THREESIXTYAIR Boarding Now
You may not know that for years U2 has traveled by charter. AMP Visual has been the company hired to produce the graphics for the charter tour planes. Graphics are updated each leg of the tour. In our photo section we have a couple of action shots of the plane as it flys around the world.
“For this U2360° tour, we called the airline, THREESIXTYAIR with the name featuring above the first passenger windows. For the US leg of the tour, we called the plane ‘Infinity’ from the song Breathe. We also added ‘The Future Needs A Big Kiss’ from the song Get On Your Boots as a sign-off near to nose of the plane.”
Hollister and U2 in Studio
Dave and the boys are re-working some classics like ” All I Want & Grace” Dave reported on Twitter that they are in “Sacramento” now this does seem a bit strange. Why would the boys be in the studio with Dave? Maybe he was saying that he is doing some work for them. That sounds more like it. In case your wondering Hollister is a former member of the R&B quartet BLACKstreet and has also released several solo albums.
Fans thats why you have to follow on twitter, this whole conversation went on during the early hours of 3AM however in Cali it was a bit earlier. Sign up for twitter and follow along.
U2 Claim 17M
U2’s recently cancelled North American tour is likely to cost the London market $17mn due to contingency cover purchased by the band and its promoters, The Insurance Insider can reveal.
The rock band were forced to call off the US leg of their 360o World Tour when Bono underwent emergency surgery after injuring himself while rehearsing for the shows.
Tour promoters Live Nation and U2 have a contingency policy placed into the London market by specialist entertainment broker Robertson.
Bono a Phallus, really now ?
Well we knew it would be a matter of days before we started to see some interesting comments about the boys and the cash they earn. Frankly who cares. Its their money and so what. If you like the music and you buy the CD’s and everything else that comes along with being a fan of course they are going to make money. Now the lead dog has the best view so its natural for the dogs that follow to be an ass, because hell thats all they look at all day as they try to reach the top. Here is an interesting view from an ass. - Share your comments, thoughts and of course all views are always welcome. Just remember if your an ass we may just point it out.
Oh, not to mention also having the audacity to expect people like us, who earn about 6 pence an hour, to cough up our meagre incomes into the hands of whichever plight they’ve aligned themselves with when they woke up this morning. And we know Bono & Co. are rich because Forbes have released their rich-list of musicians which, for the most part, is a list of artistes so dull that you might need to staple your eyeholes open just to get through it.
Over the past 12 months, U2 have been raking it in, earning an outrageous £84.9m. If you believe the rumours, most of that tootles off to some offshore account in Holland, which probably has cheque books made from African children’s woe.
Easter Eggs on U2 Blue Ray !
Using an Internet-connected player, BD-Live connects discs to a website where content is uploaded from a host.
Every time a user inserts the disc, new items and feeds, such as clips from the band, can be accessed through their television set.
Users are given a live feed of the band’s progress throughout the tour: The first download will feature a video that U2 filmed for users, in which they apologize to fans for missing a leg of their tour.
“U2 360° Tour,” released through Universal Music, marks the first Blu-ray title to be produced in the U.K. with BD-Live content. It was installed through specialty content production company the Pavement.
Cost to install the program code is around £200-£300 ($300-$450), while cost to manage the website averages approximately $7,600 per year.
“It’s important that the world knows the tech is out there,” says Pavement founder Andy Evans. “One of the biggest concerns I hear from clients is that they fear BD-Live costs too much to install and maintain. The reality is it probably costs less than a full-page magazine ad.”
Evans adds that while Hollywood majors currently use BD-Live as a means of streaming up-to-date trailers on Blu-ray discs, it also a marketing tool for distributors.
“With BD-Live, you can monitor how often people are watching your DVD, who they are and where they are viewing it,” he says.
Evans says that soon users will be able to buy tickets through their Blu-ray disc and link up to friends and communicate through the disc.
U2 Comeback ?
U2 are making their latest comeback. Following Bono’s back surgery (which forced the cancellation of their North American tour), the group will hit the road in Europe for a series of dates and be back around the United States next summer.
U2 have had a fascinating career, as even though they’ve been one of the biggest bands in the world for the better part of the past three decades, they have still regularly been cast as underdogs on the comeback trail. Their story arc is remarkable, and it hit an interesting point when they released Pop in 1997.
When you consider most albums, you have to consider the context along with the songs. But in the case of Pop, it’s almost all about the context. The last time U2 had appeared, it was a part of the absolutely gigantic ZooTV tour, which at the time was one of the most ambitious stadium-sized rock shows ever produced.
It was in support of the hugely successful Achtung Baby, a moody art rock album masquerading as pop music (it helped that “One,” the one track on the album that doesn’t really fit, was a huge international hit). The band followed Achtung with a pair of strange experiments: 1993’s Zooropa, which was an album that leaned heavily on electronics and was written and recorded in between legs of ZooTV, and 1996’s Original Soundtracks 1, a heavily ambient album produced by Brian Eno and credited to Passengers (it was so out there that the label didn’t want them to release it under their own name).
That meant it had been nearly six years since a “proper” U2 album had been put on the market, so expectations were high. Those expectations were compounded by the fact that in the run-up to Pop’s release, people were suggesting that U2 had somehow managed to solve the conundrum that was facing rock music at the time.
Back in 1996, a reasonable portion of the population believed that dance music was going to take over as the next great underground genre to blow up to stadium size. Everybody was extremely excited about the Prodigy, and the Chemical Brothers were being treated like big time rock stars and not just a pair of DJs.
More and more bands were dipping into the electronic pool, augmenting their rock tunes with breakbeats, bits of trip-hop and whatever else floated over from the United Kingdom. It was seen as a conundrum that needed to be solved, as though somebody would eventually crack the code and deliver a song or an album that would successfully bring together the two disparate worlds to create a new genre.
Everybody was convinced that Pop was that album. Before anybody heard any music, people who thought about pop music for a living seemed to think that U2 had solved it, and when they dropped the single “Discotheque” a month before, it seemed like Pop was going to change everything. “Discotheque” grafted some super-distorted guitars, techno-funky bass and a sweaty breakbeat, and it still allowed for a killer chorus it sounded like the collision of modern dance music and rock and roll.
But when the album came out and fans listened to the other 11 songs on the album, there was much confusion. The first three songs on the album — “Discotheque,” “Do You Feel Loved” and “Mofo” — made an effort to attach disparate dance genres (like techno, house and drum and bass) to U2’s refined approach to stadium rock.
The problem is that none of those songs particularly succeed as dance songs or as rock workouts. “Discotheque” runs out of steam, “Do You Feel Loved” isn’t dynamic enough and “Mofo” devolves into a beat-happy mess.
And then U2 seem to abandon the premise entirely. Luckily, they do it for the sake of “If God Will Send His Angels” and “Staring at the Sun,” neither of which contain very much in the way of electronics but both of which contain blissful melodies and hypnotic hooks. (“If God Will Send His Angels,” in particular, seemed to be laying the groundwork for their throwback 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind.) “Gone” is also a spectacular anthem with a giant chorus — in fact, Bono has a great time on Pop, as there are places for him to experiment as well as to hit his usual high notes. (Conversely, the Edge has the roughest time on Pop, as his guitar tones are often subverted, distorted or lost entirely.)
Latter day U2 albums also contain a healthy amount of obsessions with American culture, and Pop contains two such tracks: “Miami” and “The Playboy Mansion.” The former is an intense beat experiment that does a lot of swirling but doesn’t go much of anywhere, and “The Playboy Mansion” is about the closest thing the band has ever come to making a novelty song. Still, it’s charming in spots and has a jaunty little melody.
The album wraps up with the smoldering “If You Wear That Velvet Dress,” the lurching “Please” and the sparse, powerful “Wake Up Dead Man.” Really, those three songs act as a microcosm for U2’s entire career, as it has the right combination of romanticism, Catholicism, passion and darkness. Unfortunately, none of those songs have the sort of sweetness that lurks under even the most militant U2 tunes, which makes for a rather uneven finish to what ends up being a bizarre, disjointed album.
So Pop didn’t change the way we think about rock music, nor did it change the way we think about U2 (they ended up really coming back with All That You Can’t Leave Behind a few years later). Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. seemed to be distracted by keyboards and irony, which may explain why Pop is by far the most schizophrenic release in U2’s canon.
It’s an interesting entry in the band’s history (and a fascinating look at the state of rock music in 1997), but not up there with the essential All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree.
One thing is for sure, U2 has created something that you can’t leave behind.
Pistols Shoots U2
While discussing why he chose not to work with Damon Albarn on Gorillaz’s latest release, Plastic Beach, the former king of controversy also threw in a dig at U2 for reasons no one but John Lydon would probably understand.
“They have been quite negative, which has astounded us because PIL is the perfect festival band,” he said. “You don’t want U2 — that’s a band that never should have existed, there’s no life experience in any of their songs.”
Somehow, Lydon goes from talking about why PiL is right for festival shows to why U2 shouldn’t exist.
Don’t worry, John: U2’s itinerary was messed up recently because Bono hurt his back. Didn’t you hear about them pulling out of Glastonbury?
The 54 year old said, “They gave me a bell but the answer was ‘no’. I really don’t want to be dabbling in other people’s gene pools.”
“I’ve worked the many so-called famous people but it’s never been for any deliberate financial motivation. If I did it wouldn’t be a business phone call followed by a management agreement and then for an album manufactured and marketed as to what the current popular trends were.”
Instead John’s is keen to make new music with his band Public Image Limited (PIL) who kick off a six-date UK tour next week.
Public Image Limited are playing a string of 02 Academy dates around the UK in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford, Leeds and Glasgow.