Twickenham Stadium, London, July 8, 2017
Looking back, not in anger… The Joshua Tree enters a new period of growth
SINCE announcing their intention to revisit The Joshua Tree in its entirety for its 30th anniversary, U2 have been at pains to make plain this is no exercise in nostalgia. No heritage rock band, they. At the start of this year, The Edge insisted that it was an album that spoke to current times. “That record was written in the mid-’80s,” he told Rolling Stone. “It was a period when there was a lot of unrest… It feels like we’re right back there in a way. I don’t think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, ‘Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn’t have three years ago, four years ago.’”
Then, the day before the first of their two shows at Twickenham, Bono made a rather unexpected intervention, popping up as a caller on Simon Mayo’s All Request Friday on Radio 2, where in the process of drumming up some customers for the few unsold tickets, he insisted: “We play the album as if it had just been released last week. It’s not a nostalgia thing, really.” He paused. “That’s at least our stance.” The last two words were in audible italics.
Whether or not guitarist and singer disagree privately about the purpose of their current tour, it had been clear U2 needed to do something. Ten years ago, playing a secret gig at the Astoria in London, Bono announced that they had come to reclaim their title as the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. In the intervening years, though, they have done little to justify his bullishness. Couple that with the ageing of their fanbase – as kids and mortgages and redundancies and prescriptions and the rest of real life start to occupy more mental real estate than the power and meaning of rock’n’roll, which becomes a diversion rather than a guiding force – and it seemed worth asking: what are U2 actually for? If a band forges its reputation by placing itself front-and-centre in the culture, what is its purpose when time has shifted it away from that position?
This tour seems like U2’s attempt to confront that question. After drifting for so long, they appear to have decided to try to reconnect with their essential U2-ness. These shows seem much more like therapy sessions in