Fresh U2 embraces the present in concert tour but honours the past
INGLEWOOD, CALIF. — U2 has the powerhouse catalogue to delight fans with a wall-to-wall greatesthits show every time it goes on tour.
But the four-decade-old Irish band is relying on more recent and comparatively less familiar tunes in its latest tour, “Experience + Innocence.” The longtime quartet appeared fresh, fit and energetic Tuesday in Los Angeles, an early date on a 17-stop North American tour that start- plaintive Love Is All We Have Left, as an opaque image of Bono appeared behind a narrow electronic curtain connecting stages at each end of the arena.
Two other Experience tracks, each with vivid light imagery, followed: “The Blackout,” which worries about democracy’s extinction, but adds, “When the lights go out/Don’t you ever doubt/The light that we can really be,” and “Lights of Home.”
Bono then jokingly introduced the nearly 40-year-old “I Will Follow” as “our new song.”
The energetic beat got The Edge hopping, with Bono playfully leaning on Clayton as he engaged the singing crowd. The band then returned to Experience with “Red Flag Day” and its resonant line: “Today, we can’t afford to be afraid of what we fear.”
From Innocence, Bono sang about his mother in the sad, tender “Iris (Hold Me Close),” a second chance to honour a parent who was “never mentioned after she was lost to us.” He reminisced on his youth in Dublin, where he met his band mates.
A spare “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which recounts the tragic 1972 shooting deaths of 14 unarmed protesters by British soldiers in Northern Ireland, opened with Mullen on a snare drum and conveyed a mournful feeling.
Later leading into a wounded but defiant Pride, Bono, with a stars-and-stripes-decorated bullhorn, chanted, “This is not America,” as images of angry Charlottesville marchers, including KKK members, played on the screen. He switched to “This is America,” as video of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and marchers supporting civil rights and equality replaced those images. “I’ve been told the American Dream is one you can’t have when you’re sleeping,” he said. “Tonight, we dream with our eyes open, our hearts open, our arms open ... and our minds open.”