A night with… U2 in Dublin

Posted by SPun2UcloseAuthor: SPun2U Name: Kevin
Email: feedback@u2feedback.com
Site: http://www.u2exit.com
About: A little about me, I was bitten with the U2 obsession in 1991 with the release of Achtung Baby. Although I’ve known about U2 since the mid 80’s it wasn’t until the AB album that I was hooked. AB was the very first (and only) album that I had ever owned that I played straight through without hating a single song. I truly love every song on that album. Even today that album seems so fresh. My online activities, I'm curator of several U2 related sites: U2exit.com, U2torrents.com, U2fansites.com, and U2radio.com. I've maintained a U2 fan site in some form since the late 1990's.See Authors Posts (2587) on Dec 24, 2004 in Video | Comments Off

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Posted by SPun2UcloseAuthor: SPun2U Name: Kevin
Email: feedback@u2feedback.com
Site: http://www.u2exit.com
About: A little about me, I was bitten with the U2 obsession in 1991 with the release of Achtung Baby. Although I’ve known about U2 since the mid 80’s it wasn’t until the AB album that I was hooked. AB was the very first (and only) album that I had ever owned that I played straight through without hating a single song. I truly love every song on that album. Even today that album seems so fresh. My online activities, I'm curator of several U2 related sites: U2exit.com, U2torrents.com, U2fansites.com, and U2radio.com. I've maintained a U2 fan site in some form since the late 1990's.See Authors Posts (2587) on Dec 11, 2004 in Reviews/Commentary | Comments Off

Halfway through the excellent new U2 album, Bono announces, “I like the sound of my own voice.” Well-said, lad; well-said. Ever since U2 started making noise in Dublin several hundred bloody Sundays ago, Bono has grooved to the sound of his own gargantuan rockness. Ego, shmego — this is one rock-star madman who should never scale down his epic ambitions. As the old Zen proverb goes, you will find no reasonable men on the tops of great mountains, and U2′s brilliance is their refusal to be reasonable. U2 were a drag in the 1990s, when they were trying to be cool, ironic hipsters. Feh! Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus to the lepers in his head. We want him to be Bono. Nobody else is even remotely qualified.

U2 bring that old-school, wide-awake fervor to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The last time we heard from them, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, U2 were auditioning for the job of the World’s Biggest Rock & Roll Band. They trimmed the Euro-techno pomp, sped up the tempos and let the Edge define the songs with his revitalized guitar. Well, they got the job. (more…)

Surrender to Peter Pan

Posted by SPun2UcloseAuthor: SPun2U Name: Kevin
Email: feedback@u2feedback.com
Site: http://www.u2exit.com
About: A little about me, I was bitten with the U2 obsession in 1991 with the release of Achtung Baby. Although I’ve known about U2 since the mid 80’s it wasn’t until the AB album that I was hooked. AB was the very first (and only) album that I had ever owned that I played straight through without hating a single song. I truly love every song on that album. Even today that album seems so fresh. My online activities, I'm curator of several U2 related sites: U2exit.com, U2torrents.com, U2fansites.com, and U2radio.com. I've maintained a U2 fan site in some form since the late 1990's.See Authors Posts (2587) on Dec 5, 2004 in Reviews/Commentary | Comments Off

U2′s degeneration from the divine to the treadmill demands an answer to the question: why not disband?

John Waters

The new album by U2 was feted as a masterpiece before anyone heard it. It is already No. 1 in the U.S., Britain and Ireland. But How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is in reality a nondescript collection by a band nearly two decades at the top and desperate not to slip.

It is, you might say, U2′s fourth White Album, following Zooropa (1993), Pop (1997) and All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000). The White Album marked the beginning of the end of the Beatles and, though not without magic, was so underpinned by a sense of imminent disintegration as to be less a Beatles album than the first wave of a federal farewell.

Achtung Baby (1992) was U2′s Sergeant Pepper, combining a conceptual and sonic unity with a startlingly original vision of love as life. This is U2′s fourth past-their-best anthology, comprising 10 competent songs and a couple of greatish ones, a showcase of impressive talents and occasional genius, but nothing that, really, a disintegrated U2 couldn’t have left unsaid. It isn’t the album U2 should be making now, at the age they are, in a sequence defined from Boy to Achtung Baby. Sure, it has resonances that evoke different parts of their journey, but it all adds up to no more than a massive unit-shifter.

U2 promised more. They said the world could go far if it listened to what they said. They gathered up a ragged medium and sought to reintroduce it to its roots. They demanded of pop no less than that it grow up. Having started as pop illiterates, they acquired an awesome competence, implying an exalted purpose. They hinted at some sacred mission, which the attuned understand to transcend the Christian simplicities of the early years. There was something here about redemption, about taking the devil’s music back, about demonstrating some connection between inspiration and faith, love and rigour.
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December 2, 2004 – London, England – BBC Studios

Posted by SPun2UcloseAuthor: SPun2U Name: Kevin
Email: feedback@u2feedback.com
Site: http://www.u2exit.com
About: A little about me, I was bitten with the U2 obsession in 1991 with the release of Achtung Baby. Although I’ve known about U2 since the mid 80’s it wasn’t until the AB album that I was hooked. AB was the very first (and only) album that I had ever owned that I played straight through without hating a single song. I truly love every song on that album. Even today that album seems so fresh. My online activities, I'm curator of several U2 related sites: U2exit.com, U2torrents.com, U2fansites.com, and U2radio.com. I've maintained a U2 fan site in some form since the late 1990's.See Authors Posts (2587) on Dec 2, 2004 in HTDAAB Promo Tour | Comments Off

Setlist:
Vertigo, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own, I Will Follow, Vertigo.
Remarks:
U2 perform and are interviewed during the ‘Friday Night with Jonathan Ross’ program on BBC 1. ‘Vertigo’ is played at the start of the show; the others are done at the show’s end, after an interview segment. As the show closes, viewers hear Bono shout ‘One more for us!’ and the band does ‘Vertigo’ again. The program is taped December 2nd and airs the following day.