Bono and Co get their mojo back
U2
O2 Arena, London
When Bono said recently on TFI Friday that U2 have “learnt how to be in the band we always wanted to be in” on their current tour, it sounded like the kind of overblown rock star guff that he is prone to spouting. However, on the evidence of the first of six London shows for their Innocence + Experience tour, he wasn’t exaggerating.
Over their 39-year career, U2’s live shows have oscillated between gravely sincere and daftly ironic. This reviewer saw the band’s 1997 PopMart tour when they arrived on stage in a giant flying lemon, dressed like The Village People. Ten years previously, they had toured the world as po-faced blues journeymen, all ponytails and pomposity. Perhaps it’s only with the benefit of hindsight, as they enter the twilight of their career, that they’ve been able to make sense of their decades together. So while this show was musically varied and ambitiously staged, it had a compelling narrative and intimate feel.
If the goal was to re-connect with fans after 2011’s dodgy Glastonbury appearance and 2014’s bungled giveaway of their latest album — downloaded automatically to 500 million people’s iTunes accounts, irrespective of their musical tastes — then they succeeded. The show suggested a band at ease with itself. And there wasn’t a giant lemon or a ponytail in sight.
Their first indoor UK concert for 14 years was performed in the round across two stages linked by a walkway. A cage with vast see-through LED video screens as walls hung overhead. For U2, this was stripped-back. And for the first five songs — during the part of the show that dealt with U2’s past in Dublin — there were no coloured lights, no screens, nothing. Just four men playing under a single oversized lightbulb, like a multi-millionaire pub band. The show brilliantly unfurled. For
Cedarwood Road, Bono walked down a virtual recreation of his childhood street as references to Bowie and the Sex Pistols swirled around. Sunday Bloody Sunday ended with Larry Mullen beating a single snare drum as a car bomb exploded on the screen above him. It was brutally effective.
The second half focused on the world-conquering half of U2’s career. Back-to-back Where The Streets Have No Name, Pride, and With or Without You would be hard to beat in any setting.
Bono is a master at flattering his audience. He praised, he thanked, he invoked. He was in fine voice. His stage presence remained huge, although with his new orange quiff he looked alarmingly like Joe Pesci when he dyed his hair for Lethal Weapon 3.
There were typical U2 touches aplenty. Bono plucked out a fan and serenaded her. The Berlin Wall was recreated for the Achtung Baby- era songs. There was even a voiceover from Stephen Hawking. It was apt, as U2’s last album is the music equivalent of the scientist’s A Brief History of Time book: everyone owns it but no one’s opened it.
But the band seem to have put all that behind them. This show showed that U2’s mojo is back, and perhaps stronger than ever.