U2 still finds new ways to thrill fans
In 2017, U2 celebrated the 30th anniversary of the best-selling album of its storied career by playing 1987’s “The Joshua Tree” in its entirety on each stop of its tour.
In 2018, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame act is celebrating the rest of its songbook on tour by leaving “The Joshua Tree” completely out of the set list.
Could a U2 show that didn’t include such favorites as “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “With or Without You” and “Bullet the Blue Sky” — all celebrated staples of the U2 set list for decades — be satisfying to behold?
If you answered anything short of “yes,” then clearly you weren’t at SAP Center on Monday, as Bono and the boys left all things “Joshua Tree” in the desert and still managed to deliver a brilliant outing for the packed house in San Jose.
Say what you want about U2. But this band has guts to spare. Try talking Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, Journey or basically any other classic rock band into hitting the arena trail without packing their best-known songs. It’s not going to happen.
But U2 is a different kind of a classic rock act, one that is wary of being pigeonholed as a nostalgia act. Thus, after embracing its past like never before with last year’s “Joshua Tree” celebration, it makes total sense for the band to go the opposite way and fashion one of the most challenging and refreshing road shows of its career.
Those who attended the band’s 2015 “Innocence + Experience” tour will be familiar with the stage
setup used on this year’s companion trek, dubbed the “Experience + Innocence” tour. It’s basically the same one. But it’s so cool that it’s worth seeing again. It consists of two smallish stages connected by what’s really the centerpiece of the set — a long catwalk that cuts through an immersive video screen.
The band members could be seen at times actually inside the translucent, two-sided screen and, at other moments, they’d be performing on one of the two stages and their images would just be displayed, and greatly
magnified, on the screen. Sometimes they’d mix the two, showing a life-size band member interacting with the oversized video images of others. That made for some really cool effects, such as making it appear like famed guitarist the Edge was standing in the palm of Bono’s hand.
The group opened the show in the same fashion as its latest studio album, “Songs of Experience,” bringing fans to their feet with “Love Is All We Have Left” before moving into the even stronger new song “The Blackout.” The quartet, which also features
bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., stayed on track for one more new one, “Lights of Home,” before turning the attention to more familiar territory and cranking out big versions of fan favorites “Beautiful Day,” “I Will Follow” and “Gloria.”
That three-song juggernaut, not surprisingly, was one of the high points of the night. Yet the group didn’t lose much steam as it then settled into 2014’s “Songs of Innocence” for a block of songs that was highlighted by the poignant ode to Bono’s mother, “Iris (Hold Me
Close).”
The pacing was superb throughout the night, as the group mixed old and new, familiar and fresh anthems and ballads to near perfection. Nothing ever felt stale. Nothing ever felt out of place.
That was especially true once the group came back from a short break and launched into the best song from U2’s best album — the standout “Elevation” from 2000’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” — and then just kept roaring through the radio hits “Vertigo” and “Desire.” That segment was a big highlight for most fans in the building, for sure, but the real die-hard U2 aficionados were more thrilled about hearing “Acrobat,” the sole “Achtung Baby” song that’s reportedly never been played live before this tour.
U2 closed the main set with one of the better “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” cuts — “City of Blinding Lights” — before returning for an encore that started with the always-powerful “One.” Then Bono gave us words to hold onto as we exited the arena:
“Love is bigger than anything in its way.”