U2: Poll Winners Speak Out

With another sweeping Hot Press Reader’s Poll victory under their collective belt, the inevitable conclusion is that the U2 star is still unfalteringly in the ascendant.

Their achievement in taking the overall Best Polling Act category, as well as dominating the Irish section of the poll follows hard on an impressively improved showing in the NME poll, a highly successful sell-out Irish tour which took them up to scale to the 5,000 capacity RDS Main Hall in Dublin, and an equally celebratory brace of London gigs just prior to Christmas. It all adds up to a remarkable show of strength, carried all the more effectively because of the band’s still-explosive sense of enthusiasm and commitment.

But while the band in building their audience, are making the kind of strides necessary to keep the enterprise creatively as well as financially buoyant, there have been some worrying developments over the past year. Even in this, the issue of Hot Press which celebrates a new and comprehensive triumph for the band, in terms of audience commitment, the Letters page sees a hitherto unprecedented wave of disillusionment with them.

In a sense this is predictable — most bands find that achieving mass support means losing some of those who championed them through the early stages. But then U2 have always been exceptional in their ability to break with the stereotypes. Their commitment is such that you feel they must want to transcend the inevitable, to find the key to the mystery of how not to alienate those who initially put their faith in the band, while attracting new support all the time.

Currently back in the U.S. of A., at the start of a strenuous six-week stint there, Bono is characteristically UP, when the poll news is delivered. “The sun is shining, the Edge is shining — we’re all feeling very good,” he says, reflecting on his exuberant torrent of words. “When I’m not feeling so good, I don’t talk so fast.”

But there is a sense, right now, of Bono being carried forward on a wave of undiluted optimism. Neither he nor his fellow U2-ers are likely to shrink from the implications of their evolving status. And although their recent Irish tour and most specifically the Dublin RDS gig represented a pinnacle of achievement for them, they’re quite prepared to question the scale which was involved.

“What we did was quite ambitious,” the Edge says unassumingly about the RDS gig. “We haven’t ever played a venue that size in our own right before. There was a feeling that maybe the occasion became larger than us — I think that it might have been better to play some small venues as well.

“But I’d still stand by those gigs,” he adds, a theme taken up by Bono: “The concert in the RDS was the most successful concert ever of its size I’ve been at in Dublin. There was such an atmosphere of celebration, right from the front rows to the back. That kind of feeling between the band and the audience leaves me breathless.”

There were aspects of the experience about which he feels apprehensive — the fact that people were hurt for one, though it was, he emphasizes, a peaceful concert. Then there was the incident in Cork, where a group of about fifty or sixty people came autograph hunting.

“They didn’t want to talk,” he says and his voice registers bewilderment, “they wanted bits of me. They wanted me to write my name down on scraps of paper. Incidents like that did make me think about the whole thing — we’re not into that gladiators, dinosaur rock thing.

“I’m asking a lot of questions about it but what I do believe is that the band is a great live act and we’re going to continue to be a great live act.”

On their evolving relationship with their audience Edge adds, “We aren’t the sort of band you can make your mind up about and still be right in a year’s time. It’s more like a process of continual assessment. We’re going to change and we’re going to keep on changing. We’re not restricting ourselves. But audiences are into that. Audiences are into progression.”

If there is a theme in this short conversation, it’s that faith — the credence which U2 invest, some might say naively, in the quality of the ordinary people — the mass of ordinary people — who now form their audience. But in this attitude they are being entirely consistent. What has fired, and inspired their music from the word go, is an unshaking optimism, which flies in the face of so many signposts to the times, and which allows them to transcend even their own doubts, as well as the extraneous hostile forces which might have grounded their soaring vision.

What is important about this optimism is that it acts as a direct challenge to the essential bleakness imposed on those who offer youthful energy nothing more than the same old story. There is something to celebrate in the fact that where Irish youth lacked a voice for so long, now there is not just one but many through which their cultural aspirations are being expressed.

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