by Neil McCormick
It seems fair to assume Bono is a Remainer.
“For us, this is more than a gold star falling off a blue flag,” the Irish rock superstar told London’s O2 Arena this week. “It’s a loss of shared dreams.”
Bono and his band mates in U2 were standing in front of a humongous European flag, in which one of the 12 stars had been filled with a Union Jack, enclosed in a red heart.
“We’ve been touring across Europe,” he said, “and all we hear is that people love the UK and don’t want you to leave.” To drive the point home, U2 played One, written and recorded in a Berlin studio in 1990, with 20,000 British fans taking up its freshly politicised refrain:
“We are one, but we are not the same / We get to carry each other.”
This was a fiercer, rockier U2 than I have seen in decades. It was also the band at their most nakedly political. A lot of people are put off by Bono’s relentless campaigning for various causes – mainly the charities he has supported and founded.
It is the source of the most pervasive criticism of U2, a band who seem to be loathed as much as they are loved. Some people think politics has no place in pop music at all – presumably the same people who thought John Lennon should have stuck to singing love songs, and Bob Marley would have been better served rhapsodising ganja.
For those people, U2’s latest tour will be their most provocative yet. Brexit is not a global humanitarian issue on which all people of sensitive natures can broadly agree, like the Make Poverty History campaign. It is much more narrowly focussed and locally divisive than that. But if you take political positions, you court division. You have to come off the fence where most entertainers delicately balance.
Having watched this group all my life, from their very first show in a Dublin school in 1976, I have seen how flexible they can be in adapting each show to its audience.
But while other bands might tone things down to avoid offending local sensitivities, U2 do the opposite.
The Experience + Innocence tour that U2 brought to the UK was almost entirely different from the production that launched in America six months ago.
On its debut in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the visual imagery touched on Mexican immigration, gun control and the rise of the US alt-right. In London, there was footage of ruined European cities at the end of World War II, the implication being that the European Union was born from these ashes.
When the band reach their home town of Dublin for four concerts next week, the staging and message will undoubtedly change again.
In Tulsa this May, when U2 showed footage of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally from 2017 (in which a counter-protestor was killed) a section of the audience cheered the sight of American neo-Nazis waving swastikas. It was proof that U2 aren’t always playing to the converted.
It reminded me of a gig in Chile in 1998, when U2 played Mothers of the Disappeared – a song implicitly critical of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet – and a section of the crowd started booing the band. “It’s proof to me that a rock ‘n’ roll audience are not lemmings,” Bono later said to me.
“They’re not going to just follow you off the cliff, they’re not going to vote how you tell them to vote. If they don’t agree with you, they will let you know. That doesn’t mean they’re not fans. I was flattered that we weren’t just playing to people who agreed with us.”
Personally, I think it is one of the things rock and roll is built for: to challenge you, to make you feel, to make you think, to make you want to act.
www.telegraph.co.uk
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| Bono performing with U2 at the O2 Arena, London |
“For us, this is more than a gold star falling off a blue flag,” the Irish rock superstar told London’s O2 Arena this week. “It’s a loss of shared dreams.”
Bono and his band mates in U2 were standing in front of a humongous European flag, in which one of the 12 stars had been filled with a Union Jack, enclosed in a red heart.
“We’ve been touring across Europe,” he said, “and all we hear is that people love the UK and don’t want you to leave.” To drive the point home, U2 played One, written and recorded in a Berlin studio in 1990, with 20,000 British fans taking up its freshly politicised refrain:
“We are one, but we are not the same / We get to carry each other.”
This was a fiercer, rockier U2 than I have seen in decades. It was also the band at their most nakedly political. A lot of people are put off by Bono’s relentless campaigning for various causes – mainly the charities he has supported and founded.
It is the source of the most pervasive criticism of U2, a band who seem to be loathed as much as they are loved. Some people think politics has no place in pop music at all – presumably the same people who thought John Lennon should have stuck to singing love songs, and Bob Marley would have been better served rhapsodising ganja.
For those people, U2’s latest tour will be their most provocative yet. Brexit is not a global humanitarian issue on which all people of sensitive natures can broadly agree, like the Make Poverty History campaign. It is much more narrowly focussed and locally divisive than that. But if you take political positions, you court division. You have to come off the fence where most entertainers delicately balance.
 |
| U2 performing their Innocence + Experience show in London |
Having watched this group all my life, from their very first show in a Dublin school in 1976, I have seen how flexible they can be in adapting each show to its audience.
But while other bands might tone things down to avoid offending local sensitivities, U2 do the opposite.
The Experience + Innocence tour that U2 brought to the UK was almost entirely different from the production that launched in America six months ago.
On its debut in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the visual imagery touched on Mexican immigration, gun control and the rise of the US alt-right. In London, there was footage of ruined European cities at the end of World War II, the implication being that the European Union was born from these ashes.
When the band reach their home town of Dublin for four concerts next week, the staging and message will undoubtedly change again.
In Tulsa this May, when U2 showed footage of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally from 2017 (in which a counter-protestor was killed) a section of the audience cheered the sight of American neo-Nazis waving swastikas. It was proof that U2 aren’t always playing to the converted.
It reminded me of a gig in Chile in 1998, when U2 played Mothers of the Disappeared – a song implicitly critical of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet – and a section of the crowd started booing the band. “It’s proof to me that a rock ‘n’ roll audience are not lemmings,” Bono later said to me.
“They’re not going to just follow you off the cliff, they’re not going to vote how you tell them to vote. If they don’t agree with you, they will let you know. That doesn’t mean they’re not fans. I was flattered that we weren’t just playing to people who agreed with us.”
Personally, I think it is one of the things rock and roll is built for: to challenge you, to make you feel, to make you think, to make you want to act.
www.telegraph.co.uk
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