“Big budget arena shows simply don’t get much better than this,” was one American critic’s view of last weekend’s opening concert of U2’s first U.S. tour in five years. Dave Fanning reports from Florida.
“For about a month leading up to the first gig you’ll always be, at the very least, apprehensive about how it’s going to go. A new show never gets its first real test until a full gig is over. Last night’s was really good fun.”
Adam Clayton is sipping tea in the lobby of the Alexander Hotel in Miami a few hours before the second gig of a world tour that could see U2 on the road for anything up to 18 months, two years or beyond.
The “last night” in question was last Saturday, where at Lakeland in Florida, it was the first time that U2 had played live since their somewhat lacklustre show at the Point in Dublin on New Year’s Eve, 1989.
The first part of the tour concentrates on indoor venues taking the band on a 32-date trek right across America from New York to Los Angeles, finishing in Vancouver in Canada on April 23rd.
As we head off to the second concert (at the 16,000 seater Miami Arena) manager Paul McGuinness echoes Clayton’s comments. “This was quite simply the best opening night on any U2 tour ever,” he beams.
When we arrive at this huge indoor basketball arena, the predominately Irish crew are a little bit more apprehensive. Due to fog on the freeway, everything’s running at least an hour behind schedule and everyone is wearing one of those “why worry/fingers crossed” expressions.
But since this is, unusually enough, a venue without curfew, delays are tolerable. This is one of the most compact technologically complex rock shows ever staged and support band, the Pixies, who have a sizeable following in Europe but mean little at home in America, are due on stage in half-an-hour. The huge crowd outside the arena (bronzed, affluent, late teens/early twenties) are patient enough–weeks ago, the majority queued up overnight to snap up the tickets.
As with most gigs on this tour, U2 could fill each venue three or four times. But this is as good a way to test the water as any. The recession has dealt a serious body blow to the autumn touring calendar in the U.S., but if U2, who have already sold roughly seven million copies of their current album Achtung Baby, continue to play gigs like the one in Miami on Sunday, they could have little difficulty filling football stadiums right across America when they return in the summer.
Meanwhile backstage, former Kylie Minogue beau, Michael Hutchence (who fronts the musically dull but commercially successful Australian outfit INXS) is strutting around with three leggy Vogue-cover types by his side.
Grace Jones arrives looking as exotically odd as ever complete with second World War-era motorbike cap, boasting horn-rimmed goggles on the forehead. Chris Parkes, U2’s merchandising manager, is happy. Tonight 16,000 people have spent an average of $13 each for the privilege of wearing “Zoo TV” on their backs. That’s a lot of T-shirts and a lot of cash.
Rock’s most famous photographer Annie Leibovitz (Rolling Stone in the seventies, the final, and foetal John Lennon photos, that pregnant Demi Moore shot, etc.) is at once friendly and businesslike, snapping discreetly. Someone points out a member of the Kennedy/Shriver clan and someone else claims they’ve just met ’60s, “Runaway” warbler Del Shannon which is decidedly odd since Mr Shannon died a couple of years ago.
The Pixies’ set is the kind of Pixies gig many Irish fans would love to see. The Boston Indie Darlings can almost pack the Point but the last time they played in Dublin they left out most of their better-known tunes. In Miami their set was like a greatest-hits package with “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” “Debaser,” “Here Comes Your Man,” etc., all tumbling irreverently into each other.
The crowd applaud generously enough but they didn’t queue all night for tickets to see The Pixies.
When U2 hit the stage pandemonium ensues. In this all-seated venue, the seats stay unused for the rest of the night. The band plunges straight in with the staccato Euro-dance thump of “Zoo Station,” the opener on Achtung Baby. In fact the first eight numbers are from the current album so before the first oldies (“Bullet the Blue Sky,” “Angel of Harlem”), we’ve soaked up a whole new U2 in the shape of three-quarters of Achtung Baby. When U2 played that Lovetown gig at the Point, Bono spoke about “Giving it all up in order to dream it all up again.” In one way, we’d all had enough of each other.
Treading water would never be the answer. They went to Berlin to meet film director Wim Wenders. They liked the place, decided to stay and a new album took shape where an underlying understanding to create something fresh and substantial was in order — without singing about saving the world.
The second song in last Sunday’s live set, “The Fly” sums up Bono’s personal frustration with his paraphrase on the role of an artist: “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief.” Live, this song sets the tone. Its raw aggression gives it a decidedly healthy, unpolished quality and in the middle, his whispered vocal is intoned rather than belted out for a different effect. So after just these two numbers, the reshaping (re-invention, hardly) is clear.
With The Edge on guitar striking against the melody as often as he carries it, the treated sounds are driven to their heftily psychedelic extreme and Larry Mullen’s high-pitched snare drum constantly evokes a closed-in atmosphere. So by the third song (“Even Better Than the Real Thing”) everything gets a little looser and the instruments find room to breathe. All the while the latest in techno TV gear flashes across the stage and up on the huge screen, which dangles from the ceiling between banks of speakers.
Unlike David Bowie’s last solo tour where every move was timed to perfection to fit his straight-forward video images, U2’s video flashes are arbitrary, random and subliminal, highlighting a potty potted history of the band’s more recent past. Ranging from outtakes from The Joshua Tree album-cover shoot in Death Valley to daft quick-fire slogans like “Religion is a Club,” “Call Your Mother,” “Celebrity is a Job,” etc., this is not the Achtung Baby tour, it’s the Zoo TV tour where buzz-bites flicker incessantly on video walls and TV screens. Euro decadence meets Vegas trash for “Mysterious Ways,” where a frilly bikini-clad exotic dancer shoves the party atmostphere out into the centre of the arena where a second stage is introduced. Later, on this stage, U2 perform acoustic versions of “Angel of Harlem” and Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.”
Five Trabants, which act as mobile lighting rigs, hang from the ceiling.
Talk of panning or switching with Hotheads Dolly tracks and pre-edited video discs is likely to blind even the most computer-literate person with science but suffice to say that you get the impression that they haven’t entirely got their act together on this one yet, despite the visually dazzling display.
When they eventually whack out the big guns (“Bad,” “Pride,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Running to Stand Still,” “Where the Streets have No Name,” etc.) they pinch and tuck to give new life to favourites and standards. If the second half of the concert evoked the spirituality of the old with equally reverent and austere musical backdrops, the first part balanced faith and flesh with an appropriately visceral kick.
They encore with a mix of the old and the new — “Desire,” “Light My Way” and “With or Without You” are followed by the dour and ominous “Love is Blindness” for an ambitious, full-bodied, triumphant finale to this, the beginning of their first U.S. tour in five years.
As the Miami Herald concludes on Monday morning: “Big budget arena shows simply don’t get much better than this.”
At a small outdoor post-gig party on the roof of the Merlin Hotel (the new office-studio-hotel owned by legendary Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell) Bono enthuses about the silver spangled suit he wore for the encore (“makes me feel like Gary Glitter”), country fan Larry reminds us how much better Lyle Lovett is than the commercial phenomenon that is Garth Brooks, while all four members of the band are visibly pleased with their performance and the reaction to it.
The oft-proclaimed Band of the Eighties is resoundingly staking its claim for more of the same in the Nineties.
© The Irish Times, 1992.