What do the hardcore U2 fans think?

[JayJay314]

Sorry for going off topic slightly, but chatted to a die hard U2 fan who attended Glasto just to see U2. After spending the whole of Friday at the front of the stage waiting for U2 to play, decided to spend Saturday and Sunday finding out what the festival was all about. Said he was totally blown away with it all and could not wait to come back 2013 with his family. Made me smile loads

[bonosbaby25]

I've seen U2 a few times.. around 27ish, I think.. and I thought they put on a fantastic show at Glasto.. I was way back up the hill and thought the sound could have been a little louder, but I thoroughly enjoyed them, even in the pouring rain. The people who were around us had a ball, too.. the only thing that made me a little uneasy was the thought that the only reason there was lots of songs from the Achtung era is cos they are releasing those albums re-mastered soon.. so it did seem a money-making setlist.. having said that.. they played all my favourite songs.. and it has always been my dream to see my favourite band at my favourite place in the world.. so I'm a happy bunny

[paulo999]

Not a die hard, but love the old stuff.

Went mid-set, knowing I could only stay for a few tunes (not the best set-up for a gig). Sound where I was, about half way left hand side, was very weak. I put it down to the well worn Pyramid problem. It's very weather sensitive for sound, if they want to avoid pounding Pilton.

Back at home I watched on TV, to see Streets. I think the Muse/Edge version from 2010 was far better. They went to stage blackout / sound zero beforehand and gave it the deference it deserved.

On the flipside, I know people who went and had a massive time.

[Glasto fan]

Too many mistakes, too nervous, some bad choices for the setlist.... A missed opportunity.

[Glasto fan]

Where were the mistakes? And what were the bad choices in the setlist?

Edited June 30, 2011 by Glasto fan

[Badlands]

Not a massive hardcore fan but love the Achtung/Zooropa stuff. Was my first time seeing them and I was totally blown away. Its safe to say I was three sheets which may have influenced it but I was certainly compos mentis enough to remember most things about it. From where I was standing/bouncing (in front of the sound bit in the centre) it was one big singalong/hugathon.

I loved the setlist, just liberally chucking out hit after hit. Kept thinking they'd slow it down but they just kept coming. Didn't know some of the later stuff they played later on but didn't deter from my enjoyment.

Only my forth G so missed Macca, Bowie and Radiohead etc but I've been lucky enough to see cracking sets by Stevie Wonder and Blur. That was up there with the best of them for me.

[Wooderson]

Only my forth G so missed Macca, Bowie and Radiohead etc but I've been lucky enough to see cracking sets by Stevie Wonder and Blur. That was up there with the best of them for me.

[LondonTom]

Call me easily 'wooed' but I loved the spaceman bit. Will remember that part for a while. Spacemen are cool.

[danbailey80]

Where were the mistakes? And what were the bad choices in the setlist?

Edited July 1, 2011 by danbailey80

[xtrmntr75]

Och, it seems they're getting damned forthe slightest little thing. Even Better Than The Real Thing hasn't been a starter before these last few gigs. When they did Zoo Tv it was Zoo Station, The Fly, EBTTRT, Mysterious Ways, One, Until The End Of The World....... Adam Clayton stated in Q a couple of months back, that, as it was the 20th Anniversary of Achtung Baby, they'd be playing a few songs from that album so I thought it'd be the same as above.

It wasn't as good as Zoo Tv but I've come to accept that was just a special time for U2 that they'll probably never top

[danbailey80]

7/10 is about right. It was far from a classic.

[elias]

For me this show wasnt within an asses roar of Macca, Blur or Stevie. Madness to even compare them to be honest.

[The Roses]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3uL-CpPUZ8

This was good enough for me!

I seriously think if the weather was better and half the people weren't coming back from Radiohead then it would have been one of the greatest performances ever at the festival

Edited July 1, 2011 by The Roses

[russycarps]

I was off my tits but really enjoyed it.

I saw some of the coldplay footage, cant believe the praise that dirge is getting.

[dingbat2]

I said on another thread a few months back that if U2 played a stripped down set without all the gubbins you get on their tours then it could be one of the greatest Glasto moments ever.

Will they did play a stripped down set, they did play loads of old stuff, and I did love their performance. But "one of the greatese moments ever" - not really. Not too sure why. I think I expected too much having seen them around 20 years ago! Looking at Bono made me see that they aren't spring chickens anymore - he is 51 years old ffs!, his voice isnt as good as it was and there isnt quite the energy of 20-30 years ago, well what did I expect at 51!

I do not think it was the weather, I do not think it was the set list (which I think was great, except for the ommission of 40), I think its just that I was longing for what they were like in the 80s and early 90s

Don't get me wrong, I still loved their set, but I think my expectations were just too high

[Badlands]

For me this show wasnt within an asses roar of Macca, Blur or Stevie. Madness to even compare them to be honest.

[russycarps]

have the band themselves commented on the gig? I wonder how they thought it went

[Mardy]

Is there an arguement to be made that we expect more from bands that we admire than from bands we are only midly acquainted with?

I know it worked a bit that way for me when I saw Springsteen and U2. Love them both, slightly disappointed with the performance of both. Didn't know much of Blur or Coldplay and thought both sets were amazing.

[ThomThomDrum]

It had plus points and minus ones for me making it a good show not a great show.

Minus

That Hirst thing was no way to come out on stage. Show yourself and get arty farty later

The sound. Not great and the weather was not friendly to it.

The crowd. Feck all people there for various reasons. Many far away due to Radiohead and probably didnt bother trekking back. The weather also probably forced loads to go to Fat Boy Slim and DJ Shadow (Although some did tell me Shadow was not full)

The stage was not U2 friendly. These guys were out of their comfort zone and spending their budget on 2 extra screens was silly......they could of given Bono a short walkway to make him at ease.

The nerves where too evident. Seemed like they constantly questioned if they had got things right.

Setlist - Streets have no name and One played way too early in the set and for Streets they got it too wrong. One of the weakest live performances of this song I have seen. The encore left a lot to be desired. Moment to surrender and out of control are no way to end this gig IMO. It felt like it died with a whimper.

Plus

The first 10 tunes or so - It was a wall of U2 tunes that just kept us all going "YES" come on!! I loved the start. Tune placement and Art Work apart the first 10 tunes where MEGA!

The nod to Bowie - liked this a lot. Space Oddity bringing us into gig time and then basically contacting Major Tom from Glastonbury Ground Control. Gimmicky but I like that sort of thing....

Larrys Drumming.........to me he was on tip top form and was drumming up a storm - Boom!

The crowd - Those who were there really gave it socks around me and at times you forgot all about the rain. Some great moments had amongst friends with a nice soundtrack in the background

Bono being Bono - It would not be a U2 gig without the ego doing some stuff but I dont think he went too far which was a good thing. I have been to U2 gigs where he has been way too much. I did cringe for Jerusalem and Yellow but the flag thing was a nice touch. We have come a long way and to see that at Glasto. It was cheesy yet nice...

[dingbat2]

I was arguing the same sort of thing over the weekend. huge artists, I mean artists in the U2/Springsteen category are pretty much on a hiding to nothing with this kind of gig. They've only played to their own audiences for a long time, and so they have a rep of being astonishing live. This builds up people's expectations to such a degree that neutral members of the audience will inevitable feel a little disapointed. I think it's an inherent problem for bands of this size, and to be absolutely honest, I don't really understand why these bands agree to do it, they can never 'win', best they'll get is a score draw.

Edited July 1, 2011 by dingbat2

[The_Wiseman]

Agree they were dogged by bad luck missing out on 2010 and then the crap weather this year. However there true professionalism showed throughout and they put on a hell of a show in the circumstances. I was reading their show directors diary on u2.com today and thinking what a shame they changed their minds on the setlist from 2010 - I guess they do have a habit of overthinking things at times - here is the extract from u2.com

"We’ve also been pontificating about the set list for Glastonbury for about eighteen months now. In essence, we’ve known for some time what the stance will be. Had we played the festival last year, we would have played the set-list that we rehearsed in New York. This was a three-act show, the first of which was a rash of 80’s festival greats, opening with Where the Streets Have No Name, then Follow, New Year’s Day, Pride, Found… all of them. Act two was going to be the re-mounting of the first 30 minutes of the ZooTV show, complete with all the original video sequences, then act three was ‘the present’, with a chunk of the 360 set list.

I loved this set list but in the intervening year things moved on and besides, there was so much public speculation about the band opening with Streets that we revisited the idea. After much deliberation we now have asimilar kind of set but with acts one and two swapped. This means we now intend to open the Glastonbury set with five songs from Achtung Baby that are staged with all the accompanying ZooTV visuals and I for one am psychotically excited about it. The one exception is Even Better Than the Real Thing which opens the show. The new version of the music demanded a new visual idea, so none other than Damien Hirst was commissioned to make a video piece to accompany the song."

[Torcs4]

WEATHER

If U2 had been on the next day, after the warm, sunny, good vibes of the Saturday, after the warm, sunny, good vibes of Elbow, it would have been a different crowd and a different gig. Bigger crowd, more up for it crowd, better sound (I don't know what was with the sound - I heard them soundcheck Mysterious Ways in the morning and it was about the loudest thing I've ever heard coming from that stage) and without a doubt a better performance.

In the BBC interview afterwards, Bono said the stage was like an ice skating rink, and that was restricting. I don't know if he meant the main stage or their little ramp thing, but either way, anyone who has watched U2 live even just once, would know that was a remarkably 'still' performance from all of them, but especially Bono. Even at 51 he is still a very energetic frontman, but not at this gig. He spent hardly any time down on that little second ramp/stage, and watching the broadcast back, you can see the steps running off it and down to the pit/barrier at the front. Bono generally performs right up in the face of the crowd - that he didn't go down there was surprising. You can just imagine something like that video of Bad posted above, but with Bono up on the barrier belting out - small things like that change the atmosphere significantly. I thought he'd spend half the gig down there. Blame the weather?

So blame the weather for crap sound, crap crowd and for U2, that was a crap performance? And as an aside, the mistakes the band were making were all timing related - could the weather have been playing with their ear monitors? Weather or not - I suspect that's what their issue was, and that's why they messed up both Even Better and Streets, and during the gig there was a lot of shouting going on between band members, and band members to side-of-stage crew. I think they were having problems with those monitors and communication.

SETLIST

I loved the Achtung Baby run of songs, but see how for this event, they should have maybe broken it up and hit the crowd with a couple of the monsters earlier on. I also think U2 had an issue with the fact that all of their songs were pretty big to very big songs. You watch someone like Coldplay, and they play a few big ones, then drift into a few lesser knowns (or new) and then build back up to some big ones at the end, and there's a real release from the crowd when they get to those. U2 didn't have that kind of momentum in their set because it was Big One/Big One/Big One/Big One all the way through the middle. They needed to break it up better, somehow. Honestly, their set was probably too short. Should have padded it with three or four more songs and created a bit of that drama to the set. And yeah, the ending. Moment of Surrender on record is a fantastic song. Live, within the context of a regular U2 gig, it can provide a great stadium-into-cathedral type ending, but for Glastonbury? Stupid. They should have ended the main set with With or Without You, bumped Beautiful Day with it's Space Station intro back to open the encore, and then ended with a noticeable absentee: All I Want Is You. It's the anthemic, well known, everyone singalong, warm, group-hug type song that a good Glastonbury set should end on. Big mistake.

STAGING

They went with stripped back. Admirable in a sense, in a weekend of lasers and confetti and fireworks and dancers and whatnot, to see a band put the songs at the forefront, but actually, given the weather and sound issues, the stripped back (and thus 'cold') lighting and whatnot maybe worked against them too. A big warm show, one that 'reached' back further, might have helped. I also think they should have gone with building a ramp and b-stage out into the actual crowd. There was a connection problem there, and this would have sold it, plus a couple of songs out there would have provided that kind of 'break' in the setlist I was talking about above. If they came down there and did a couple of songs like Desire and Angel of Harlem, that would have broken up the 'main stage' anthem run enough to give the back end of the set a separate momentum to the front end.

[Torcs4]

me too. Were they interviewed after their set?

Edited July 1, 2011 by Torcs4

[The Nal]

Larry's demeanor tells a very different story though.

Edited July 1, 2011 by The Nal

[russycarps]

BBC interview. Positive/enthusiastic from Bono and Edge. Larry's demeanor tells a very different story though. Honestly, you might one day hear someone close to the band (like Willie Williams in his above mentioned diary or something) admit that it all went a bit pear shaped, but I doubt you'll ever hear it from the band themselves, they'll continue to - at the very least - bow at the Glastonbury alter, if not talk up their own set. They'll never, ever admit "Actually, it was pretty crap."

They must be pretty bummed though. I do feel a bit sorry for them. For 18 months they've been talking this up and did seem genuinely very excited about it. And the band did need it. U2 cop a lot of crap, about 20% of which I think is deserved, but about 80% I think is absolutely unfair, or at best, just lazy/bandwagon stuff.

It's a shame. I've seen U2 many, many times. I worked in the music industry for the better part of a decade, and saw hundreds of live acts, and actually became a fan of U2 based on them being above and beyond anything else, a stunning live band. This was certainly not them putting their best foot forward. That the consensus seems to be that they were trumped by Coldplay is a real kick. On any normal night, they should blow them out of the water without breaking a sweat. Some sort of perfect storm of wrongness went down last Friday.