U2 confirm their superstar status with a triumphant Joshua Tree show
Twickenham Stadium
‘Thank you for letting us back into your lives,” Bono cooed during the London leg of U2’s 51-date, 2.4millionticket selling world tour to commemorate their landmark album, The Joshua Tree, turning 30.
For many, U2 have been a constant that never left. The beaming Glaswegian I chatted to on the train had seen them 14 times, the first of which was at Murrayfield in 1987. “No money could make me part with this ticket,” he assured me, “this has been my life.”
Judging by the number of original
Joshua Tree tour T-shirts I counted, plenty in the crowd felt the same.
The Joshua Tree was the album that changed everything for U2. It seems strange to say now, but in the mideighties the Dublin quartet were still considered too punky or too experimental to become arena-rock superstars. Their fifth album addressed this doubt, masterfully splicing a bigger, primary-coloured, driving American rock sound with the rhythms and repetitions of Irish roots music. It topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic and pushed Bono and co into the musical stratosphere.
The rest, as they say, is history. Here, for 70-minutes or so, the biggest rock band in the world lived up to the billing. They were simply magnificent, combining power, warmth and verve into as extraordinary an arena-rock salvo as I’ve ever seen. A quick-fire Eighties hit parade, kicked off by the hammering military march of Sunday
Bloody Sunday and rounded off by the gleaming hooks of Pride, showcased a studied musical tension between aggression and tunefulness.
Bono, in all black and hefty Cuban heels, let loose his impassioned howl as The Edge’s effects-laden guitar snarled and whirred. Amid the cavernous surroundings, the quartet were often not more than a few yards from each other, as if doing a band practice in Bono’s garage in 1976, adding a level of intimacy rarely seen at stadium shows.
Against the backdrop of a huge
Joshua Tree motif on a striking burnt orange background, the band then played the album in full, as it was intended to be heard in an age where the album was considered a sequenced work of art greater than the sum of its
parts. Of course, the individual songs weren’t bad either. The gorgeously melodic guitar ricochets of Where the
Streets Have No Name and the elegiac,
spectral hum of With or Without You were a reminder that sometimes the most popular music in the world can also be the best.
The stage was set for a ripsnorting finale, but it never quite materialised. The band’s 2001 number one Beautiful
Day kicked off the final onslaught, followed by Vertigo and Elevation. But this self-consciously grandstanding arena rock was less powerful than the quieter aggression that had come before. When Bono brought Noel Gallagher on stage for an acoustic-led version of Oasis’s Don’t Look Back In
Anger, it felt like a hollow conclusion. I wished the gig had finished 45 minutes before, when U2 were living up to the reputation their landmark album created three decades ago.
U2: The Joshua Tree Tour 2017