From The Courier-Mail:

U2 twenty years later

U2’s PopMart spectacular rolls into Brisbane on Wednesday. Nui Te Koha checked the front and back at the band’s Perth concert this week

IF ANYONE cared to do the research, pinpoint the co-ordinates and match the class timetables, chances are that the official date for the 20th anniversary of U2’s formation would land somewhere around this week.

But Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, who started a band as teenagers while attending Dublin’s Mount Temple School just don’t want to know about it.

"People keep mentioning when it was — around about now — but I can’t remember the actual day and I think it’s because we don’t want to," band frontman Bono said this week after the band’s gig in Perth. "It’s kind offunky, the thought of being around for 20 years." "We never really wanted to stay the same, though," drummer Mullen interrupts. "We are not really good at repeating ourselves, so today, we are a different band.

"We’ve always pushed the envelope and we do things that maybe everyone doesn’t like and that’s just part of the deal we make with ourselves and our audience."

"But really," Bono says, his grin broadening, "we are just your regular dysfunctional family."

It’s not a bad call either, given that Bono bounces into the room in a homeboy hood, natty shades with a cool, tangelo tint and a moderately sized ghetto blaster with The Propellerheads’ tune History Repeating cued up and ready to play.

Bono lets the track rip, only to discover he’s set up the wrong song. He fidgets with the boom box, strikes gold, then struts to The Props’ twisted blend of cocktail-meets-chemical beats.

If Pop — by Bono’s admission — is the band’s one and only party album, then the stage translation, PopMart, must surely be the life of this particular party.

Well, yes and no.

The key to PopMart’s success — especially as it relates to its monstrous audiovisual predecessor, the 1994 ZooTV tour — is deconstruction.

U2 have stripped back the senses and information overload of the previous tour to bring the focus back tomusic. Wisely, it is a strategy that cashes in on the bare bones rock’n’roll of the early records and the futurist agenda the band has plotted with albums released this decade — Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop.

Of course, a visual spectacle underlines PopMart’s noble intent but it rarely overshadows the tunes.

The stage — various runways that spread across and reach out to the crowd — is a marvel in itself. Its centrepiece is a giant illuminated golden arch with a stack of speakers at the peak.

A giant video screen, which runs the length of the stage and the height of the arch, runs a gamut of images, icons and rich, vibrant colours.

A huge lemon, which sits idle at the side of the stage for most of the show, provides a rumbling, glittering highlight during the encores.

Significantly, PopMart is fired from centre stage where a tight and rocking U2 absorb themselves in being a potent four-piece musical unit again.

(In Perth, a shocking sound mix played havoc with the first three songs — all of them killers that should be crisp and clear. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out by the Brisbane show.)

Bono hoofs it down a catwalk for most of the night but there is a connection to the other players — a striking contrast to his playful alter egos, like Mister Macphisto, Zooropa’s devilish crank caller.

"The thing we have learnt, really, after two tours like this, is the songs travel great distances, faster than all those millions of diodes and pixels that we have on the (video) screen," Bono said.

"I can see the songs connect. And we have got to make a record that reflects where we are at now . . . and that is making direct music, probably to contrast the circumstances of this tour."

Guitarist, The Edge, agrees. "ZooTV was a show of great ideas and concepts and we had a blast playing with information overload but when we put this tour together we really wanted the music to be the centrepiece of everything.

"On a good night," The Edge says, "the production becomes like a backdrop."

That said, Bono says they use whatever means necessary to achieve their aim.

"The job of rock’n’roll, if it is any kind of job at all, is to blow people’s heads. We are playing these big places.

"Let’s do something fresh with them, something new, and when everyone else is kind of into nostalgia . . ." Bono trails off.

"It is really peculiar to me," Bono said, seizing on a point.

"The fag end of the 20th century, you have all this obsession with The Beatles, The Stones and the ’60s. We just thought: ’Let’s do something fresh.’

"It’s a hard call trying to turn a shopping mall or a supermarket or a casino into a cathedral but that’s actually what we’re trying to do. Trying to find a spirit in the machine, if you like.

"We live in a sort of neon time and place and that’s what we are trying to make. We are trying to make it magical, not trying to be smart-arse or ironic at all.

"What we had in our heads was a big sci-fi gospel show. We also had The Jetsons supermarket in mind but we wanted Martin Luther King in the building, along with Elvis."

Have they written any new material while on tour? "We write all the time," The Edge says. "Sometimes it’s just a few ideas on Walkman cassette."

"I’ve got a great tune," Bono chirped. "I just started it yesterday. It’s about women, actually: ’First at the cradle, last to the cross.’ I think it’s going to be a great little tune."

These have got to be strange days for U2. Apart from taking a raincheck on their 20th anniversary, the future, Bono says, looks to be a contradictory path of new technology applied to a back-to-basics style.

"We can’t afford to take this f…ing thing around the place forever," he says of the PopMart tour. "It’s madness."

Bono says the ticket price covers the cost of lugging the PopMart tour around the world but, "We are not making any money out of this, I can tell you that," he laughs.

"But we are so up on it, so proud of it," Bono says of PopMart.

"But you have to be an engineer, an electrician, a computer scientist, painter, video editor, songwriter, guitarist, bass player, drummer and singer to do this.

"Maybe, the next time, and I’m just speaking for myself, I may just want to be a singer."

U2 plays ANZ Stadium on Wednesday at 7pm.

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