Super-sized on stage and screen: U2’s 2015 tour
Rock’n’roll creates its own peculiar sense of scale: hyper-real, larger-than-life. And so it is that the first thing that really hits you about U2’s Innocence + Experience show is that frontman Bono’s (currently blonde) head appears cartoonishly big, even viewed from way up high. The next, more enduring impression is that only a band as globally mega and stridently assured as U2 could make a six-night stint at this 20,000-capacity arena – a venue that has previously hosted a Prince residency and a one-off Led Zeppelin reunion among countless star dates – feel unusually intimate.
U2 have long sealed their stadium-sized status, and Innocence + Experience feels like some kind of confessional creature compared to the blockbuster behemoth of 2009’s blockbuster 360° shows. It’s their first indoor arena tour for a decade, and it’s also the first chance to really hear how material from their 2014 album Songs Of Innocence stands up alongside classic anthems. That latest album was widely lambasted on release – not for the quality of its songs, but the supposed arrogance of its arrival: gate-crashing iTunes folders as part of an Apple freebie deal. In tonight’s packed-out live setting, its tracks prompt a considerably warmer welcome, but you don’t need to be a U2 die-hard to be struck by how effortlessly bold they feel: as personal statements, and as part of the quartet’s mega-catalogue.
Album opener The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) also forms a strident kick-off to this set-list, before the band flow through the pleasing power riffs of Out Of Control (from their 1980 debut album, Boy), and Vertigo (from 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb). U2 have been on the road with this tour since May, and they play with the ultra-slick expertise that stems from decades of success, yet also an unabashedly joyful vitality which summons the fact that Bono, guitar hero The Edge (who spends much of this show beaming), steadfast bassist Adam Clayton and coolly sullen drummer Larry Mullen, originally got together as fired-up teens in north Dublin. As Bono declares to the delighted Monday night masses here: ‘We’re a Saturday night, Sunday morning kinda band.’
Youthful recollections are the driving force of the concert’s first half, in particular Bono’s poignantly raw tribute to his late mother, Iris (Hold Me Close), as well as the memory of his childhood home, Cedarwood Road. In these early highly intimate moments, the show’s fantastic set design (directed by U2’s long-time collaborator Willie Williams, with work from Es Devlin and Ric Lipson) really bursts into life: through mesmerising loops of home video footage; through an animation of Bono’s old street, which the vocalist walks along within a lengthy elevated ‘video cage’ linking two separate stages (illuminated ‘i’ and ‘e’). Invariably, the personal and political overlap, as the music’s themes turn to the 1970s backdrop of Ireland’s Troubles, and the iconic Sunday Bloody Sunday loses none of its devastating atmosphere here, with Mullen a lone figure on the stage walkway, beating a tattoo on a single snare drum. It’s followed by latest album song Raised By Wolves, with images in commemoration of the 33 victims, young and old, of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
As the title suggests, Innocence + Experience is a concert of two parts, and the video cage becomes a graffiti-strewn ‘Berlin Wall’ (soundtracked by a rendition of 1991 Achtung Baby anthem The Fly) for the intermission, before a more showbizzy spirit takes over. This second half feels more like a series of grand gestures which actually lack the emotional punch of the earlier set, though the classic tracks still sound resplendent. Various fans are hoisted on stage: a girl who films the band for a live webcast (streamed above their heads, with a haze of emoticons); two boys who play guitar on Angel Of Harlem; and as a last-minute surprise, Brit rocker Noel Gallagher (who apparently took the tube to play at tonight’s show).
When politics crops up again, it unfortunately feels clumsy and rather crass. Bono ‘doing’ global activism has always jarred, and for Bullet The Blue Sky, the video screen is filled with a splurge of timely and heart-rending yet cluttered images: bomb-shattered Syrian neighbourhoods, bathed in a strange sunlight; refugees fleeing for safety; drowned bodies floating in an ‘EU’ formation. Within this, Bono highlights his antagonistic status – ‘You’re part of the problem, not the solution,’ he drawls, mimicking his critics; somehow, it still comes across as an ego trip rather than self-awareness, boosted by the fact that the star in wraparound shades has spent much of the show sloshing around loads of bottled water. At such points, that rock’n’roll scale just feels like a massive lack of human perspective. Innocence + Experience proves that U2 remain most powerful and believable in their original element: as local boys made loud and proud.
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