Tour grosses over $703 million

The Edge / Adam / Bono / U2 360 Tour Denver 2011NEW FIGURES show that U2’s 360° Tour has grossed more than $703 million (€534 million) after seven million rock fans paid to see the band over the past three years.

According to figures published by music industry journal Pollstar, the tour grossed $231.9 million last year after 2.38 million music fans paid to see the band at 34 gigs across 26 cities.

The US-based publisher shows that the tour grossed the highest amount of any rock band last year and on average grossed $8.9 million per gig with an average attendance of 91,828.

The figures show that U2’s three-gig stint at the Morumbi Stadium in São Paolo, Brazil, alone earned $32 million.

The $703 million is a gross figure and does not take into account the significant costs of staging the tour, which involved 110 gigs in 79 cities around the world over three years.

Hundreds of people were employed in transporting and constructing the 360° “Claw” stage, while the concerts provided a major economic boost in the cities where they took place.

The profits from the tour are shared between the four members of the band – Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton – their manager Paul McGuinness, their promoter Live Nation, and the local venue operator.

The 360° production increased the capacity of venues by up to 25%, resulting in record attendances.

The Pollstar figures show that one of the top-earning stints over the three years was the band’s sold-out three-night run at Dublin’s Croke Park, where the tour grossed $28.5 million.

A breakdown of the annual figures shows that the tour grossed $231.9 million in 2011; $160.9 million in 2010; and $311 million in 2009, when three million people paid on average $101 to see the band play.

The year 2009 was the largest grossing year of the tour, when the average gross per concert was $10 million.

The drop-off in revenue in 2010 came as a result of the band postponing a North American leg of the tour after Bono sustained a back injury in Munich.

The latest figures for U2’s main Irish company, U2 Ltd, for the 12 months to the end of 2010 show that its cash pile increased almost fivefold to €4 million.

The principal activity of the company is the creation, protection and licensing of intellectual property.

U2's Hidden Gem

By Dre  

Often I find myself listening to U2 lyrics to find that hidden gem. I find that listening to U2 gives me hope, faith and renewed sense that people are good.  Often I reminded that U2 music is more than words on a sheet that some deep thought has gone into the lyric.   As I was traveling the other day, I had a chance to read an article by Brett Warner that was just refreshing and full of possibility.  The team has been writing for weeks about Achtung Baby and how you really should pick up your own copy, small plug for us. Every time you make a purchase on Amazon from our links, you are helping fund this project. So thank you for your continued support.   Now back to Brett and his article.  He dusted off a gem that I had forgotten about. “The First Time” We all know the story that Achtung Baby was the successor to Zooropra was to be the EP that promotes the fourth leg of the massive production Zoo TV.

I had to revisit the song and as Brett states this is song is pure amazing, deep dark, insightful and in control. The Edge opens softly and the song builds slowing and gracefully. This was the work of Brian Eno and Bono. The song is simple clean and as you will find a soulful lyric reference to God and “keys to the kingdom” I have to agree with Brett this was and maybe still one of the best songs of the 90’s and while I have my first love “New Years Day” my heart does fill with love for the first time.

The First Time

I have a lover
A lover like no other
She got soul, soul, soul, sweet soul
And she teach me how to sing

Shows me colours when there’s none to see
Gives me hope when I can’t believe
That for the first time
I feel love

I have a brother
When I’m a brother in need
I spend my whole time running
He spends his running after me

When I feel myself going down
I just call and he comes around
But for the first time
I feel love

My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man’s cloak
Gave me the keys to his kingdom coming
Gave me a cup of gold

He said I have many mansions
And there are many rooms to see
But I left by the back door
And I threw away the key
And I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key

For the first time
For the first time
For the first time

I feel love

Lyrics/ Songs U2/Island Records

Does U2 still have relevance?

Bono / Nick Walker 2011Bono answers the tough questions with tough answers. U2 are about to release their most expansive reissue project yet, for 1991’s Achtung Baby (Super Deluxe Edition – the album where they traded in earnest uplift for funk, noise, sex, irony and self-doubt. So how does this lavish look back square with the band’s old lyric “You glorify the past when the future dries up”?

Reissuing 1991’s Achtung Baby (Super Deluxe Edition) with a new companion documentary wasn’t an easy decision for a forward-looking band averse to rearview glances, says Edge, 50. “How big a deal do we make of an anniversary when we’re in the middle of what we’re doing now? We had a hard time figuring that out. We’re not a heritage act. We’re still very active. But this record was so pivotal that we felt it was OK to revisit it.”

“I’m not so sure the future hasn’t dried up,” says Bono, who’s been irritating his bandmates lately by publicly questioning U2’s relevance – despite the fact that they just finished the highest-grossing tour of all time. “The band are like, ‘Will you shut up about being irrelevant?’” he says. But Bono can’t help himself – even though U2 have been in and out of the studio with various producers recently, he raises the possibility that the band may have released its final album. “We’d be very pleased to end on No Line on the Horizon ,” he says, before acknowledging the unlikelihood of that scenario: “I doubt that.”

Bono concedes that revisiting the album where U2 punched themselves out of a tight corner – after 1988’s Rattle and Hum Movie and album helped convince some music fans they were hopelessly solemn and pompous – suggested a way forward. “Ironically, being forced to look back at this period reminds me of how we might re-emerge for the next phase,” says Bono. “And that doesn’t mean that you have to wear some mad welder’s goggles or dress up in women’s clothing. Reinvention is much deeper than that.”

Moving forward has never been easy for U2, as chronicled in the outtakes, B sides and early versions of Achtung songs unearthed for a new box set – and set forth in moving detail in From the Sky Down, a documentary about Achtung Baby’s genesis by It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim. The movie, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival, makes it clear that trying to find a new sound led to what the Edge calls “a potentially career-ending series of difficulties.” In tracing the creation of “One,” the film also reveals that lyrics such as “We’re one, but we’re not the same” are as much about the band’s fraught brotherhood as anything else. “I thought [Achtung Baby] was a really supercool moment in a not always supercool life,” Bono says with a laugh, “and [Guggenheim] goes and makes an uncool film about us!”

Bono / Nick Walker 2011 Rattle and Hum, and the horn-section-and-B.B.-King-accompanied Lovetown Tour that followed, were U2’s rootsiest moment. But for a band whose actual roots were in late-Seventies post-punk, the cowboy hats and denim were starting to chafe. The Edge was listening to My Bloody Valentine,  Nine Inch Nails and Einstürzende Neubauten, while also noting the fusion of rock and dance coming out of Manchester, with groups like the Stone Roses. “I always remember the intense embarrassment when I happened to be in a club and a generous-spirited DJ would put on one of our tunes from the War album,” the Edge says. “It was so evident we had never been thinking about how it would go down in clubs. So we just wanted to stretch ourselves in the area of rhythm and backbeat and groove.”

The band recorded the bulk of the album in Berlin’s Hansa Studios , just as Germany was reunifying – and as co-producer Brian Eno wrote, aesthetic guidelines soon emerged: “Buzzwords on this record were trashy, throwaway, dark, sexy and industrial.” “We found it was more interesting to start from an extreme place,” says the Edge.

Hence the buzz-saw guitars that kick off the opening track, “Zoo Station ,” followed by a blast of Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums distorted almost beyond recognition. “Some of the extreme sounds weren’t achieved with sophisticated, outboard equipment, dialed in carefully,” says the Edge. Instead, they simply overloaded their vintage recording console. “It was literally, ‘What happens if you try to go to 11?’” says the guitarist.

Adam Clayton / Nick Walker 2011 For the band, rediscovering the wildly different lyrics and arrangements on the early “kindergarten” versions of the songs was revelatory – “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” for instance, sounds like an Irish folk tune. “The first time the paint goes on the canvas is a very, very exciting moment,” says Bono. He was intrigued by a line in the early “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” that recasts its story as a “parasitic” love affair (“Your innocence I’ve experienced”), while the Edge is convinced the more restrained vocal melody on that version is superior to the released track.

One of the more intriguing outtakes, “Down All the Days,” has the same backing track as “Numb,” from U2’s 1993 follow-up, Zooropa, with Bono singing an entirely different song. “It’s this quite unhinged electronic backing track with a very traditional melody and lyrics,” says the Edge. “It almost worked.”

Meanwhile, U2’s future plans are not set. “It’s quite likely you might hear from us next year, but it’s equally possible that you won’t,” says the Edge. Adds Bono, “We have so many [new] songs, some of our best. But I’m putting some time aside to just go and get lost in the music. I want to take my young boys and my wife and just disappear with my iPod Nano and some books and an acoustic guitar.”

Read more about Bono’s interview in the new issue of Rolling Stone

Rumors contiue of the end of U2, over the next few days we will revisit some of the rumors and lay to rest some thoughts of the future that lay on the past.

"we should just f*** off"

BRIAN BOYD

‘Achtung Baby’ was the making of U2. As the album is rereleased after 20 years, alongside a film about the band, Bono and Edge recall the turmoil that surrounded the recording and talk about their future

IT’S WHEN THREE glasses are raised to toast “12-step programmes” that you realise perhaps one too many cocktails has been taken. It’s a bar in Toronto and the caipirinhas were Bono’s idea, with Edge not slow to get his round in. “If we don’t come up with a very good reason to make a new album, we should just f*** off,” says Bono. “Why does anyone need a new U2 album?”

For the first time in their 35-year career the notoriously “faster, stronger, higher” band have put the brakes on and taken a long look in the rear-view mirror. A new film about the band, From the Sky Down , documents how their huge success in the 1980s provoked a bout of self-loathing and almost broke up the band as they struggled to stay true to their vision of a band forged in the white heat of Dublin’s punk/new wave movement.

To mark the 20th-anniversary rerelease of their key Achtung Baby album, U2 had a rush of blood to the head. They decided to open their archives and cede editorial control to the Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim to make a film ostensibly about the troubled gestation period of Achtung Baby . The result was something very different.

“Watching From the Sky Down the first time made for painful viewing. I hated it,” says Bono. “U2 never look back. It’s never been what this band is about. Edge will tell you that when we put together our best-of collections he forced me – actually had to physically force me – to listen to them before they went out. I’ve never been interested in what we have done. I’m interested only in what we’re about to do. But I think there comes a time when it actually becomes dysfunctional not to look into the past, and for the Achtung Baby album we made an exception.

“The film is not about us per se. It’s about how bands function – or, in this case, don’t function. But when I saw it first I just saw these four people talking intensely about their music, and, really, does the world need that at this time? Davis didn’t tell us he was going into our past to put a context on what really happened to the band after the success of The Joshua Tree and how bad things were in Berlin when we started to make Achtung Baby . He didn’t tell us because we wouldn’t have agreed. Now that I’ve seen it a few times I realise it is actually about the creative process. Let’s face it, the era of rock music is going to end soon, and if you are interested in rock music and rock bands you’ll be interested in their internal dynamics: what makes a rock band tick, the tribal aspect, the idea of the clan. The irony for me now is that we made Achtung Baby to set fire to our earnestness and now here’s this very earnest film about the making of the album.

“We held back nothing from Davis. We opened up our archives to him and he really had carte blanche. The first time I saw it I was going, ‘Oh no, no, no,’ and I went to him and made a few suggestions as to the changes I wanted. There was no battle of wills. He just didn’t even get into a discussion with me. He didn’t change anything. But I was looking at it, going, ‘Why is this film talking about Cedarwood Road [where he grew up], the Baggot Inn and my grandmother? I thought we were making a film about the Achtung Baby album. What is going on here?’ ”

What is going on in the film is a look at how a band who shared musical DNA with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire ended up sitting at music’s high table alongside Elton John and Dire Straits – but without the AOR table manners. A generation before Nirvana dragged alt-rock into the musical and media mainstream, this punk-theatric band ended up on the cover of Time magazine, in April 1987, as “Rock’s Hottest Ticket” and selling out arenas around the world.

Disgusted with the idea of being rock idols and disillusioned by their stadium-rock billing, they were at breaking point. “We were carrying Catholic guilt around – the sin of success,” says Bono. “We had emerged from playing with The [Virgin] Prunes and hanging around the Project Arts Centre getting mime lessons from Mannix Flynn. And the context here is that the musical scene we came from had this very Maoist music press. There were certain canon laws: thou shalt not go platinum; thou shalt not play in a stadium or an arena; thou shalt not go to America; thou shalt not be careerist. If you even thought about those things you had committed a sin.”

DESPERATE NOT TO turn into a cigarette-lighter-in-the-air stadium-rock band, U2 boarded the last flight to East Berlin just before Germany reunified, in 1990. It was one of the harshest Berlin winters, their recording studio, Hansa, was a former SS ballroom, their hotel was rubbish and they had no songs. “On a scale of one to 10 we were at a nine for breaking up,” says Bono.

For Edge, U2 were over the moment they walked into Hansa – or, at least, Rattle and Hum U2 were over. “It would have been insanity for us to have stayed in Rattle and Hum mode; that was a wonderful, great little aside, but it was never who we really were,” says the guitarist. “Who we really are is all about the future and innovation. We were getting a bit purist and a bit ‘disciplist’ about roots music, but we needed to become disciples of what is coming next. I arrived in Berlin with drum machines and loops, telling everyone what was happening in Manchester,” he says, referring to the Hacienda nightclub and to The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, among other bands. “I was also big into industrial music, but the producer of the album, Danny Lanois, was going, ‘Okay, this all sounds interesting, but show us where it’s going musically.’ And I couldn’t.”

Things deteriorated rapidly. As Bono has it, while outside they were tearing down the Berlin Wall, U2 were building their own wall inside Hansa. On one side were the so-called traditionalists: Adam, Larry and Lanois; on the other, Bono and Edge were throwing club- culture and dance-rhythm shapes. Bono had always felt aggrieved that whenever a club DJ would play a U2 song, it would empty the dance floor. He wanted to make U2’s music sexy.

“To Danny Lanois, from his perspective, we were kindred spirits to his love of roots music,” says Edge. “He loved the organic feel to our music, the material that was on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree . But no one knew how to make the bits of new material we had into U2 songs. The first two weeks were a nightmare. Everything we tried would just nosedive. It got to the stage where we lost trust in each other … and there was a clear dilemma.

“There were options: one was to see whether U2 could absorb new material and make it their own, or whether U2 as a band were inflexible and couldn’t stretch. The other option was to throw out all the material, start again and … extend the line-up or bring in other musicians.”

With the band having to take some very hard decisions about continuing to flail around in the studio or just cancelling everything, a deus ex machina arrived in the shape of the discarded second bridge from a song called Sick Puppy (later renamed Mysterious Ways ). That bridge was shaped into the intro for a new song, One . “As soon as One came into that room it stabilised everything,” says Bono. “Everyone just sort of surrendered after we had that. By surrendering, we got over the hump.”

With a song to anchor the album, they returned to Dublin for Christmas and finished off the album in a rented house in Dalkey, in south Co Dublin.

Released in 1991, and hailed as a triumphant reinvention, Achtung Baby sold more than 20 million copies. It remains their most important album, and the resulting tour, Zoo TV, changed how live rock music would be presented and experienced.

It’s dark outside in Toronto now, and an interview that began in sunshine has gone way over time. There’s just one more thing. It may well be an act of lese-majesty, but here goes: one possible interpretation of the film, Bono, is that, without Edge, you’d still be in the Baggot Inn. “Sure,” he says, nodding.

“That’s a lovely thing to say,” says Edge. “But I don’t think that’s true. It’s symbiotic. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without Bono, and I think that’s reciprocal. He makes me great. I help him to be great.”

Before they descend into you’re-my-best-friend territory, we slip away. Bono is saying, “Being in U2 is like being in the priesthood. There’s only one way out. And that’s in a coffin.”

Happy Birthday The Edge

The Edge / NIck Walker 2011 David Howell Evans (born 8 August 1961), more widely known by his stage name The Edge (or just Edge), is a musician best known as the guitarist, keyboardist, and backing vocalist of the Irish rock band U2. A member of the group since its inception, he has recorded 12 studio albums with the band and has released one solo record. As a guitarist, The Edge has crafted a minimalistic and textural style of playing. His use of a rhythmic delay effect yields a distinctive ambient, chiming sound that has become a signature of U2’s music.

The Edge was born in England to a Welsh family, but was raised in Ireland after moving there as an infant. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he formed U2 with his fellow students and his older brother Dik. Inspired by the ethos of punk rock and its basic arrangements, the group began to write its own material. They eventually became one of the most popular acts in popular music, with successful albums such as 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby.

Over the years, The Edge has experimented with various guitar effects and introduced influences from several genres of music into his own style, including American roots music, industrial music, and alternative rock. With U2, The Edge has also played keyboards, co-produced their 1993 record Zooropa, and occasionally contributed lyrics. The Edge met his second and current wife, Morleigh Steinberg, through her collaborations with the band.

As a member of U2 and as an individual, The Edge has campaigned for human rights and philanthropic causes. He co-founded Music Rising, a charity to support musicians affected by Hurricane Katrina. He has collaborated with U2 bandmate Bono on several projects, including songs for Roy Orbison and Tina Turner, and the soundtracks to the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and the Royal Shakespeare Company London’s stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine placed him at number 24 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.