Plastic Bono Band

U2 PopMart: Live From Mexico City
***** (five stars)

DOH. JUST WHEN we’d eased ourselves back into nodding appreciation of Old U2, here comes a reminder that the New U2 are much better. It’s a concert video, but in U2’s hands, such a mundane item is transformed into an essential adjunct to the multimedia U2.com experience.

It usually means a concert with some cameras at it. But U2 gigs already have cameras at them. U2 gigs, that is, since Zoo TV in 1992, which compared to the PopMart tour in 1997, was a doodle on a napkin. This, as they used to say on Tiswas, is the stuff.

Some stadium bands (The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi) tackle the form’s yawning void by having bouncy castles onstage and their lead singers running from side to side for two hours like the cricketing dad on The Fast Show. Not U2. PopMart – and whether you went or not, you’ll know the drill: half a McDonald’s arch, big lemon, huge cocktail stick, fuck-off olive – manages the deft trick of involving the audience in its own spectacle. It’s as if 70,000 Mexicans with the sleeves of their own denim jackets rolled up to come to the same diner.

This intelligently-choreographed video – shot by David Mallet at the Foro Sol Autodromo, December 3, 1997 – captures all the songs (24), costume-changes (three), lights (umpteen) and spectacle (one), about which, ironically, there is nothing ironic: this is pure rock’n’roll theatre.

Some late news just in: Bono is the star, always captivating with his funny old gait – a wounded dog crossed with Robin Williams as Popeye – and a master of ceremony, whether playing bull to Edge’s matador on a jetty or (yes!) getting a girl up onstage for Old U2 emotional relief. As a nod to their own history, I Will Follow is faithfully preserved, and Sunday Bloody Sunday acoustically revived.

Elsewhere, dressed like Elvis as a UN chemical weapons inspector, U2 are what pop will be like in the future. If we’re lucky.

(c) Q magazine, 1998.