who symbolizes the human longing for freedom.
'Aung San Suu Kyi is to Asia what Nelson Mandela is to Africa,' rapped Bono, after an elegiac version of Scarlet. 'She has lived without her freedom in Burma for most of the last twenty years, under house arrest.
'Her crime was to believe the election result that made her leader of that country. But she’s out now and that is a very special thing for this band and for our audience who have campaigned for her release for the past ten years or more. And Amnesty International who campaigned for twenty years.'
'Walk on, walk on What you got they can't steal it No they can't even feel it Walk on, walk on... Stay safe tonight...'
As Walk On closed, Bono recalled the origins of Amnesty, before raising a pint of Guinness in tribute: 'Fifty years ago Amnesty was formed because two Portuguese students were imprisoned for seven years for raising a toast to freedom, so in their honour tonight we raise a toast to freedom and might you join us in singing Happy Birthday to Amnesty International...'
A rousing and moving birthday chorus for Amnesty gave way to 'another special message which was unbelievable to imagine even a year ago.' as onto the huge screens above the stage the iconic face of Aung San Suu Kyi herself appeared, bringing thanks from the people of Burma for the work of Amnesty and of U2 fans in campaigning for freedom in her country.
Only One could follow that and it did before 'Streets', 'Hold Me, Thrill Me...' and finally With or Without You when the cellphones of Winnipeg turned 'this place into the milky way.'
'What a wonderful night, thank you, thank you...'
Setlist
Even Better Than The Real Thing
I Will Follow
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways
Elevation
Until The End Of The World / Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
All I Want Is You
Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet / Beautiful Day / Heart Of Gold
Pride (In The Name Of Love)
Miss Sarajevo
Zooropa
City Of Blinding Lights
Vertigo / You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Crazy Tonight / Discothรจque / Life During Wartime / Psycho Killer / Please
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Scarlet
Walk On / You’ll Never Walk Alone
Happy Birthday
One
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow / Where The Streets Have No Name
Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
With Or Without You
Damian Corless remembers the first time U2 played at Slane Castle.
IT was 1981. The summer soundtrack was ‘Stars On 45’, featuring Beatles songs mushed in a blender and blared out at ear-splitting volume by the new super-pirate Radio Nova.
Every second car windscreen had a sticker boasting ‘I Shot JR’, and Bono was buzzing around his native Glasnevin doing his usual impression of a young man in a great hurry.
This time, however, he really was in a great hurry. In a few hours’ time he was due on stage 20 miles up the road at Slane Castle for the biggest gig of U2's young lives, but before he could go he had to It being the first concert ever staged in the sleepy Boyne backwater, everyone was making it up as they went along.
That included the promoters who were banking on homecomers Thin Lizzy to draw 20,000, and were tickled ever deeper shades of pink as that projected turnout looked like doubling.
Amid all the first night nerves, U2 didn't get their freebie tickets until the last minute. This led to the spectacle that Saturday morning of Bono
kerb-crawling the locality in his weather-beaten Fiat 127, hailing down friends and neighbours to ask if they'd like tickets for the show.
It was a mixed bag of a line-up. Thin Lizzy were the headliners, but they were on the slippery downslope. Hazel O'Connor was top of the pops with the stopwatch ticking down on her 15 minutes of fame.
Sandwiched inbetween, U2 were a work in progress, but with a lustful eye on the future. They were still a long, long way from arriving in that cheery place where everyone knows your name, but at least they'd finally made it past the point where tour promoters abroad were billing them as The U2s, V2 or even VR.
They'd released an album, ‘Boy’, that had crept stealthily up the Billboard Hot 100, and they arrived in Slane hot off a small but perfectly formed American tour.
They opened with a rousing new song ‘With A Shout’, and as the crowd surged forward it really did seem that everyone in the singer's neighbourhood had made the day trip. But Glasnevin was just a pocket of Dublin and Dublin just a pocket of Ireland and it quickly became clear that the vast majority there were Lizzy fans keeping their powder dry for the main attraction.
Testing his growing powers as a Pied Piper, the singer tried to rouse the serried ranks of swiggers, smokers and snoggers on the surrounding hilltop, chiding them: “Up on your feet! This is not Woodstock.”
No, it wasn't Woodstock. It was Ireland on a woozy summer's day and they weren't going to disturb themselves for some cocky upstart.
Whatever about the audience, it quickly became evident that this would be no picnic for U2. They'd picked a bad day to be a work in progress. In the studio, they'd succumbed to the dreaded “difficult second album syndrome” trying to finish their new record ‘October’.
Bono's lyrics had been stolen so the new songs they premiered at Slane were belted out on a wing and a prayer with makey-uppy words. Not that that mattered too much since most of Bono's vocals were scattered to the squalling winds. Add in that The Edge's guitars were wrongly tuned and it was just one of those days.
When some louts started hurling bottles, Bono's frustration seemed to spill over, although he directed his ire rather oddly at “a special sort of people – they're called reporters”.
He fumed: “They find somebody like that guy over there who's throwing the bottles in the air, and then they take a photograph of him and print the photograph. And then you all are throwing the bottles. Do you see what I mean?”
U2's first Slane wasn't the shining triumph they'd hoped for. Their best success at whipping up some audience participation came when they persuaded the crowd to join in a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday To You’ for The Edge's sweetheart Aisling.
When it was done they'd scraped a pass mark for effort, but in the greater scheme of things it was another rung safely negotiated on the ladder to the top.
Three years later, U2 had scaled that ladder to dizzying heights. America was teetering before them, ready to topple given just one more tiny tip. Instead, in the summer of 1984 they were holed up in Slane Castle with visionary producer Brian Eno, intent on finding their European voice on the album they'd call ‘The Unforgettable Fire’.
In mystical tones, Bono likened the acoustics in the castle's stately rooms to those of a cathedral. He pronounced himself pleased at having finally found “a room that has life in itself, a living room”.
IF it seemed that U2 had temporarily turned their gaze from America, America came calling on them at Slane in the guise of Bob Dylan, who played Slane in 1984.
Backstage, armed with a tape recorder, Bono conducted an interview with Dylan that wouldn't have been out of place in ‘Spinal Tap’. After Bono informed Dylan that The Clancy Brothers were “like punk rock”, Bob expressed his admiration for the Irish band “Plankton”.
“Planxty,” Bono corrected him politely. A few sentences later Dylan showed that he'd been paying attention a little, but not a lot, when he asked Bono: “You know Planxty?”
The encounter climaxed with Dylan leading an impromptu singsong of Brendan Behan's ‘The Auld Triangle’, which is as good a place to leave it as any.
Slane Castle, 2001
When U2 finally returned to play Slane in 2001, both the band and the summer fixture had grown almost beyond recognition.
Slane had blossomed into one of the prestige pitstops on the world touring circuit, a tourist attraction in itself, drawing huge crowds from home and abroad to eyeball stellar names, including The Stones, Oasis, REM, Springsteen, Bowie and Queen.
And U2 had long since joined that stellar pantheon, both in terms of fame and of corporate scale.
For the duration of their first Slane performance, they were locked in a battle with the elements, with their equipment and with an indifferent crowd.
When their 200-strong army of technicians, flunkies and caterers set up camp by the Boyne in 2001 for the Slane leg of the Elevation tour, U2 were locked in an ongoing battle with The Rolling Stones for the bragging rights as to who could mount the biggest moneyspinning trek of all time.
U2 leapfrogged The Stones that year with Elevation, and were leapfrogged in 2006 by The Stones' Better Bang excursion, and this year U2 regained first place with their current tour.
Slane 2001 was a bittersweet experience for U2. Bono's father Bob died days before the first of the two shows, bringing a tinge of melancholy to the event.
The second show some days later was the sight and sound of one nation under a groove.
First the multitudes watched on giant screens as the Republic of Ireland football team beat the Dutch to qualify for the 2002 World Cup Finals, and from there, incredibly, the day got even better.
Bono´s (and the band´s )long time friend, Gavin Friday, has just released a new album, called "catholic". It`s his first release after a hiatus of 16 years (his last album was 1995 "Shag Tobacco"). Friday has spent the last decade and a half recording film scores (The Boxer, In America, Get Rich Or Die Trying), collaborating with the likes of Scott Walker and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and hanging out with his old mates in U2 on their 360 world tour. He’s gone through some serious personal turmoil since we last saw his name atop an album cover—health issues, the death of his father, and the end of his marriage—and catholic bears all of that hurt in brave and unexpected ways. Operatic in both scope and execution, the album has all the pomp and melancholy of a royal wedding: cellos and violins careen gorgeously, electric guitars soar and dive, and Friday’s voice—a deep, sensual/sinister purr that douses every word with more sex, smoke, and danger than your average Dublin tavern—croons and growls more evocatively than ever before.
“Able” starts us off with a propulsive beat and anthemic synth textures, building to a soaring, keyboard heavy chorus with lines like “I want to be able to hold my own” carrying some extra emotional weight. Echoing Adam ‘N’ Eve’s “Falling Off The Edge of the World”, “Land On The Moon” features a duet with Amy Odell over a lush, hushed bed of acoustic guitars and soft piano chords. Producer Ken Thomas lends a sinister, chilly ‘80s synth-pop vibe to “A Song That Hurts”, featuring the long-awaited return of Friday’s wrenching falsetto and enough haunting background vocals to give you shivers. “The Only One” builds to a majestic swell with its mild electronic beat and dramatic string arrangement, while “Blame” (an ode to Gavin’s late father) relishes gloomily in its mournful cello arrangement, resembling the soundtrack to a long abandoned ghost town saloon.
“The Sun & The Moon & The Stars” feels like a long-lost Cocteau Twins outtake, while the simultaneously sorrowful and uplifting “It’s All Ahead Of You” rises out of a gorgeous chamber melody into a life affirming chorus of blasting trumpets and boisterous violins. Though “Perfume” resurrects the glam rock swagger of past Gavin Friday records, we close out with the one-two funereal punch of “Where’d Ya Go? Gone” and “Lord I’m Coming”, the latter a riveting orchestral hymn of symphonic grandeur that rises into a grandiloquent climax of buzzy synths and sweeping strings.
Though the touch of long-time collaborator Maurice Seezer goes sorely missed, Gavin Friday and new right-hand man Herbie Macken have crafted a consistently elegant, intricately arranged, and stunningly beautiful album well worth the long wait. Often threatening to melt your heart, catholic is a continually rewarding piece of work—a towering achievement of classical grandiosity and modern elusiveness. Leave it up to a sly, mildly-reclusive Irishman to deliver one of 2011’s unexpected master works.
Gavin was interviewed by Mojo for July´s edition.Click on picture to enlarge.
An album worths listening with great melodies and sung with deep voice and enchanting rhythms.
“Did you know that best is yet to come”, he asks in one of his songs, by listening to his new album we may think the best is here to stay.
Bono signing autographs at the Burton Cummings Theatre
The band arrived in Winnipeg and went straight into rehearsals at the Burton Cummings Theatre.
Outside the theatre Bono told fans that they were here filming a documentary about Achtung Baby with Davis Guggenheim and he was pleased to see they'd brought the Irish weather to Winnipeg.
Adam and Bono signed autographs and met with fans who'd been waiting outside since early morning.
Adam, signing autographs at the Burton Cummings Theatre
The Claw in Edmonton where the band will play next Wednesday
Fender Custom Shop has sent out a pic of the new bass for Adam Clayton, via Twitter .
Second new bass Adam will play in the last shows of the monumental 360ยบ Tour.
Bono and the Edge's 'Spider-Man' Cast Recording Due in JuneThe cast recording of Bono and the Edge's musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will hit stores on June 14th. The disc will include 14 songs penned by the U2 duo for the recently revised show, which is set to open officially on Broadway on the same day. The cast album was produced by longtime U2 collaborator Steve Lillywhite, who was brought into the show earlier this year. The songs will feature Reeve Carney in the role of Peter Parker, Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane, T.V. Carpio as Arachne, and Patrick Page as the Green Goblin. They'll be backed by a 20-member orchestra.
The show recently restarted after a three-week hiatus following the firing of Julie Taymor as director and with rejiggered music and a smoothed-out script. It officially opens on June 14.
