U2’s Flight to Now (Turbulence Included)

U2's "Innocence and Experience" tour begins May 14 in Vancouver, British Columbia. From left, Adam Clayton, Bono, Larry Mullen Jr. and The Edge. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — It was definitive arena rock, loud and clear, filling Pacific Coliseum here with surging sound. The Edge blared a distorted two-chord guitar riff, Larry Mullen Jr.’s tom-toms and cymbals landed hard on the backbeat, Adam Clayton’s bass throbbed down below, and Bono was unleashing “woo-oohs” in exultant falsetto. U2 has taken over the coliseum for a month of full-scale rehearsal to assemble its “Innocence and Experience” tour, which starts at Rogers Arena here on May 14, and the band was charging through “Elevation.” The stage was an austere geometry of fluorescent tubes; the song was triumphant. “Wow, that’s four years since we played that?” Bono said as the last chord faded. “Not bad!”

U2, the Irish band that released its debut album in 1980, is about to test its place in the present. Because Apple gave away millions of copies of U2’s 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence” — its 13th studio album and its first since “No Line on the Horizon” in 2009 — the band has no way to gauge the album’s impact through conventional measures of sales. The album also faced a furious online backlash from nonfans who resented it showing up in their music libraries or iCloud as “purchased,” even though it was free. Until it performs the songs on tour, U2 won’t know for sure whether anyone paid close attention to their work. “The idea that there may be a whole swath of audience out there that don’t yet know they like the band is really turning us on,” Bono said. “It makes us want to go out and find them if they’re there.” He paused. “They may not be there.”

The “Innocence and Experience” tour scales down to arenas after U2’s gigantic “360° Tour” in 2009-2011 — a tour that sold out stadiums worldwide with a huge, flashy, edifice of a stage. The new tour uses high-resolution video and takes a radical new approach to arena sound; it’s technologically savvy and determined to be intimate, and the Apple backlash apparently didn’t affect it. The tour has sold 98 percent of the 1.2 million available tickets for its 68 concerts, including sellouts for its entire European stretch and, in New York City, for the first six of eight shows at Madison Square Garden, starting July 18. But U2 hopes to stir more than loyalty and eagerness for oldies.

“Songs of Innocence” has a dual and sometimes contradictory mandate. It aims for mass pop impact with songs full of individual, local details and memories. U2’s confidence was shaken by the response to “No Line on the Horizon.” Despite the international barnstorming of the “360°” tour, “No Line on the Horizon” didn’t yield the hit single that U2 has always prized: songs like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” that merge popularity with an implied sense of high-minded solidarity.

So the band set out to discipline its songwriting, building from acoustic-guitar basics rather than the sonic experiments of “No Line on the Horizon”; it also chose younger-generation producers. Yet the new album’s lyrics steer away from simple, teen-oriented rock, often looking back. “We wanted to think that we could make songs that were contemporary to what radio plays now, but in reality we come from a different place,” Mr. Clayton said. “We have to write from the perspective of that journey, that 35-year journey.”

The band remains nonplussed by what Bono now calls the “difficult birth” of “Songs of Innocence.” At the time, band members say, it seemed like a way to reach listeners as directly as possible. “Just to puncture public consciousness at this time is really, really hard, so we were trying to think of ways that would get our album through to people,” the Edge said backstage. “The prospect of putting it out and have it just disappearing down a rabbit hole, which seems to happen to so many albums now — that would be soul-destroying.”A month after the release, Apple announced that 26 million people had downloaded the entire album. But what U2 and Apple considered a gift — Apple paid Universal to give away the album — was treated by a fast-reacting blogosphere as spam, an intrusion into personal devices and an overbearing exercise of power by a self-important rock band and a technology corporation. U2 issued a partial apology in a video interview on Facebook, in which Bono described the album release as “a drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we’d poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.” Apple offered a one-click way to delete the album.

Now, Bono reflected: “I think Apple and we got a lot of the backlash that was headed to Big Tech for knowing too much about us. But in fact, Apple is not interested in every search you ever made — it’s only interested in your music, so it’s not fair to tar them with that brush. And as a person who’s been a lifelong member of Amnesty International, of all human-rights crimes I think that this kind of unwanted mail, if it’s at the top of your list or even halfway up it, your life is really fantastic.”

Kevin Weatherly, senior vice president for programming at CBS Radio and program director of KROQ in Los Angeles, predicted: “The tour is going to spark a lot of interest. When all is said and done people are going to revisit the album. Quality wins out.”

Despite the giveaway, sales of the physical “deluxe edition” version of the album, which added a few songs and arrived in October, did land it in the Billboard Top 10. Nielsen SoundScan has tabulated sales of 101,000 copies of “Songs of Innocence.” But further promotion for the album was derailed in November, just before U2 was about to start a weeklong residency on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and announce the tour it had been planning since 2013. That was when Bono had a bicycle accident in Central Park that fractured his eye socket, his shoulder, his elbow and his left hand. “I really used to think that my head was harder than any surface it came in contact with, and I don’t anymore,” Bono said backstage. “I didn’t come off a Harley-Davidson. I came off a push bike and smashed myself to bits. There is no glory here.”
Onstage in the coliseum, Bono worked the space with the assurance of a longtime frontman, often using his left hand to grasp the microphone or to point a finger skyward. But he is still recovering. “It feels like I have somebody else’s hand,” he said backstage. Pointing to his curled fourth finger and pinky, he said, “I can’t bend these, and this” — he pointed to another part of his hand — “is like rigor mortis. But they say that nerves heal about a millimeter a week, so in about 13 months I should know if it’s coming back.” He gestured to his forearm and elbow. “It’s all numb here, and this is titanium,” he said. “The shoulder’s better, the face is better.”

He held up his hand again. “But this is the hard bit because I can’t play guitar,” he said, then glanced at the other band members. “They don’t seem to mind,” he said with a half-grin.
Last week, U2 was exploring its new arena setup as its production team tried out visuals and effects, followed by meetings that dissected every possibility: A string section for ballads? Video images or color fields? How to pare down a sprawling set list? Bono did most of the talking, but it was obvious that U2 was determined to work by consensus, weighing each idea respectfully. “The songs are the boss. They tell us what to do and they tell everyone in this building what to do,” the Edge said during a dinner meeting. “We’ve just got to unlock what the songs are asking and telling us what to do.”

The initial idea was to work up two entirely different concerts, but U2 worried about leaving out staples or having fans think they’d gotten the second-best show. As of last week, it planned instead to have a relatively fixed first half and a varying second one — separated, for the first time on a U2 tour, by an intermission. The band is also planning to work the entire room. Running nearly the length of the coliseum floor was U2’s triple platform: a large rectangular stage (a strip of which could light up as “I” for Innocence), a smaller round stage (“e” for experience) and, between them, a walkway that’s wide enough to become a third stage, sometimes sandwiched between LED video screens. “Here they are in an arena, and we want to land them in the audience’s lap,” said Es Devlin, the production designer, who has also done tours by Kanye West and Lady Gaga.
The tour’s most striking innovation isn’t immediately obvious. U2 has moved its sound system to arena ceilings: an oval of 12 speaker arrays that sends the music downward evenly everywhere in the arena. When I walked all around the coliseum as the band played, the music was uniformly transparent and strong, the volume constant from front to back. “If you’re trying to blast sound the length of the venue from the stage, the venue sometimes wins and you get mud,” the Edge said. “With this, you don’t have to have it so loud — you’re getting good quality sound from something that’s much closer to you than normal.”
The band calls the walkway the divider stage because that’s what it does midway through the concert — turning into a barrier that separates the audience completely. The division is part of the concert’s underlying narrative, a passage from innocence to experience inflected by Irish memories. “Songs of Innocence” is U2’s most specifically autobiographical album; its titles include “Cedarwood Road,” where Bono grew up, and “Iris,” named after his mother, who died when he was young. At the start of the concert, the band is illuminated by a lone swinging light bulb, as Bono was in the room in 10 Cedarwood Road where he started to play music. There’s another idea as well, Bono explained: “After all the scale and sculpture of ‘360,’ to begin the next tour with only a single light bulb.”
The concert’s bleak midpoint — “the end of the innocence,” Bono calls it — is “Raised by Wolves,” a song from the album about a terrorist car bombing in Dublin that killed 33 people on May 17, 1974. “We grew up in a culture where random terrorism was a horror. It’s now part of everyday life worldwide,” said Gavin Friday, one of Bono’s childhood friends who led the post-punk band the Virgin Prunes in the 1970s, and who has long worked with U2 on staging. At the coliseum, Mr. Friday and a sound engineer were assembling an audio collage of explosions, speeches and news reports around the 1974 bombing. “The way the album was released, Apple overshadowed the whole thing, so the album was never really listened to,” he said bluntly. “I was told to make the song really real.”

At the intermission, Bono said, half-seriously, “people will walk out into the aisles not buying T-shirts but having counseling, and wondering, ‘Where did the fun go?’ ” The second half of the concert breaks down the divide and, true to U2’s past, promises healing and love. “When we undo that division, we’ve got to really glue them together,” Bono said.
Backstage at the coliseum was a warren of activity: construction, video programming, sound editing, catering, a rehearsal room with another set of instruments. An HBO crew was shooting a tour documentary. And there was one more curtained nook: recording, with a mobile studio setup. There the next U2 album, “Songs of Experience,” is taking shape.

During the enforced downtime after his accident, Bono had been writing songs, sometimes with a guitarist to play the chords he couldn’t. “At the very end of an album you’re at the height of your powers in terms of writing, arranging and performing,” the Edge said. “It’s a shame that you have to stop then and start the other phase of what we do, which is playing live. This time we haven’t really stopped. Bono is trying to capitalize on that momentum and that sharpness.” New producers have been joining the band in Vancouver, including Andy Barlow from the electronic group Lamb, who cued up some of the U2 tracks in progress like “Red Flag Day,” “Civilization” and “Instrument Flying” as Bono enthusiastically sang along with himself. “We’re keeping the discipline on songs and pushing out the parameters of the sound,” Bono said. “They’re very basic earthy things, irreverent. They’re not lofty themes. One of the things that experience has taught us is to be fully in the moment. What’s the moment? Pop music.”
But in the meantime, the band has a tour to mobilize. “On May 14 we’re going to find out if the album worked and if the experiment worked,” Bono said. “If people know those words and feel those songs, then the experiment was right.”

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AdvertisemHe held up his hand again. “But this is the hard bit because I can’t play guitar,” he said, then glanced at the other band members. “They don’t seem to mind,” he said with a half-grin.

Last week, U2 was exploring its new arena setup as its production team tried out visuals and effects, followed by meetings that dissected every possibility: A string section for ballads? Video images or color fields? How to pare down a sprawling set list? Bono did most of the talking, but it was obvious that U2 was determined to work by consensus, weighing each idea respectfully. “The songs are the boss. They tell us what to do and they tell everyone in this building what to do,” the Edge said during a dinner meeting. “We’ve just got to unlock what the songs are asking and telling us what to do.”The tour’s most striking innovation isn’t immediately obvious. U2 has moved its sound system to arena ceilings: an oval of 12 speaker arrays that sends the music downward evenly everywhere in the arena. When I walked all around the coliseum as the band played, the music was uniformly transparent and strong, the volume constant from front to back. “If you’re trying to blast sound the length of the venue from the stage, the venue sometimes wins and you get mud,” the Edge said. “With this, you don’t have to have it so loud — you’re getting good quality sound from something that’s much closer to you than normal.The band calls the walkway the divider stage because that’s what it does midway through the concert — turning into a barrier that separates the audience completely. The division is part of the concert’s underlying narrative, a passage from innocence to experience inflected by Irish memories. “Songs of Innocence” is U2’s most specifically autobiographical album; its titles include “Cedarwood Road,” where Bono grew up, and “Iris,” named after his mother, who died when he was young. At the start of the concert, the band is illuminated by a lone swinging light bulb, as Bono was in the room in 10 Cedarwood Road where he started to play music. There’s another idea as well, Bono explained: “After all the scale and sculpture of ‘360,’ to begin the next tour with only a single light bulb.”

http://www.nytimes.com/

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Another Band Returns! U2 New Album Sessions Started Months Ago

They never could keep out of the limelight for very long. With David Bowie announcing a shock return, Irish rockers U2 have opted to steal some of the returning legend's thunder by revealing to The Sun that they themselves are also back in the studio with a new album on the way. The multi-million selling group haven't been away for nearly as long as the Thin White Duke, or even pop stars Destiny's Child and Justin Timberlake, both who revealed their long-awaited comebacks last week. Their last album was 2009's No Line On The Horizon, whilst the group were touring as recently as 2011.

Nevertheless, the announcement that they're to return will provide yet more fuel for a 2013 that's musical year is already ablaze with anticipation. “U2 have been back and they’re really in fine fettle" the group's front man Bono told The Sun. "They’re mad for it at the moment and they really want to make a new record. And they don’t care if it takes ten years – they don’t care if it never happens again, they just want to get it right." So that wasn't a definite on whether their new album - the group's 13th - would see the light of day this year, but it certainly sounds like they're getting on with it.

For many fans of the band, it'll be a relief to see Bono back behind the microphone doing his day job, with many getting increasingly exasperated at the singer's move into the political arena. The band have also faced accusations of tax evasion in recent years, though it's something that they've always vehemently denied.


http://www.contactmusic.com

"It`s great to be back in Mexico"

                                                  U2 are already in Mexico City

 

Those were the words Adam Clayton shared with the fans that were waiting for him at the Four Seasons Hotel after soundcheck last night.

Some minutes later Bono and  Larry had arrived at St. Regis Hotel in Paseo de la Reforma. The band were rehearsing at Estadio Azteca last night  as some fans witnessed. Some of them twitted they were listening to "Magnificent" and later, "Zooropa", "Even  Better than the Real Thing" and "I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight".

In a few hours U2 will be playing at Estadio Azteca, Mexico City.

http://excelsior.com.mx// pictures via Twitter and Facebook 

Edge on Chile 'More Hopeful Place'

Edge talks about his memories of Chile on the way to soundcheck in Santiago. U2.com has published Edge`s conversation on his way to soundcheck


'It's a much more hopeful place than it was back then, it's a pleasure to be here...'


U2 > News > 'More Hopeful Place'

With all four band members finally in Santiago (Bono and Larry arrived on Thursday), U2 finally took the stage  for what amounted to a slightly abbreviated rehearsal prior to Friday night's concert at the National Stadium. With hundreds of fans already in line and listening from outside -- and many tweeting the whole time -- the band went through a near-complete setlist, but Bono only sang on a handful of songs. Here's what U2 rehearsed , with notes in parentheses as needed:




Return of the Stingray Guitar

Beautiful Day (twice)

I Will Follow

Get On Your Boots

Magnificent

Mysterious Ways

Elevation (Bono)

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

One Tree Hill

Miss Sarajevo

(Fez segue - possibly live vocals?)

City of Blinding Lights

Walk On

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

Moment of Surrender (Bono)

Beautiful Day (Bono)



In addition, fans reported hearing what sounded like guitar bits of "Mothers Of The Disappeared," the piano from "New Year's Day," and the siren sound from "Vertigo" during some rehearsal downtime. The inclusion of "One Tree Hill" would be unusual, since it's typically associated with and performed in New Zealand. But the song does mention Chilean poet Victor Jara Jara, who was murdered in Santiago in 1973.

Bono also reportedly visited earlier today with artist Rene Castro, whom the band met and became friendly with during the Joshua Tree - Rattle And Hum - Lovetown tour era.

Chilean and Argentinian fans were spotted in the rehearsals, among them Mariano Nicotra, who is making the documentary of the band in Argentina and neibouring countries (U2 en Argentina, la película; U2 in Argentina, the movie)


www.u2.com//www.atu2.com

All Set For Auckland

U2.com has posted a short video showing The Claw at  Mt Smart Stadium, Auckland, getting ready for tomorrow´s  big night.

U2 Rehearsing in Auckland

Edge has posted a picture in his Twitter account of (obviously) One Tree Hill, the tallest five volcanic islands which make up Auckland, New Zealand. The song makes reference to their friend and value member of the U2 organization, Greg Carroll who passed away during The Joshua Tree Tour.

"The imaginery of (the song) ´One Tree Hill' superbly evoked the seafaring heritage of Carroll´s Maori ancestors. A spiritual tour de force, it is a hymn of praise and celebration which describes the traditional Maori  burial of their friend on One Tree Hill and links it poetically with themes of renewal and redemption, with the river running, running down to the sea." (Niall Stokes: U2 The Stories Behind Every U2 Song)

The band started rehearsing for their concert at Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland for next Thursday 25th.

There was a  surprise  for the fans huddled at the Beasley Rd entrance as they ran through Scarlet for the first time.

And New Zealand's favourite U2 song also got some time tonight - Bono introducing it by saying to the assembled fans and crew, 'Tonight we just think about these people who are still under the ground and our hopes and our prayers are with them this evening,' referencing the mining disaster on the country's West Coast.


www.u2.com/twitter.com

Only 24 Hours For The Real Thing!!!

Twenty four hours until showtime in Turin.

With rehearsals done for another day at the Stadio Olimpico, fans who've been waiting outside the venue are in for a surprise. 

U2 have done lots of things throughout their career, they have tried new musical styles and have reinvented themselves as many times as needed.Do you think it is time for a change of career??

So good to see Larry out!!!

Pizza Delivery Boys suit them!!!

To the surprise of all the fans outside the Stadio Olimpico, the guys delivered pizza to their diehard fans. They reported that Adam got tempted and tried a slice with them!

Magnificent, Amici!!!! 


More pics here.

www.u2.com///www.lastampa.it//www.u2miracle.com(video)

3 Days to Come and It´s Larry Mullen´s Time!!!

U2.com reminds us that  "in three days time  Turin gets to see the return of U2 360°.Rehearsals are underway at the Stadio Olimpico... and  Larry Mullen Jr  is on the drums..."





Meanwhile Bono shows us how well he has recovered holding up a very young fan.

He was interviewed by the Italian newspaper La Stampa where he mentions that U2  have 25 songs which are ready and they are working on four projects:"an ambient album, Songs of Ascent", "a rock album, a "club music" album, "the soundtrack of Spiderman, the musical debuting on Broadway in November" )as close as we can understatd Italian).

www.u2.com//www.atu2.com///www.lastampa.it

4 Days ...

U2.com reports that the band is in Turin rehearsing for the show to come.



Hundreds of fans have been waiting for the band to appear at the gates of Stadio Olimpico.Some of them have posted that they are rehearsing a couple of new songs, apart from the already mentioned "The Flowering Rose of Glastonbury", fans have been listening to an unknown song which is said to be slow and has a chorus that repeats "I can´t wait any longer for your love", video here.
In this video you can see Adam being nice with fans (as usual).


And Bono meets fans...or a Bono clone?

The final countdown has started and fans are anxiously waiting for a new magnificent show.


www.u2.com//www.u2miracle/www.atu2/

Few Days To Go For The Real Thing

In between rumours, fans´pics, speculations, wedding celebrations and whatnots, U2 is finally rehearsing in Turin.Anxiety has grown high into enormous proportions.

Bono was seen at Alicia Keys wedding celebration in Corsica last Saturday but this fans´pic shows him arriving at Turin.Looking fit and slimmer...

Rehearsal started with the whole band in the Stadio Olimpico. More fans´pics and video here...

And there´s even a video of a new song they were rehearsing, rumours go that it is called "The Flowering Rose Of Glastonbury", probably written for the Festival.




Thanks to the net and diehard fans,  we can have an almost second to second report of our fave band on their way to restart their monumental gig.

www.u2place.com/www.u2.com/www.u2miracle.com

Back on the Road!!!!

Rumours went that they were about to rehearse at Stadio Olimpico. Up to now, they are just that, rumours.There was soundcheck so many Italian websites said and some songs were heard like Pride, City of Blinding Lights and Moment of Surrender, however only Edge had some contact with the fans.
Adam was also seen arriving at the stadium and Bono was interviewed by the Italian TV and  the programme will be aired on Sunday.

This is  a video of the  soundcheck  captured by fans outside the stadium.But it is still unknown if it is really U2.

U2 Gig Prompts Juventus To Switch Grounds For Europa League Clash

Juventus’s third round Europa League tie will move to a different ground next month because U2 are booked to perform at the same venue.

The Italian side are scheduled to play either Shamrock Rovers or Bnei Yehufa at Stadio Olimpico in Turin on August 6. But the Irish band are due to open the latest European leg of their 360 Degree tour at the stadium on the same day. As a result, the clash will now take place nearly 300km away in Modena.

Shamrock Rovers chairman Jonathan Roche told the Irish Times: “Apparently U2 have the stadium booked as part of their European tour so the venue is being moved to Modena no matter who progresses to play Juventus.”

The gig will be the first time U2 have performed live since singer Bono recovered from back surgery.

www.gigwise.com