It’s one of music’s most enduring anomalies. How is it that four old school pals from Dublin are still selling out stadiums after quarter of a century when most of their post-punk contemporaries have long since stumbled off into the wilderness? There were tantalising clues at Hampden Park last week, the only Scottish date in U2’s nine-month Vertigo tour, when the biggest band in the world emerged cheerily into the gaze of 75,000 fans like old friends coming through an airport arrival gate. In a sense we’d all grown up together: Adam Clayton, touting his bottle-green bass, Larry Mullen Jr on drums, and then the first shards of guitar from the Edge, all ‘tache and benny hat like a Belarussian hitman. When Bono lit the touchpaper with his numerically challenged “Uno, dos, tres, catorce . . . ”, suddenly the whole stadium was pogoing to Vertigo as if they’d never got middle-aged and settled down.
The staging was a little less elaborate than previous tours — no giant billiard balls or lemons or flying Trabants. Initially, images of the four band members were simply projected onto the speaker stacks, while Bono strode through the crowds on catwalks to shower water or steal occasional kisses. Then, during City of Blinding Lights, the back wall of the stage exploded into colour and light, taking the show to another level with office-block-sized animations of strafing F16s or flickering slogans.
The 2½-hour set showcased the best new material from How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb alongside rare 1980s gems such as The Electric Co and popular standards. Running to Stand Still, originally a song about drug addiction, became a birthday tribute to the imprisoned Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, testimony to the band’s ability to bring new cultural relevance out of old work. Where the Streets Have No Name had similarly morphed into a hymn to Africa, part of Bono’s campaign for the Make Poverty History marches and Live 8 concerts.
“Six thousand African people are dying every day of a mosquito bite,” he announced, as African flags cascaded down the screen behind him. “That’s not acceptable at the start of the 21st century, we’ve got to fix stuff like that, this year. This is our moment, our time.”
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Such campaigning has always divided the jury on this showman-missionary. But the audience lapped it up, applauding his sometimes fumbling entreaties. Another side of Bono was on show in Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own, when he sang with raw emotion about his dead father, eyes naked for once without his trademark wrap-around shades.
This ability to pan from the international to the personal, from the raucous to the lyrical, is what gives the band such range and subtlety. The anthems may stick in the mind, but quieter lyrics are often more interesting: “Freedom has a scent like the top of a new born baby’s head”.
Ultimately U2 succeed because it’s about something bigger than the music. “Take me to church now!” joked Bono during I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For — but in a sense we were there already. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, which got the biggest roar of approval, he wore a headband adorned with a crescent moon, the Star of David and a crucifix. “Father Abraham, what have we done?” he sang confessionally to the progenitor of all three religions. On the vast screen above him, the symbols arranged themselves to form the word “coexist”.
Cynics may find this stuff cringe-making, but Bono gets away with it, unashamed to rekindle the youthful idealism of his audience. After a rapturous encore, I found myself thinking the unthinkable: that U2 may yet make goodness fashionable.