US – Wednesday, March 17
Updated 16:54, September the 21st, 2009
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Edge and Bono hanging at the 360° Tour.Edge and Bono hanging at the 360° Tour.
Photo: Michael Tran/Getty Images
 

‘The sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard’

U2 rely heavily on new material for 360° tour

Song-by-song reaction to the show

After sitting in three hours of pre-show traffic and wondering if it was gonna be worth it, we finally arrived a few minutes before 9, and the show hadn't started. Here's our minute-by-minute from the moment the band walked the long cat-walk out to the stage.

  1. Breathe As somebody who has purposely been trying not to look at setlists online, this is a surprising selection for an opener. I would have thought they would have been all over "Get On Your Boots."

  2. No Line On The Horizon Really? Another one from the new album?

   3. Get On Your Boots Ahh. Here's the one I thought they would have opened with. I still can't believe they haven't played a song that says "Hey, it's us, we're U2, the band you know from this popular hit of ours."

  4. Magnificent Wait, is it really U2? 

  5. Mysterious Ways Those catwalk things are moving. Now they're moving on them. Man, there's got to be some degree of "OK, now Edge, you walk down there at this point." I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at that band meeting.

  6. Beautiful Day / Blackbird (snippet) OK, now I'm feeling slight echoes of the "Holy crap, this is the guy that wrote this song! And he's here, performing it now! And I'm watching it!" that I felt the very first time I saw U2. But this is not the best U2 medleying. It doesn't even come close to the time they  did an excerpt of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" during "With or Without You" on the "Joshua Tree" Tour that I bought that bootleg of in college. Oh man, I forgot I was this much of a fan of this band. I love U2!

  7. Elevation This is the first realization of how it must be for the band to pick tunes that are thematically consistent with the album they're currently promoting.

   8. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / Stand By Me (snippet) Another great moment, and when the crowd sings "Stand By Me" it's one of those goosebump moments.

  9. Unknown Caller Man, not even the cool visuals on the huge screen can help this tune. I have noticed for the first time though that the amps just say "Guitar" on them, like a generic Fender logo. That's pretty cool.

10. New Year's Day This song works very well with the icy feeling of the "Horizon" songs.

  11. Stuck In A Moment A sweet moment with Edge and Bono.

  12. The Unforgettable Fire Though I stayed away from looking at setlists I had heard that they might play this one. I wish I hadn't known, because this would have been a great surprise. Apparently it was a surprise for the guy behind us, who yelled, "I am in absolute awe! Holy sh-t!"

13. City Of Blinding Lights It's interesting how a U2 song becomes a classic. This one, like its chorus sound "so beautiful toniiiiiiight!"

  14. Vertigo / She Loves You (snippet) Now they're totally in the groove.

  15. I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight Now this is a new song that has been successfully snuck into the set. The visuals of the band's serious faces with silly clapping is perfect, as Larry Mullen Jr. walks around with the bongo.

  16. Sunday Bloody Sunday / Rock The Casbah (snippet) The person I'm at the show with is Iranian, and she's legitimately touched by the visuals of violence in Iran with Farsi text about a brother being killed for speaking out. Throughout the song, the band is bathed in green lights. This is the first instance of political messaging in the set, and it's quite tasteful if even my Iranian friend is buying it.

  17. MLK This one was dedicated to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Nice way to keep the politics in one section of the show. And nice way to educate your audience about world matters.

  18. Walk On I know that fans love this song, but I think it needs one more album between it before it's an official U2 classic.

  19. One / Amazing Grace (snippet) Despite the huge scale of this show, this band is at their best when it's the four of them just huddled close and playing their tunes straight-up. Man that "we get to carry each other" line still gives me chills. And this is a good U2 medley.

  20. Where The Streets Have No Name In real life I was jumping up and down too much to actually write anything in my notebook at this point.

      Encore(s):
  21. Ultra Violet (Light My Way) I'm glad they've recharged this one. It's such a great tune, that didn't initially get enough play. And it's cool to see that lit up mic hanging from the ceiling, as Bono hangs onto it like a liferaft.

  22. With Or Without You Damn, this is good, but it sure feels like we're approaching the end of the set. I had heard that they play the tune "Bad," and this will probably be another "holy crap!" moment if they do. But damn, I'm in the middle of one of those moments now! Not stuck in a moment, just in a moment.

  23. Moment of Surrender Shoot. This is the closer, isn't it? Yup. Oh well. Great show.

 

REVIEW. U2 is unique in that they still use their concerts as sales pitches for their most recent album. While they’ve had this approach for much of their career, many of their rock ‘n’ roll peers have adapted to the iTunes era, and relied more on fan favorites for their setlists.

But Sunday night’s show at Gillette Stadium featured seven songs from their spring-released “No Line on the Horizon,” four of which had the prominent placement honor of beginning the show. And for the most part, it worked.

It’s a tough proposition, putting new songs alongside classics and expecting fans to react as positively as they react to the ones that beefed up their high school yearbook quotes. Not even Springsteen demands this degree of keeping up from his fans. The last time he was in town, he only played two songs from his latest album.

But even if you’re not keen on the new numbers, there’s something to be said for this dedication to recent material. It tells your audience that these new tunes are simply classics that haven’t been tenured yet. “The sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard,” Bono sang on one of Sunday’s best new songs, “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” as Larry Mullen Jr. marched around the huge ring outside of the stage playing a bongo.

The songs in the set also relate to the stage themes so tightly that the experience of seeing them on this particular tour is much more memorable. And chances are you’re not going to hear “Unknown Caller” on the next tour. (Hopefully not, at least. Its “force quit and move to trash” computer jargon lyrics are about 10 years too late.)

The 360-degree set-up relates with there not being a line on the horizon, and the songs they play that aren’t from the new album share a thematic kinship with the ones that are. It’s why a song from “Rattle and Hum” wouldn’t make sense in this set unless it were drastically re-worked.

And though the guy behind us who yelled “I am in absolute awe!” after a worthy version of “The Unforgettable Fire” probably would have preferred that U2 closed with an anthemic classic like “All I Want is You” or “One Tree Hill,” they closed with the prayer-like 2009-minted “Moment of Surrender.” The song features a telling incantation, “It’s not if I believe in love, But if love believes in me” which seems to sum up the band’s ethic of playing so much new stuff. They want to be sure they still feel what they’re singing, and not going through the motions, not just for their fans, but for themselves, which is why they need to add new elements to classics like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” putting it within the context of revolution in Iran. It’s either that or perhaps the answer can be found in another telling line from another tune from “Horizon” that they played last night. In “Breathe,” Bono sings that he comes from “a long line of traveling sales people on my mother’s side.”

Pat Healy