(Note: the exact date of this concert is unknown; it is not listed in any of the sources @U2 has checked, and is not even listed in media reports detailing exact dates of U2’s London tour during December, 1979. It is our guess that this show was a late addition, and likely occurred between December 9th and 13th — during those 5 days, U2 was only scheduled to play one show, on the 11th)
A Doll By Doll dream the Venue must be — its layers of stodgy tables and dodgy in-business types out to compare wallets and tour jackets; its Space Invaders, ugly bar prices, and pointless jukeboxes; its rounded, predictable, I-say-what-ho applause; its dopey table-service regulations, polite nite-club and pseudo-exotic furnishings.
“This is the first time we’ve done cabaret,” announces U-2 singer Bono, endearingly: the expurgation is greeted with self-conscious hum of approving tee-hees. A band at the Venue is like a band on New Faces, or at a Working Men’s Club variety nite; people performing for a studio audience, the people who laugh and clap in all the right places, but never boo or fart in public, and like to eat steaks and sip elaborate cocktails while the PA flickers crisply and the “group” do their “thing.”
U-2 are aware and promiscuous; they’re warm enough, enticing enough to draw people in, yet sifficiently stubborn to deflate a cozy situation when necessary and stick their flag in the painful parts.
At the Venue they’re pulling and pushing the whole time, dropping theatrics into unlikely circumstances: they’ve conquered the art of dynamics…they’ve hustled it into the constitution of a remarkably fresh and frisky new rockpop. They make sublime rockpop.
In Bono they have a uniquely expressive front figure, an irrepressible schemer and operator ducking and diving his alter-ego through number-apres-number; he can create interest with the flick of the hand, or build a mime [sic] of information into a mike-stand.
U2 are doing things within their chosen format — lyrically, idealistically, visually — that should be apparent to anyone with an imagination or, alternately, a disillusionment with the general bloated rock state-of-affairs; the blind and deaf are, of course, excused.
Polite applause flickers at the close of their set…
(snip equal-lengthed portion of article about Doll By Doll, then resume at the end)
Doll By Doll By Midnight: their stripshow is not over, though their set is. I leave immediately — that way I remember the Doll By Doll, not the Venue: their relaxed hour has been a steady, good-humoured confirmation, their solitary dip into a conceived, other nite-lifestyle.
I know whose path I’d rather follow…
© Record Mirror, 1979.