The Friendship Ball:Edge plays with Brian Ferry

The Edge made a guest appearance with Bryan Ferry Thursday night in London. It was part of The Friendship Ball, an event that helped to raise money for cancer programs and research at Crumlin Hospital in Dublin and Great Ormond Children's Hospital in London. The photo at right is from Ferry's Facebook page and says that Edge and Ferry are performing "Carrickfergus." Another artist, Darren Holden, also posted a photo with The Edge last night.

http://www.atu2.com/

BONO'S OLD HAUNT COMES BACK TO LIFE FOR SELF HELP AFRICA BASH

Tosca, one of Dublin's hippest restaurants of the 1990s is set to return to the capital for one night only on Friday October 26, to raise support for Self Help Africa.

Owned and operated by Norman Hewson, brother to U2’s Bono, the regulars at the Suffolk Street eaterie included artists Jim Fitzpatrick and Guggi, author John Banville and singers Gavin Friday and Liam O’Maonlai, among many more. A pit-stop for artists performing in the capital, celebrity patrons included Bob Dylan, Naomi Campbell, Bruce Springsteen and of course, U2.

In what promises to be a unique star-studded event, over 25 original staff are coming back – from places as far flung as LA, London and Limerick! – to reunite under the leadership of Norman Hewson and Head Chef, Aongus Hanly. They will be joined for this one-off night by regular patrons for a special 'pop-up' event in the Smock Alley Theatre, Temple Bar, which will also feature top class entertainment. Among the performers so far confirmed are Eric McGrath, Lady Vada and members of the cast of Raw. Tosca was also a regular place for Hot Press book launches, with Philomena Lynott and Jackie Hayden's original 1995 edition of My Boy, Eamonn McCann'sWar and Peace and Liam Fay's best selling Beyond Belief all launching there.

With a menu created specially by Hanly, currently of Caviston’s, an array of favourites will be served. All ingredients are being provided by Irish farmers and supporters of Self Help Africa. With performances by former Tosca patrons and some very special guests, as well as items for auction from the Tosca archives, the event will be limited to 200 guests and will sell on a first come first served basis.

This fundraiser is the flagship event of Self Help Africa’s World Food Day celebration activities, keeping in line with this year's theme of “Agricultural Cooperatives - Key to Feeding the World” and Self Help Africa’s work in rural communities helping households grow more food, diversify farming activities, access markets for their produce, and ultimately achieve a secure future.

http://www.hotpress.com

'Music Is Beyond Politics': When U2 Went to Bosnia in 1997

Fifteen years ago, U2 brought music and a message to post-war Sarajevo.

Fifteen years ago this weekend, on Sept. 23, 1997, pop music changed the world.

Well, briefly at least. On a Tuesday night in a bomb-scarred Olympic stadium, Irish rock band U2 played the first major pop concert to take place in the recuperating city of Sarajevo since the end of the Bosnian war, in hopes of erasing the ethnic tensions that had overwhelmed Yugoslavia, if only for the duration of a two-act set.

"If there's any message, it's a simple one, a banal one," frontman Bono explained to CNN. "It's that music is beyond politics."

Famously, Bono's ballooning humanitarian efforts would later earn him a reputation—not a good one—as a "messianic do-gooder" and an overambitious, globe-trotting collector of vanity projects. In 2002, the cover of Time would ask cheekily, "Can Bono Save the World?," and in 2009, the Daily Mail complained that while Bono was certainly passionate about relieving Third World debt, he acted "as if he has the entire solution to it in his leather trousers." But U2 hadn't come to Sarajevo with plans to save the nation or reverse the course of history. Bringing a good time to some young people for a few hours was good enough.

Sarajevo had emerged only two years earlier from the longest siege in modern military history. Serb aggressors had surrounded the city for 44 months between March of 1992 and December of 1995, starving and mistreating its citizens. For three and a half years, Sarajevans were dependent on food and fuel trafficked into the city through a kilometer-long underground tunnel, continually taking cover from the hundreds of mortar shells that fell on the city every day. According to war reporter Charlotte Eagar,

"Old ladies staggered home, hauling prams and homemade go-carts laden with plastic containers of water. ... Unable to collect firewood, people burned first their furniture and then their books. And yet they died during the brutal mountain winters. ... Both the shelling and the cold were indiscriminate in meting out death."

By the time the war ended in 1995, more than 10,000 Bosnians had been killed in Sarajevo.

Bono had visited the country shortly afterward, and promised to return and "bring the band along next time." The 1997 concert was a fulfillment of that promise.

By then, the once-magnificent city—the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics—that had become a death camp almost overnight had started rebuilding itself. Sarajevo's zoo was being restored, and arts patrons swooped in to furnish the wounded city with musical instruments and library books. Guerrilla artists had begun beautifying the streets with "Sarajevo roses"—red resin poured into the scars and divots made by mortar explosions. So at the insistence of Sarajevo organizers, this would not be a small charity concert—rather, Sarajevo would be a full-scale, ticket-selling tour stop on the band's global PopMart tour.

The 60 trucks carrying U2's massive soundstage had to navigate narrow mountain roads to even get to Sarajevo; nevertheless, a team of 450 assembled the stage and sound system in Koševo Stadium.

"It's just a miracle that we're here, really," said guitarist The Edge to a swarm of reporters that greeted the band upon their arrival. "The fact that we can come and put on not just a concert but the same concert that we put on in Paris and New York and London [is] maybe a symbol for the people of Sarajevo that things are getting back to normal."

The night of the concert, special trains brought young people from former Yugoslav republics Croatia and Slovenia to Sarajevo. According tonews reports from the week of, Slovenes were informed that "they would not require a visa for the evening."
And for two hours that night, in a stadium surrounded by NATO troops, a sold-out crowd of 45,000 people from all over the former Yugoslavia bathed themselves in neon light, bounced along to both the classics and the manufactured synth U2 considered high art at the time, and kind of felt normal again.
The U2 of 1997 wasn't quite as suited to act as a symbol of hope for a discouraged city as, say, the U2 of 2002. The PopMart tour was a biting parody play on shallow materialism; Bono and his bandmates tramped around the stage in shiny satin capes and wore flesh-toned shirts with eye-popping foam muscles bulging out of them. In other words, it was a weird moment for U2. The PopMart tour, sadly, couldn't offer Bosnians the same simple, mighty images of resilience that an older, wiser U2 would later offer heartsick Americans in the months after 9/11.
That's not to say, though, that the concert for Sarajevo was without its moments of high-gloss emotional splendor. During the Luciano Pavarotti-assisted ballad "Miss Sarajevo," Bono led 21-year-old Inela Nogić onstage by the hand. Nogić had become the tragic, lovely face of the war—and the inspiration for the song—when she won a Sarajevo beauty pageant in 1993 during the siege. As she was crowned, Nogić and a dozen other swimsuit-clad, shrapnel-scarred teenagers unfolded a banner: "Don't let them kill us," it read, in English.


"[Holding a beauty pageant] was kind of a crazy thing to do during a war," she told the Associated Press earlier this year. "But we tried to live a normal life. It was some kind of a defense mechanism we all had." According to the AP, Nogić ducked shells and snipers just to get to and from the contest with her crown.
In the years after U2's concert for Sarajevo, inter-ethnic aggressions would flare up again in the Balkan region. War erupted less than a year later in Kosovo, and though Sarajevo itself is flourishing today, the celebrated "normalcy" that 1997 wanted so desperately to usher in was fleeting at best. NATO forces would remain in Bosnia through 2004, and European Union peacekeepers are still stationed there today. Ethnic Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians still uncomfortably share territory, and many would prefer not to. As Aida Cerkez of the Associated Press puts it, "Everybody [still] wants what they wanted back in 1992. So Bosnia today is not at war, but certainly not at peace."
So today, maybe it's best to think of U2's historic concert as just a kind gesture for a long-suffering people. PopMart didn't undo the horrors of war or bring long-lasting peace to Bosnia so much as it brought a happy distraction to some people who'd been through a lot.


http://www.theatlantic.com

How The Edge Created a Classic Guitar Sound

Not many people can boast about being in the same band for thirty-five years, with the same three guys you met in school. But that is the case for Dave Evans, or The Edge as he is more commonly known. The U2 guitarist started playing with Bono, Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton while at the Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, Ireland. The four pretty much learned to play their instruments after forming the band. The Edge and his brother Dick, who initially played with the band, had actually built their own guitar that they would take turns playing. It took a while for The Edge to develop what is now the classic U2 guitar sound. In the beginning his playing style was more blues-rock oriented, like that of fellow Irishman Rory Gallagher, which can be heard in the early U2 song “Street Mission,” that was scrapped before time came to record their first album.


The Edge would acquire the first piece of the puzzle to his guitar sound when he went on vacation with his family to New York City in 1978. He ended up buying a 1976 Gibson Explorer Limited Edition. The Edge paid $248.40 for the Explorer (there's a picture of the receipt in U2's autobiography U2 By U2), which was most likely a substantial amount of money for the young guitarist in those days. But today it's safe to say that it is a priceless instrument, considering its significance in creating U2's sound and it's use on countless recordings.

When The Edge put up his 1975 cream Gibson Les Paul for auction in 2007 it brought in $240,000, and while that guitar had been used by him on tour since 1985 it still does not even come close in terms of importance to the U2 sound, since the Explorer was around from the very beginning. The Edge talked about buying the guitar, and his band mates reaction to the instrument in the BBC series The Story of the Guitar: “I just picked it up in the store and it felt so great, this is it. I actually went in to buy, I think I was going to buy a Les Paul, but I just fell in love with this guitar. I brought it back and I was slightly like...it's a little strange looking...are the guys in the band gonna look at it and go 'what?'...there's a few strange looks for the first day, but everyone just loved the sound of it. I think it became like a signature look, no one else was playing Explorers at that point, and so quite soon it became the thing we were famous for. Apart from a few other things obviously.”

The Explorer has taken a bit of a beating from all its years on the road, with one particularly nasty accident, as told by The Edge in The Story of the Guitar “It's had a few accidents over the years. This happened in Radio City about the mid eighties. We were playing a show and the bouncers were particularly heavy in the venue, and there were some kids in the front getting pummeled. So I actually threw the guitar off, sort of to intervene, and stopped it. Bono stopped the show and we got it sorted out, but I came back, picked the guitar up and the head was hanging off. It was totally broken...We got it repaired. I'm not sure it has affected the sound, I couldn't tell the difference when I got it back.” But the repair is quite visible on the back of the neck, since the replacement piece of wood is newer, and has assumed a different color over the years.

The Edge still use his original Explorer to this day, but it has now been relieved from touring duties, and is only used in the studio, explains Dallas Schoo, The Edge's guitar tech, in an interview with MusicRadar: “We finally retired it. It's such an important guitar for recording that I finally convinced him to leave it home. Nothing serious ever happened to it, but it's spent years in the sun, getting rained on - outdoor shows do that. I wanted to nip things in the bud while I could.”

But if you thought any 1976 Explorer would do, you'd be sorely mistaken, as Schoo explains: “The right ones are hard to find because Gibson had two different Explorers in production that year. The ones that were produced from June through December had a thin neck, but the models that were produced during the first part of that year had a thick baseball bat neck. Those are the ones Edge prefers. Gibson didn't make many of them, only about 1800 of them or so, and people hang on to them.”

The second piece of the puzzle in creating the classic U2 sound came in the form of an echo unit. The Edge got himself an Electro Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe, a delay pedal that allows you to modulate the original tone with a chorus or vibrato effect. Edge experimented with different delay intervals, and changing the modulation of the original tone. The one most closely associated with the U2 sound is perhaps the dotted eight-note delay heard in “Pride (In The Name of Love)” and “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.”

Since it is quite tricky to set a specific delay time on the Memory Man, The Edge would switch to using two Korg SDD-3000 digital rack processors instead sometime in the mid eighties, later also incorporating the TC Electronic 2290 Digital Delay. He has two processors since some of U2's songs, like for example “Where The Streets Have No Name” use two parallel delays with different delay times.

The final piece of the puzzle for that early U2 sound came in the form of the amplifier The Edge has been using for decades. It's a 1964 VOX AC30 Top Boost chassis in a 1970s cabinet. The Edge would stay with this signature sound, or variations thereof, for all of U2's recordings during the 1980s. During the nineties The Edge and the rest of U2 felt the need to reinvent their sound to great success, especially on their 1991 album Achtung Baby. But The Edge has since returned to the classic delay driven AC30 sound on some songs on the albums All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb - guess you really shouldn't mess too much with a good thing.

Daniel Eriksson

http://www2.gibson.com

Rushdie: How Bono annoyed the gardai by taking me for a pint!

The writer Salman Rushdie reveals some of the high jinks he got up to on his jaunts to Ireland during his notorious fatwa where he and his wife Elizabeth stayed in Killiney with U2 star Bono.

"There was," he writes in a memoir, "a beautiful little guest house at the bottom of the Hewson's garden with CinemaScope views of Killiney Bay. Guests were encouraged to sign their names and scribble messages or drawings on the bathroom wall."

He adds that on that sojourn to Ireland then President Mary Robinson received him in Aras an Uachtarain and "sat twinkly eyed and silent" while Rushdie spoke. "She said little," Rushdie claims, "but murmured: 'It's no sin to listen.'"

The fatwa encouraged Muslims to kill Rushdie because they claimed his book The Satanic Verses was blasphemous.

Later at Trinity College during a small drinks party, after a 'Let In the Light' free-speech conference, a "small sturdy woman" approached Rushdie to say that because he opposed Section 31 "you have removed all danger to yourself from us".

"I see," said Rushdie. "Who's us?"

"You know fockin' well who we are," she answered.

"After being given his free pass by the IRA" -- but not alas by the Ayatollah Khomeini -- two days later Rushdie was smuggled out by Bono to a bar in Killiney without telling the garda protection squad, "and for half an hour" Rushdie was "giddy with the unexpected freedom of it and maybe thanks to the unprotected Guinness too".

When the most infamous author on the planet and the most famous singer in the world returned to the Hewson home later, the gardai looked at the U2 frontman with "mournful accusation but forbore to speak harsh words to their country's favourite son".

In the course of the 636-page Joseph Anton (his nom de plume) Rushdie doesn't refer once to the story printed by the Sunday Independent columnist Terry Keane in 1998 -- a story that was taken up by media all over the world that Bono sheltered the hunted author at his house for five years in secret. In his 2002 book of essays Step Across The Line, Rushdie did, however, mention it: "A couple of years ago, for example, a front-page Irish press report confidently announced that I had been living in the folly -- the guest house with a spectacular view of Killiney Bay that stands in the garden of Bono's Dublin home -- for four whole years!" he writes.

In the new memoir, Salman is expansive about how his relationship with Bono grew. In 1993 when U2's Zooropa tour landed at London's Wembley stadium Bono rang him personally to ask him to make an appearance onstage. "U2 wanted to make a gesture of solidarity," Rushdie writes.

"Amazingly," he recalls, "Special Branch did not." Rushdie took his teenage son, Zafar, who watched the show with him waiting for dad's big moment. When Rushdie stood up to go back stage, Zafar told him: "Dad, don't sing." Rushdie said he didn't see why not. "It's quite a good backing band, this Irish band, and there are 80,000 people out here."

"You don't understand," said Zafar, "if you sing I'll have to kill myself." He didn't sing but he did tell Bono onstage, dressed as MacPhisto in horns, "real devils don't wear horns".

A few days after the concert in England, Rushdie writes: "Bono called, talking about wanting to grow as a writer. In a rock group the writer just became a sort of conduit for the feelings in the air, the words didn't drive the work, the music did, unless you came from a folk tradition like Dylan, but he wanted to change. Would you sit down and talk about how you work? He sounded hungry for mind food and for what he called just a good row."

Bono, he says, also offered him the use of his house in the south of France. "He offered friendship."

The two ended up collaborating on a song called The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rushdie had sent Bono his novel of that name and Bono put melodies to it. Rushdie writes that Bono wanted him to go to Dublin so he could play the song for him. A few weeks later Rushdie did go to Ireland: Paul McGuinness's bolthole in Annamoe, Co Wicklow, where Bono apparently "made" Rushdie go and sit in his car and listen to the demo CD there. Rushdie said he liked it but "Bono kept playing it to be sure" Rushdie wasn't "bullshitting".

And when at last Rushdie said he was sure, Bono said: "Let's go in the house and play it to everyone else."

Maybe there's no one better placed than Rushdie to know that you have to suffer for your art.

- BARRY EGAN

http://www.independent.ie

U2 TO HELP FUND CORK MUSIC STARS OF THE FUTURE

U2 have co-funded a new Cork music programme that could create the stars of the future.
Music Generation Cork City, a new programme to bring music to youngsters who may never otherwise have had an opportunity to play instruments or learn musical skills, begins in nine city schools this month.
The programme is designed to create greater access to music for children living in the city’s four RAPID areas — parts of the city deemed to be in need of better services.
These areas include Knocknaheeny, Hollyhill, Churchfield, Blackpool, The Glen, Mayfield, Fair Hill, Gurranabraher, Farranree, Togher and Mahon.
A total of 1.2m will be spent on rolling out the three-year project — half of which was raised locally by the city council, the HSE, local third-level colleges and other State agencies.
This is then matched by the programme’s national donors, U2 and The Ireland Funds — a group of overseas donors who have  links to Ireland.
The programme will initially be open to 500 children in seven primary schools and two secondary schools and will later be expanded to work with youth and community groups.


http://www.eveningecho.ie