U2 ROCKS T.O.
Irish quartet blows fans away with Joshua Tree tour,
★★★ (out of 4) The Rogers Centre, June 23
There’s nothing mysterious about the way Bono works an audience. Even as U2 charged into a packed Rogers Centre with the crowdpleasing plan to play their best and most popular album Friday, their frontman wasn’t leaving charm to chance.
By the third song in this stop on U2’s Joshua Tree tour, he’d already spun in a 360 trying to lead an overhand clap by example, instigated a stadium-wide cell-phone-light constellation and offered the sort of freeflowing gratitude that would sound insincere from most anyone else.
Oh, and then there was the endless spring of praise he lavished on Canada, a country he referred to on separate occasions as “sexy,” “magnificent” and a “beautiful mosaic.” He reminisced on a conversation with Leonard Cohen, announced his presence at next week’s Canada Day celebration and even took a moment to offer his thanks to the country for “giving us Irish safety and sanctuary all those years ago.”
Well, no one who paid to hear a 30-year-old album performed slavishly in full should really complain about being pandered to. And it’s unlikely many of the nearly 50,000 at Friday’s show would lament this slickly seamless two-plus hour show, during which a band that has fallen upon its longest creative slump seemed rejuvenated by the reliable comfort of rigorously tested hits.
Depending on your perspective, the track-for-track album tour is either nostalgic fan service done right or a callous cash grab doubling as a sad sigh of creative bankruptcy, a weary acknowledgment that nothing new will compare to the best-loved material of old.
These tours are also extremely popular — an exhilarating night without the burden of the unfamiliar. (The full-album tour has become so ubiquitous that even Third Eye Blind’s inessential debut has been subject to the treatment.)
It’s certainly been boffo business for Bono and co., who reeled in $62 million (U.S.) from the first 10 shows of this tour, according to Billboard, before announcing another North American leg.
So it’s natural to view the project through a lens of cynicism, especially given the fact that fans simply wouldn’t pack a stadium to hear 2009’s austere No Line on the Horizon or 2014’s goodwill-killing, iPhone-invading Songs of Innocence.
On the other hand, how many albums are as deserving of a 30-year victory lap as The Joshua Tree? The shimmering, yearning post-punk classic represented the Irish quartet’s creative and commercial peak, and Friday was a potent reminder.
The band opened with a four-song set of pre- Tree thrillers before strutting back to the mainstage and the warmth of their massive, out fieldsized 8K video screen. As “Where the Streets Have No Name” turned to the rest of Joshua’s tracklist, the screen beamed images of desert landscapes, craggy mountain peaks and other Americana ephemera. Much has been made about how the record’s political themes align with our current Trump climate, and it is easy to draw parallels to songs about Reagan-era military muscleflexing in South America (“Bullet the Blue Sky”), labour unrest (“Red Hill Mining Town”) and violently selfrighteous outsiders (“Exit”).
But the band seemed to trot along the line of political commentary with a gymnast’s precision. Aside from a video recording poking fun at U.S. President Trump’s border wall and Bono’s bantering reference to Canada’s “adolescent” neighbour, the band avoided specific political statements in favour of positive, broadly relatable sentiments, such as this “Beautiful Day” improvisation: “When everyone’s identity is what they want to be, that’s a beautiful day!”
By the way, “Beautiful Day” was part of an encore in which Bono hollered about the future and the band’s faces were rendered as pulsating digital blobs onscreen. And yet, the newest song U2 played Friday was 2004’s “Vertigo,” which is only a few months away from being a teenager.
Perhaps the troubling thing for the band is that no one seemed to mind. At one point, Bono chided with mischief: “What could possibly go wrong?” And the answer, with a band and show this polished, seemed obvious: nothing. These were songs of our experience and they were exactly what the Rogers Centre was looking for Friday. But one can’t help but wonder what else is on U2’s horizon.