U2 Live at Wembley: In depth review - part 2 - News

U2 Live at Wembley: In depth review - part 2

U2 - Wembley, Friday August 14, 2009

As Q's glimpse at the setlist revealed, the show is synchronised and staged with precision but Bono still finds time for some baffling banter. As Get On Your Boots comes crashing to an end he begins to spit out London station names, stretching out his words in an attempt to make "Paddington" sound somehow profound.   

Just as Mick Jagger now resembles nothing more than a transvestite mimicking his younger self, Bono can often seem like a bloated parody of the young unforgettable firebrand he once was.

But then, as he is wont to do, he confounds your prejudices. Magnificent is magnificent, beautiful and fragile in a way that seems unfeasible in a stadium of Wembley's forbidding size. Prowling the outer ring of the circular stage, the band spend the song distanced from each other but their playing meshes together perfectly with the Edge delivering the kind of guitar solo that justifies his current starring role in It Might Get Loud with those other guitar legends, Jimmy Page and Jack White.

Beautiful Day - wallpapered into our collective consciousness by a thousand football trailers - is the first truly hands in the air moment of the night. The crowd is on its feet almost as one. But up in the nosebleed seats, a little boy sits on a railing and looks bored. U2's power is in resonant nostalgia, a soup of pasts real and imagined. To the kid, they're just a berk in big sunglasses, a guy in a beanie hat and two nondescript fellas (albeit in the case of Clayton wearing a glittery tank top).

But for the fans, the performance holds as many surprises as it does old favourites. A portion of The Beatles' Blackbird comes grafted on the end of Beautiful Day before Bono begins a lengthy (and genuine) thanks to the crowd and to Elbow who delivered a stadium sized support slot: "Thank you Elbow for giving us lift-off."

Suddenly, he's back in carnival barker mode, shouting out to the large Irish contingent in the audience and declaring: "Something very special could happen tonight...but that's why we're here." It's hyperbolic in the extreme but with a little twinkle in his eye, you sense Bono realises that.

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is a copper-bottomed classic introduced by Bono with a story from the band's early days: "I was 18 years old, I slept at Waterloo station with a demo of our first song...tonight is the night." And you, the bastard almost makes you believe him. As the song reaches a transcendent conclusion, Bono shifts into a snippet of Primal Scream's Movin' On Up, the pop cultural magpie after anything that's shiny as he stands beneath his alien creation.

Then we get Stuck In A Moment That You Can't Get Out Of and the faithful melt into a swaying, screaming mass of acolytes. Unknown Caller, another relatively new track, is given the call and response treatment, huge scale karaoke as the lyrics flash up, twisting and turning on the giant video screens. Rendered that baldly the sheer brashness of making a set of lyrics out of computer commands is shocking.

Vertigo arrives and not even Bono's drunk-uncle-at-a-wedding dancing can take the shine off it. Then I'll Go Crazy, If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight, which had been blasted non-stop from the megaphones of the Blackberry encampment outside, topples into view.   

The danced-up version eschewed tonight is fun but throwaway with the Big Brother style leering visions of the band on the video screens more distracting than the song itself. The whole package - the song and it's visual accompaniment feel a b-side to the Popmart tour.

U2 Live at Wembley - part 3

Words: Mic Wright

3:50 PM | 17/08/2009

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