2 Months into the European Leg Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Walls is the last stop before heading to America's. Couple of the video highlights. Noteworthy was Bono playing the guitar during Bad.
Tour Moves on to America and the U2 TOUR FANS Hot line is ready Call/SMS (513) 360-TOUR (8687)
Now that Europe has been completed and the boys are settled in for the short hop across the pound to start their America tour leg. Last nights show followed the same grand order of the rest of the shows. We have our videos, currently reviewing prior to posting them on our Youtube channel. Turn to channel U2TOURFANS. Also we have launched a new U2 TOUR FANS hotline(513) 360 TOUR. Anyone can call in, send a SMS, Photo, Video or leave comments. We mean anyone, Bono, The Edge, Larry or Adam feel free to drop us a call too. (513) 360-TOUR
Encore
Remember North America is right around corner
(513) 360 TOUR
We will have videos, stories, photos from the show as we report thru out the concert. You can follow us via twitter @U2TOURFANS as well see our youtube channel U2TOURFANS
If you attending the concert check out our hotline number and send an SMS from the show, which can include a photo or audio file. Next stop AMERICA !
U2 will tour Australia in 2011, leaving its concert stage behind as a gift.
Mark Fisher, who designed the stage, inadvertently announced the band's plan to visit Australia.
Fisher has built three super-structures for U2's 360 Tour.
"My vision . . . is we will turn them into permanent concert pavilions and leave them around the world," he said.
"For example, we will finish one part of the tour in Australia and another in
Mr Fisher said U2 would donate the stages, which hold 180 tonnes of equipment.
U2's Australian tour promoter, Michael Coppel, said no local tour dates were confirmed.
But industry sources said U2 would perform in Australia in 2011.
Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield The U2 360 Tour went out live on air to millions of radio listeners in the UK and around the world to U2.com subscribers with a live audio stream. The stream was not without a couple of bumps in the road. If you follow us on twitter you knew that the show was about 20 to 25 minutes into it before online fans had started listening to the first note. However knowing that millions of U2.com fans had logged on and briefly slowed the site to a halt the stream sounded wonderful. It as electric as some of the tweets suggested.
The first show at Don Valley was back May 1980 remember the Tick Tock Tour? Of course Z00 TV made its grand entrance June 92.
It was sort of a birthday present for Willie Williams (Show Designer) has the band and 45,000 fans sang Happy Birthday to Sheffield's own.
One of the highlights: ’Where are we going?’ Bono asked, as the band introduced ’Magnificent’. ’Rotherham, Manchester?’ Sheffield was the northern town he was looking for and Sheffield gave the penultimate night of the European 360 Tour a show to remember.If you attended the show, or listened on-line tell us your thoughts.
Now, its on o Cardiff and over the horizon North America calls in September where the shows are yet to be sold out.
Remember to follow us via twitter.com/u2tourfans - Enjoy the show video channel on youtube.com/u2tourfans -
About 120,000 people are to descend on the city of Glasgow for a major concert and football match.
Celtic play Arsenal in a Champions League game in Parkhead in the east end while rock band U2 perform at Hampden Park on the city's south side.
Free shuttle buses are being laid on to help fans attending the U2 concert in Glasgow on Tuesday in a bid to ease traffic congestion.
Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) said 20 buses would run from Buchanan Bus Station to Queens Drive, near Hampden, in the city's south side.
The concert is taking place on the same night as Celtic's Champion's League home match against Arsenal.
Both events will see up to 110,000 at Glasgow two largest stadiums.
SPT said the buses would run from 1700 BST onwards from four dedicated stances at Buchanan Bus Station.
U2's 360 tour flits, meekly, between old hits and tracks from the current, rather lame, album
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Is it a crab? Is it a spaceship? Is it a physical representation of the ego of Bono Vox? Whatever it is, it dwarfs the borough of Brent, almost reaching the Wembley arch. Everyone has their own theory on exactly what U2's much-discussed stage set actually resembles. For me, it's one of those claw-like grabbers from a machine in a seaside arcade. The ones that hover tantalisingly over some leftover piece of pop-cultural detritus from the semi-recent past (a Flat Eric, a Teletubby, a Bart Simpson if you're lucky), then deliver nothing.
Yeah yeah, Cheap Metaphors R Us. But if you could drag-and-drop your ideal U2, which would it be? The earnest, scuff-booted youths of Boy? The stetsoned authenticists of Rattle & Hum? The late-comer ironists of Zoo TV? The global statesmen of the past decade? Probably not today's corporate pimps for BlackBerry, whose streetwalkers accost you the length of Bobby Moore Way, but hey.
Personally, I'd take a mischievous Macphisto with a soupçon of "The Unforgettable Fire" sincerity, and it's that song which provides the only real shivers of the night. That was the last time U2 tapped into the dizzy mystery of their one-time peers – Associates, Talk Talk, Blue Nile – and a glimpse of an alternate U2 that could have been, if they'd stayed away from the bloody cacti.
Most of the time, the 360 tour flits between the familiar hits and current album No Line on the Horizon which, once you've stopped sniggering at the drug innuendo of the title, is pretty lame. Bono tries so hard, bless him, in his leather jacket and Gucci shades, desperately trying to match the Dylans and Lou Reeds and Patti Smiths on his shoulder with lines about feeling "like loose electricity while the band in my head plays a striptease", or dropping in ad-libs from Primal Scream's "Movin' On Up", Frankie's "Two Tribes" and The Clash's "London Calling" in an attempt to recoup some cool-by-association. "I think something special could happen tonight," he says optimistically at the scene of his big mulleted Live Aid moment, but it never quite comes.
The stage, at least, is fairly cool. Not quite as sci-fi in the flesh as it looked on Wossy, but the giant mirror-ball effect is quite something, and it's undeniably a step forward from Bowie's Glass Spider, which I saw in the old Wembley two decades ago, whose legs resembled eight scaled-up lengths of mobile disco rope light.
Its sheer scale allows Stumpy Hewson (as you can see, I've remained untouched by the Bono charm offensive which has muddled the judgement of other, usually reliable critics), his garden labourer on guitar and the Other Two to play so far apart they may as well be on separate continents, their wanderings assisted by moving radial walkways. Give it a couple of tours and they'll be Stannah stairlifts.
The "special" moment almost arrives. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" sidesteps Partridge-based hilarity by being updated into a tribute to detained Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi (complete with masks). Then Bono blows it all by leaving us with "Moment of Surrender", which boasts one of the worst lyrics in living memory. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: "I was speeding on the subway through the Stations of the Cross ..."
At first I was afraid, I was petrified. It was 8.30pm, N-Dubz stage time minus one hour, and the street leading to the Opera House is already like a scene from Shaun of the Dead. Booze-battered blokes stagger around paralytically, on a knife edge between picking a fight and wetting themselves. The faint whiff of menace is in the air.
Then it dawns that these zonked-out zombies are merely the background noise of Bournemouth at the height of the holiday season, and N-Dubz's actual crowd is the far younger, more excitable throng outside the doorway, hyped up on alcopops, turning cartwheels and yelling at the stewards. I experience a Burchillian glow at the sight of "my people" enjoying themselves (in the knowledge that, were I the same age, they wouldn't be "my people" at all). What's not to love?
N-Dubz hysteria has spread far beyond the London borough of Camden whose NW1 postcode provided their name, and reached kids with yokel burrs in places like Bournemouth. I use "kids" advisedly: this audience is barely too old for panto. The reason why, with the exception of the self-fulfilling prophecy "Number 1", N-Dubz singles invariably stall outside the Top 20 is because nobody over 20 buys them.
The man fronting their rap-soul fusion, which resides at the far "pop" end of the grime spectrum, is Dappy, aka Dino Contostavlos. He is also the group's prime scream-bait, despite the handicap of that Peruvian hat which makes him look like he's trying to smuggle an Easter egg. His songbird cousin Tulisa and co-rapper Fazer complete the trio.
People of Greek origin making music of black origin? (N-Dubz won a Mobo this year.) It may strike some as a bit Ali G, but having lived in the vicinity of Camden for 20 years, I know it's the most natural thing on earth. The subjects they rhyme about – untimely deaths, untold amounts of weed, shagging – are the authentic chitter-chatter of the N29 night bus.
There's also a little poison – on one song, Dappy disses a "bisexual prick" and blames him for spreading Aids – but a little marketable homophobia never did Eminem any harm. Despite this, it's all strangely family friendly. There's a bit of larking about in boxing robes to the "Eye of the Tiger" riff, and Dappy gets the crowd to chant "Fazer is a plonker". They stop just short of soliciting a "He's behind you!!!".
Whatever your preconceptions, N-Dubz's urban panto is fun for all ages .... Oh yes it is!
U2 payed a special tribute to convicted Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi last night (August 15) after her prison sentence was recently extended.
The Dublin four-piece have heavily campaigned for her release for the last nine years and even penned the Grammy award winning single 'Walk On', taken from their 2000 album 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', in her name.
Ms Suu Kyi won the Burmese elections in 1990 with the National League for Democracy but was never allowed to take power and has been under house arrest ever since.
She was due to be freed but her sentence was extended for a further 18 months last week when she let a US national, John Yettaw, into her lakeside home after he swam there uninvited, preventing her from taking part in elections scheduled for 2010.
U2 singer Bono told a crowd of 88,000 at Wembley Stadium during the second night of their 360° Tour of the UK: "An extradordinary woman has spent 20 years under house arrest. Her only crime is if she had run for election she would won have that election.
"Her name is Aung San Suu Kyi. I send a prayer from London to Burma for her safety."
The frontman then urged the crowd to don masks of the pro-democracy leader, which were handed out during the gig, as the band launched into 'Walk On' while volunteers marched onstage with her face on.
The band played a mammoth two hour set under their giant 'claw' stage as they blasted through a host of their greatest hits plus seven tracks from their recent album 'No Line On The Horizon' including an elecro version of 'I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight'.
U2 also revisited some old classics including 'The Unforgettable Fire', which has only recently been showcased on their world tour for the first time in over 20 years, and 'Ultraviolet (Light My Way)' which saw Bono firing off red laser beams from his jacket while he swang across the stage on a circular microphone.
Later the whole stadium also belted out the words to fan favourites 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' and 'Pride (In The Name Of Love)' while the likes of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey and Mel C watched the show from the sidelines.
Bono was on jovial form throughout the show often throwing in snatches of tracks by The Rolling Stones, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Black Grape mid-song.
He also paid tribute to the city of London on numerous occasions and joked: "If you want our claw for the Olympic Games we'll give you a good deal when the tour finishes."
The band rounded off the show with a poignant rendition of 'One' before Bono urged the crowd to lift up their mobile phones and light up the stadium for closing track 'Moment Of Surrender.
Set List
'Breathe'
'No Line On The Horizon'
'Get On Your Boots'
'Magnificent'
'Beautiful Day'
'Until The End Of The World'
'New Year's Day'
'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For'
'Stay'
'Unknown Caller'
'The Unforgettable Fire'
'City Of Blinding Lights'
'Vertigo'
'I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight (Remix)'
'Sunday Bloody Sunday'
'Pride (In The Name of Love)'
'MLK'
'Walk On'
'Where The Streets Have No Name'
'One'
'Bad'
'Ultraviolet (Light My Way)'
'With Or Without You'
'Moment of Surrender'