Why do U2 want to play Glastonbury?

Excellent article by always clear and to the point Neil Mc Cormick. It appeared in The Telegraph. For me it clarifies and supports what many die-hard U2 fans think about U2´s upcoming presentation in Glastonbury.


U2 are to headline Glastonbury this year, on the festival’s 40th anniversary. There has been some predictable scepticism expressed about this from the anti-U2 brigade, although it seems a bit of a no-brainer to me: rock band plays rock festival – let the controversy begin!

Like last year’s headliners, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the Irish group have a long established reputation as outstanding live performers, which has helped make them one of the most consistently popular live attractions of the last few decades. It was probably a given that U2 would get to Glastonbury sooner or later (The Rolling Stones are really the only other band of that stature never to have played the festival), the real question being why has it taken them 26 years.

The answer lies partly in the fact that U2 just don’t need Glastonbury, or any other festival. They are one of the few bands who can pull mass crowds under their own steam on a regular basis anywhere in the world. And, certainly since they ascended to stadium status with The Joshua Tree in 1987, they have put a great deal of care and effort into creating their own unique and artfully integrated live environments. Whenever the issue of Glastonbury has arisen within the U2 camp, the same questions tend to arise, which, if I might paraphrase the succinct directness of their very pragmatic drummer, boil down to: “So, if I understand this correctly, we wouldn’t be playing to our fans, right? It’s not our sound system? It’s not our lighting rig? And we would be doing this for a fee that would be less than we would make on the gate at our own gig? And the point of this would be …?”

So what has changed? Well, Glastonbury itself, for one thing. It has become a kind of something-for-everyone entertainment smorgasbord. There may still be a quasi hippy ideal of the Pyramid stage headliner connecting to the audience in a mystical way as the sun goes down and the lights go up, but you can’t have Radiohead every year. It’s hard to see how having one of the world’s greatest rock bands at the top of the bill is any more unlikely to appeal to the mass of festival goers than other recent headliners, such as Jay Z or Sir Paul McCartney.

But the whole music business has changed, beset by technological challenges that have not just damaged recorded music sales but provided so much choice that it is becoming ever harder to achieve the kind of universal, crossover audience that U2 are used to. They may have a huge fan base, but for them to remain a truly effective force in the wider world of popular music, they need to find new ways to reach out to people who are not, perhaps, their natural listeners.

I imagine the band see Glastonbury as an opportunity to woo the sceptics, that increasingly shrill minority of mockers who loudly denigrate their every move. Bono has the instincts of a perennial suitor, a rock and roll travelling salesman who almost sees it as a matter of pride to be able to sell his wares to the most reluctant customer. The fact is the general public loves them, as their sell out live shows (this year alone, U2 have performed to over 3 million fans and grossed more than $300 million in ticket sales) and multi-million selling albums attest (although their latest ‘No Line On The Horizon’ has been widely perceived as a four million selling flop, low sales by U2’s standards, it is nonetheless amongst the best selling albums in the UK and the world this year). But somehow U2 have never belonged in the rock fraternity that seems to locate Glastonbury as its spiritual home. They have never actually been part of a British rock scene. In earlier days, U2 did play festivals. But never Glastonbury, probably because they were never invited. Coming from Ireland as post-punk rockers in the early 80s, they were critically aligned with the Liverpool new-psychedelic scene of Echo & The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes, but were viewed suspiciously by those bands as over-eager Irish interlopers, rivals rather than peers. And while they have certainly had their champions amongst critics (in the UK, The NME’s influential, polemical and cerebral critic Paul Morley was an unlikely early supporter) they have always had their vocal denigrators, who use them almost as short-hand for naffness: too sincere, to epic, too ambitious to ever be cool. U2 achieved success on their own terms, almost completely outside of the framework of the British music scene, and actually more on an Irish-US axis.

There is still something about playing Glastonbury that is a badge of honour amongst British bands, and I know that is something that appeals to Bono. There is a fraternity that exists in at least the perception of a shared experience, where the bands not only mingle back stage, striking up new friendships and alliances, but are perceived to share the trials of the often embattled festival goers themselves. Indeed, the regularly appalling weather of the worst Glastonbury festivals seems to be a positive bonus in this regard. Bonds are formed in the mud and rain. Bands wear those wellies with pride.

U2 live are a fairly irresistible force. They have passion, commitment, charisma, imagination and the kind of songs you can find yourself singing despite yourself, delivered with the showmanship and warrior skills of a gang who have been playing together all their lives. And with Bono at the helm, they are a band of seducers: put them in front of even the most sceptical crowd and they will do everything in their power to win them over. It may be a greater challenge to perform to an audience that is not, naturally, their own, but if they deliver at Glastonbury, the ripples could spread out into the wider musical community of both fans and artists. For all their success, U2 have been outsiders in the British rock scene. On some level, Glastonbury still represents a kind of inclusion. With these kind of stakes, I think U2 at Glastonbury could turn out to be legendary.


source:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk