Vertigo Is Go!

Politics were high on the agenda as U2 began their Vertigo tour in San Diego on 28 March.

With a setlist spanning their 25-year career, the two-hour show saw Bono and Co addressing the crisis in the Middle East and famine in Africa on a stage that echoed the stripped-down feel of 2001’s Elevation Tour.

Two days before, 300 competition winners were invited to a shambolic “dress rehearsal” at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The warm-up saw the band stumbling through a mixture of old and new songs, with Bono fluffing lyrics and chastising guitarist Edge for playing “too slow.”

“It was terrible,” said Bono, speaking to Q in the band’s back-stage inner sanctum the next day. “We weren’t getting any life-off.”

Q pulled up a ringside seat for the first six shows of the U.S. tour to see if “lift-off” would ensue.

28 & 30 March Sports Arena, San Diego

All 17,000 tickets for the opening night of the tour sold out in less than 24 hours. Four hundred fans were packed into the “Bomb Shelter” — an area directly in front of the stage surrounded by a huge elliptical catwalk. A gigantic beaded “video curtain” hung at the back of the stage, while four large TV screens descended from the ceiling at strategic points during the show.

Amid a spectacular shower of silver tinsel, the band opened with “City of Blinding Lights” and “Vertigo” from last year’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album. These were followed by a trio of anthems from their 1980 debut album Boy: The Electric Co.,” “An Cat Dubh” and “Into the Heart.”

At the heart of the show was a trio of the band’s most overtly political songs, “Love and Peace or Else,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Bullet the Blue Sky.” The latter saw Bono acting out the role of a Guantanamo Bay-style political prisoner, pulling a blindfold emblazoned with the word “Coexist” over his eyes and falling to his knees. The singer later pleaded for aid relief in Africa as the continent’s flags flashed across the video curtain during “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Bizarrely, break-through U.S. hits “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” were both absent from the set.

“That was surreal,” U2 manager Paul McGuinness told Q. “Imagine if you’d paid to see the Rolling Stones and they didn’t play “Satisfaction’.”

The following night saw the band replacing “An Cat Dubh” with another early track, “Gloria,” and adding “With or Without You.”

“The script works, even if the reading wasn’t perfect,” said Bono after the show. “But at this stage, we know exactly what we’re on about and what needs to be done.”

1 & 2 APRIL Arrowhead Pond, Anaheim

Actors Matt Damon and Owen Wilson, Audioslave’s Tom Morella and producer Rick Rubin saw U2 dramatically overhaul the show’s opening on the first two nights in Anaheim. The band took to the stage in darkness, strobing the audience with powerful flashlights before launching into new opener “Love and Peace or Else.”

The second night saw Bono paying tribute to Pope John Paul II, who died earlier that day. “There was something true about the light in his eyes,” he said, hanging a set of rosary beads given to him by the Pope from his mic stand at the end of the show.

5 & 6 APRIL Staples Center, Los Angeles

A few hours before the first of their two Los Angeles shows at the 14,000 capacity Staples Center, Bono and actor Brad Pitt held a press conference in the venue for the global AIDS and extreme poverty awareness-raising ONE Campaign. “We’re not just asking for people to put cash in the pot here,” he told reporters. “We’re asking for their voice.”

Inevitably, Hollywood’s A-list were out in force, with Pitt, Kevin Costner, Heather Graham, Orlando Bloom and Dennis Hopper all in attendance. The presence of veteran singer Leonard Cohen on the first night was marked by Bono crooning the first few lines of Cohen classic “So Long, Marianne,” while Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea got the same tribute treatment the following night with a snippet of “Under the Bridge.” The second night also saw the band dust down another track from their debut album, “The Ocean” — the first time they’d played it since December 1982.

“We came off at the corners a few times,” said Bono. “But this is such a great band right now, that if we make a mistake we’re able to turn it around quickly. 2005 is definitely our year.”

© Q magazine, 2005.