bono 360 tour

Bono’s injury and U2’s shrinking tour

The 360 shows were the highest-grossing tour of all time. the irish band’s new one, innocence + experience, is a series of intimate indoor gigs. the industry will be watching the audience reaction – and the stage performance of post-bike-crash bono.

U2 frontman Bono flings water at the crowd during the band’s first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver. Photograph: Jonathan Hayward/AP

Two things bring U2 out in a cold sweat: a new album and a new tour. The band's detractors came out in force last September, when U2 gave away their current album, Songs of Innocence , on iTunes. When U2's new world tour begins, in Vancouver on Thursday, they will be ready to pounce if even a single cue is missed. And they'll be doing so not only in the music press but also in the business pages. The last U2 concert tour was the highest-grossing of all time, with the 7.2 million tickets bringing in $736 million (€653 million) in sales.

But that tour – 360 – took place in stadiums, sometimes to crowds of 80,000 or 90,000 a night. This one, Innocence + Experience – or, as U2 prefer, iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE – will stay indoors and play to just 20,000 people a night. Running until August in North America and from September until November in Europe, it involves 70 dates in 20 cities. (Reports this week that the tour will come to 3Arena, in Dublin, in December are untrue. The band will play Dublin, but no dates have been confirmed.)

An issue that will hang over Thursday night’s gig in Vancouver is Bono’s health. Since a serious cycling injury last November, in Central Park in New York, the singer has been struggling for fitness. – The injury was far worse than he admitted at the time. He broke his arm in six places and fractured his eye socket, hand and shoulder blade. As of this week he has a titanium elbow and still can’t bend two of the fingers on his left hand; his injuries are so bad that he may never play the guitar again.

All eyes are on the frontman at a rock show. Bono has always been an exuberant stage presence, and fans and industry watchers will be keeping a close eye on his mobility next week.

Those at the gigs will also be in for very different kind of U2 live show. A single light bulb is the opening image of the performance in Vancouver on May 14th. The band’s most stripped-down show yet begins by taking audiences inside Bono’s bedroom at 10 Cedarwood Road in Finglas.

Under that bulb a teenage Bono listens to the music that made him want to be in a band: songs by The Ramones and The Clash. As the narrative-driven show progresses, the audience see them play their first shows in London and make their first trip to the US.

The first half of what sounds like something approaching an autobiographical musical will focus on their “innocence”. In the second half – this is the band’s first show with an interval – U2 move from the main stage via a giant walkway to the opposite end of the arena, to play on a second, “experience” stage.

It’s a high-concept idea that is not without risks, and the band have been in Vancouver for a month, putting in long rehearsal days.

Waning box-office appeal?

Do the shrinking venues signify waning box-office appeal? To an extent, but U2 never expected to replicate the success of the 360 tour. At the time the band were in a long tussle with The Rolling Stones for the Most Successful Tour Ever accolade. Winning that battle remains one of their proudest achievements.

U2 say now that it was always the plan to scale down and go indoors with this tour. That could sound like spin were it not for the fact that the confessional and autobiographical songs of their current album suits a more intimate show.

The band are playing at least two shows in each city of their tour. The initial idea was to follow the first night’s largely acoustic Innocence show with the second’s largely electric Experience show. That plan was scrapped in case fans at either show felt they were missing out.

The first half of each concert will now be largely the same, but the second half will vary. The band will play hits but rework some of them for the smaller stage.

In a sonic innovation, the sound system will be placed on the ceiling of the venue, so that the music falls downwards, and evenly, on audiences. It’s a risk, but the band are trusting that it will work.

As the fuss over the unconventional release of last September's album begins to recede, nerves have steadied in Vancouver this week with a New York Times report that the tour has already sold 98 per cent of its 1.2 million tickets, including six nights in a row at Madison Square Garden, in New York.

The band are also travelling with a mobile recording unit, so they can finish their next album, Songs of Experienc e . While Songs of Innocence focused largely on their early Dublin days, the new album is expected to explore the band's experiences in the 1980s, such as the Live Aid concert and the Joshua Tree album.

Uncertainties remain over the tour. Although no dates have been announced beyond November this year it is possible that the tour will go outdoors, into stadiums, during 2016, with a return to the US, more European dates and, possibly, additional legs in South America and Australasia. This wait-and-see approach is not unusual at this level of the live-music business.

Hometown shows

The reluctance to confirm Irish shows is more of a surprise, not only because

Songs of Innocence

is, as Bono puts it, “a Dublin-centric album” but also because the hometown shows are the ones the band look forward to most. It’s possible that U2 and their management plan to assess Bono’s fitness in the early shows before committing to a Dublin venue.

Next year marks 40 years since the band formed in Larry Mullen’s kitchen – it was September 1976. They remain a bundle of contradictions: a band forged in the white heat of punk and new wave who dispensed with the pieties of that scene to chase the big time.

Despite the 150 million albums they have sold, the biggest tour of all time, and a record 22 Grammy Awards, U2's tense, nervous headaches never abate. The band are insecure, prone to bouts of musical self-loathing yet also convinced that one of these days they will be able to write a song as sublimely perfect as The Ronettes' Be My Baby or The Clash's (White Man) I n Hammersmith Palais .

Given the physical battering Bono has taken, not to mention what Mullen has put his body through drumming over the years, it would have been easy for the band to cash in their chips and go out on a lucrative greatest-hits tour before retiring. But five days away from a new tour they’re up all night, struggling over setlists, making last-minute changes and reworking entire sections of the show. A lot’s riding on that single light bulb.

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The tech behind U2's record-smashing tour

The U2 360 concerts are huge by any measure. But on Sunday, with what may have been the largest live-stream ever, the tour got even bigger.

PASADENA, Calif.--If you were one of the 96,000 people packed into the Rose Bowl Sunday night for the U2 concert--said to be the largest concert ever held here--you were sharing the experience with at least a few other fans off-site.

There's no way to know yet how many exactly, but it's safe to say millions of people around the world were also watching the concert live on YouTube, a potentially server-crashing Webcast that may have been the biggest live-stream yet.

For months, the band has been on tour with its U2 360 concerts. And to top off the grand claims, it has been called the biggest rock tour in history , at least as measured by the size and cost of its infrastructure--more than $750,000 per show, according to Rolling Stone.

Only days ago, the band announced that it would share the Rose Bowl concert live , with fans across the globe. Just before the band came on stage, a roadie calling himself Rocco got up in front of the crowd of 96,000 and said, "Tonight, you are the ones making history," shouting out that those in attendance would be joined by viewers in "North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica."

Photos: U2 goes global via YouTube

For its part, YouTube wasn't sharing much about how it put together the live stream. Before the show started, there was some discussion among reporters on hand at the Rose Bowl about whether YouTube would be up to the task of delivering the show to so many people, live, on so many continents. But if Twitter is any judge , the live-stream went off almost without a hitch. More to the point, a Twitter feed set up on the official YouTube U2 page showcased comments in a wide variety of languages from Webcast viewers.

Back at the Rose Bowl, in an effort to rally the capacity crowd, the concert-goers were told why this show was chosen by YouTube: "Because right here is where the greatest singers of U2 songs are....Tonight, we need to hear your voices, and to hear you sing. Can you do it?"

In response, the crowd roared its agreement, and indeed, throughout U2's approximately two hours on stage, there were several emotional moments when U2 leader Bono stopped singing and let the audience take over the vocals. These were truly beautiful and awe-inspiring moments, as there is very little on Earth like the sound of nearly 100,000 people singing together.

Ironically, no connectivity These days, you can find out what's happening at just about any event by turning to Twitter. But at the Rose Bowl, this wasn't the case. It turned out that there was nearly no connectivity, and so there seemed to be a dearth of tweets sent from inside the concert. Still, because the show was being watched by millions of people around the world, there is certainly no shortage of posts on Twitter about what was happening.

That's an ironic turn of events, though, and not at all what I expected. I thought there would be a steady stream of tweets emanating from the Rose Bowl, and I had expected to send many of them myself. Instead, this highly tech-centric concert was ground zero for a disconnected audience. We were truly "stuck in the moment," to quote one of U2's hit songs, though I doubt anyone wanted to "get out of it."

A YouTube representative did tell me prior to the show that the service was using 24 cameras to film the concert, as well as 24 additional closed-circuit TV cameras. Further, he said YouTube was offering its stream at three different qualities, so that almost anyone could watch, regardless of the speed of their Internet connection.

Having YouTube produce such a major Webcast is fitting, given the size and scope of the U2 360 tour. Among its facts and figures are tidbits like this: the 360-degree stage--which allowed huge numbers of fans to watch from behind--featured a 90-foot-tall steel structure, topped by a center pylon reaching 150 feet in the air; the innovative video screen atop the stage weighs 54 tons, is 4,300 square feet when closed, and is 14,000 square feet when opened; the screen itself is comprised of more than a million pieces, including components to illuminate 500,000 pixels, as well as 320,000 fasteners, 30,000 cables and 150,000 machined pieces.

The incredible expanding screen The video screen, according to information provided by the band's publicists, is "broken into segments mounted on a multiple pantograph system, which enables the screen to 'open up' or spread apart vertically as an effect during different stages of the concerts."

I didn't think I'd ever seen such a thing before, and it just about made my jaw drop when I noticed it. Already, the screen was a sight to behold, but it didn't seem all that big, especially when I thought back to what I'd seen the band do with video during its U2 3D film.

Well, it turns out I was right: I hadn't seen anything like this before, and neither had anyone else who hadn't been to one of the U2 360 shows.

"The video screen is the first LED screen to be based on a geometric system that allows it to expand in two directions simultaneously," U2 360 architect Mark Fisher told CNET News in an e-mail interview. "Video screens are normally flat panels that track like closet doors, or slatted panels that roll up like garage doors. The 360 degree screen uses a scissor-like motion to expand in two directions. It starts as a solid elliptical ring approximately 20 feet deep, and transforms into form a cone-shaped mesh 60 feet tall."

Fisher added that this is the first time such technology--what he called "transforming geometry"--has been used to "change the shape of a video screen."

And while Fisher said that, in general, the technology behind U2 360 isn't in and of itself new, the way it's being used during the tour most certainly is.

"The show employs a large number of computers and electric motors to control the motion of the screen, and there are large numbers of computer-controlled moving lights," Fisher said. "The video on the screen is also created using powerful computers that 'map' the picture onto the transforming screen. All of this automation and programming is possible because the computers available in 2009 and more powerful, and cheaper, than they were when we created the Vertigo tour in 2005."

Google Earth Another piece of technology used for the tour--at least in a way that U2's fans can interact with--is Google Earth. Fisher explained that the stage's designers decided it would be fun for fans to see the huge structure on Google Earth.

"So we hooked up with the folks that run the operation, and they agreed to let us put 3D models of the stage into the 3D models of the stadiums where it plays," Fisher said. "The 360 degree stage is turned around in each stadium in six days (and) the models stay in each city on Google Earth for slightly longer."

On U2's official Web site, the band explained what is going on with the Google Earth project: "If you're following the tour as it moves around...there's a very cool new feature on Google Earth--a model of the 360 stage, in situ, at the venue, about a week ahead of each show."

The site also explained that the model that fans see could be red, green or blue, with each color corresponding to one of three "steel teams" that "leapfrog each other from city to city to build the stage in each stadium."

Fisher also weighed in on the site with the real reason why the band chose to implement Google Earth: "We thought it would be interesting to put up on Google Earth a piece of portable architecture, which is what this structure is," he wrote. "In a way it's got no practical purpose...except that it's fun!"

Bono: If U2's 360 Degree tour flopped it would have been bad news

Bono, who is at home recovering from major back surgery and has postponed his north american tour this summer, admitted that the band took a big risk using a futuristic spider-like stage in their 360 degree tour. the band created a stage that allowed viewing opportunities from every angel of a theater or stadium and spent millions of dollars in doing so. bono said: "had it flopped on the first night, we would have been in some deep doo-doo. "think about a rock show in 360 degrees with the scale of a gigantic action film, except you're moving location every few days. you're building a whole city, then knocking it down, putting it into trucks and moving. it's quite something. "you've got to try and give the audience, at the very least, something they've never seen before, or, maybe more importantly, something they haven't felt before." bassist adam clayton said that although the band agreed on the futurama stage it was bono's brainchild. he told the sun newspaper: "it was bono's vision, he's that kind of performer. i think the rest of us would be happy to stand on an old beer crate but he's the person working the stage." on the postponement of the north american tour, manager paul mcguinness said, "our biggest and i believe best tour has been interrupted and we're all devastated. for a performer who lives to be on stage, this is more than a blow. he feels robbed of the chance to do what he does best and feels like he has badly let down the band and their audience.".

Bono, who is at home recovering from major back surgery and has postponed his North American tour this summer, admitted that the band took a big risk using a futuristic spider-like stage in their 360 Degree tour. The band created a stage that allowed viewing opportunities from every angel of a theater or stadium and spent millions of dollars in doing so. Bono said: "Had it flopped on the first night, we would have been in some deep doo-doo. "Think about a rock show in 360 degrees with the scale of a gigantic action film, except you're moving location every few days. You're building a whole city, then knocking it down, putting it into trucks and moving. It's quite something. "You've got to try and give the audience, at the very least, something they've never seen before, or, maybe more importantly, something they haven't felt before." Bassist Adam Clayton said that although the band agreed on the futurama stage it was Bono's brainchild. He told The Sun newspaper: "It was Bono's vision, he's that kind of performer. I think the rest of us would be happy to stand on an old beer crate but he's the person working the stage." On the postponement of the North American tour, manager Paul McGuinness said, "Our biggest and I believe best tour has been interrupted and we're all devastated. For a performer who lives to be on stage, this is more than a blow. He feels robbed of the chance to do what he does best and feels like he has badly let down the band and their audience."

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U2's The Edge speaks out about Bono's condition, 360 Tour postponement

U2 's The Edge has issued a video statement in which he talks about Bono's back injury and surgery, which has forced the band to cancel their first-ever Glastonbury performance and postpone the next leg of their U2360 Tour.

Discussing the singer's surgery last Friday, Edge said jokingly, "I spoke to Bono immediately, like, a few hours after he came out of the operation, but he wasn't making any sense, I can tell you. Whatever he was on, he didn't remember any of the conversation, which is a shame because he promised me his car and various other valuables…a few paintings. But he claims not to remember that conversation."

As for what led up to Bono's back injury, which has been described as "a severe compression of the sciatic nerve, the guitarist said, "He was in a fairly intense program to be ready for the tour, so something in that preparation…maybe he just overdid it and hurt himself maybe without realizing it. It could have got worse. But luckily enough, he did realize, at a certain point, I think when he could no longer walk that actually he needed to go to the doctor."

Joking again, Edge said that "this is probably the most rest [Bono will] have had in decades, the few weeks after the operation. But the other thing we have to make sure is that he does follow the doctor's orders in terms of the program of the rehabilitation….So we'll be there to chain him down if need be."

Although U2 were looking forward to heading back on the road, Edge revealed that he is "already back at work on songwriting for the next U2 record. When we do get back out there we'll be in top condition and raring to go. That's our focus now."

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Joe is a freelance journalist who has, over the past few decades, interviewed hundreds of guitarists for  Guitar World ,  Guitar Player ,  MusicRadar  and  Classic Rock . He is also a former editor of  Guitar World , contributing writer for  Guitar Aficionado  and VP of A&R for Island Records. He’s an enthusiastic guitarist, but he’s nowhere near the likes of the people he interviews. Surprisingly, his skills are more suited to the drums. If you need a drummer for your Beatles tribute band, look him up.

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U2, Live From Outer Space: Launching the Biggest Tour of All Time

By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

A n Irish spaceship has landed in a Chicago football stadium, and its pilot is standing under a starless sky, barking mad orders into a microphone. “Take the astronauts’ voices out,” says Bono , his brogue echoing through 61,000 empty seats. “And if you could take Sinéad out of the first verse … the sonic boom needs to fade three times faster — it’s not a subtle thing, it’s a big change.”

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It’s less than 24 hours before the kickoff of U2 ‘s first U.S. stadium tour since 1997 — and as far as Bono is concerned, a perfectly good time to tear apart a section of the show. He’s fixated on an obscure song: “Your Blue Room,” a languid, atmospheric track from the band’s 1995 Passengers collaboration with Brian Eno. U2 have never even played it live, but tonight they’re trying to transform the tune into an elaborate production number, with newly recorded vocals from Sinéad O’Connor and video and audio shot aboard the International Space Station.

“We’re lucky,” says U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, watching the expensive effort unfold from a chair in front of the midfield production tent, “that they’re not doing it live from space.”

The actual setting is exotic enough: a four-clawed metal sci-fi cathedral that’s the biggest stage in rock & roll history — large enough to be seen from planes approaching the city. It’s almost a living thing, with moving ramps, constant exhalations of smoke and a constellation’s worth of rotating lighting rigs. Even the video screen performs tricks, stretching up and down like a Slinky — when Bono asks for it to retract, it does so instantly, rustling with the hum of a thousand bees.

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Up until now, the dress rehearsal had been going well, as the band tore through the first half of a two-hour set, playing to vacant cheap seats. The show — already polished in 24 European dates — begins with four songs in a row from the band’s latest album, No Line on the Horizon , before diving into the back catalog. But “Your Blue Room” is a mess, the song’s essence buried in astronaut chatter and other sound effects. What should be a haunting moment — a Belgian astronaut named Frank De Winne appears on the vast cylindrical video screen above the stage, reciting a spoken-word verse as he floats in zero gravity — isn’t registering. “That was not a pleasant experience,” Bono says, before hijacking the rehearsal to play the song again and again. His bandmates and the production team already spent an hour on the song the night before, and they know they’re in for the long haul when the singer asks for coffee from the stage. Even as they reshape the sound effects and video, Bono is writing a new bridge on the spot for the 14-year-old tune, improvising lyrics and melodies each time they run through it.

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Bono’s relentlessness has helped get U2 this far — while leading them off a PopMart-size cliff or two along the way. “Bono has to be Father Christmas for 70,000 people every night,” says longtime show director Willie Williams, “so it’s absolutely fair enough for him to lead the charge.” The rest of U2 roll with their singer’s tenacity with varying degrees of good humor. After they conclude a lengthy onstage huddle with Williams, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. cracks, “If it ain’t broke, break it.”

At stake is the biggest rock show of all time — and U2 seem entirely comfortable working at this scale. The monster stage is their workplace, as unremarkable to them as an office cubicle. But there’s no denying it: Thirty-three years after four Dublin teenagers first came together in Mullen’s parents’ kitchen, they have reached their summit. “We’re actually at the limit, the absolute limit, when you consider the economics and the practicality of transportation,” says the Edge . “We’re really as big as we could ever get.”

The size of the tour, in some ways, is the point — an argument for the value of rock megastardom itself. In a culture as divided musically as it is politically, U2 are offering themselves up as one thing to agree upon.

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“Your Blue Room” is meant to “tie the show together,” as Tom Krueger, who directs the show’s video content, puts it. The celestial imagery offers a reminder of the optimism about the future that the space program once represented — and the shots of Earth from space match the global perspective of a show that addresses AIDS in Africa and politics in Myanmar and Iran. (And the stage does look an awful lot like a spaceship — David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” even plays each night as the lights dim.) “Your Blue Room” is far from a hit, though, and hardly anyone’s idea of stadium rock — in each subsequent version, the band keeps trying to make it quieter, more seductive. “It’s a delicate thing,” Bono says. “The problem is, the song could sink a whole section of the set if it doesn’t work.” He’s ready to gamble and do it opening night, but the rest of the band is pushing for night two in Chicago. (The song ends up premiering on the second night — Bono, who watched the crowd closely, says he saw faces that were “rapt and a little mystified.”)

The goal, as usual, is elevation. U2 are trying to make art in football stadiums — to achieve what Bono calls “intimacy on a grand scale” — even if getting there takes $750,000 a day of overhead: a 170-ton stage, 200 trucks and the corresponding carbon offsets, nearly 400 tour employees, more than 250 speakers, 13 video cameras, Sinéad O’Connor and various astronauts. (Red guitar, three chords and the truth sold separately.)

The tour is also the latest skirmish in U2’s battle to prove that the biggest band in the world can also be the best — and that, despite relatively weak sales for No Line on the Horizon , their new material can stand up next to the old stuff. “What do you do if you’re in a band?” the Edge says. “Do you just keep your head down and sell loads of tickets and CDs around the world? Or do you try and engage and try and do something different?”

The band takes one last shot at “Your Blue Room,” and it’s all starting to click: churchy washes of organ, the Edge’s melancholy piano chords, spotlights on top of the stage converging in a pyramid in the sky, the closing image of the sun rising over Earth, which leads directly into “Unknown Caller,” with its opening lines “Sunshine, sunshine.” Bono is relieved, and the rehearsal moves on. “One giant step,” he says, “for a little man.”

O n their way to Chicago, U2 almost run into Lil Wayne. Five minutes before the band drives up to a private airport in Newark, New Jersey — it’s using New York as a home base for this leg — a shades-wearing Wayne and a small entourage walk along the tarmac to their own private plane, unaware that they’re missing a chance at a superstar summit.

The jet that U2 are using today is a loaner, while their usual one is being prepped — and it’s so opulent that even Wayne might find it gauche, with couches instead of chairs, dark, polished wood walls and a private anteroom or two. I’m sitting alone in one of those cabins, waiting for takeoff, when a figure appears in the doorway. “Tickets, please,” Bono says. He’s wearing a denim-on-denim outfit and gray shades slightly larger than his usual model. His hair is shorn brutally short on the sides — it looks like he has it trimmed every day, and he probably does.

As he straps himself into one of the plush seats, Bono is fascinated to learn of Lil Wayne’s proximity, and laughs when he’s reminded of a nine-year-old U2 lyric: “The last of the rock stars/When hip-hop drove the big cars.”

“We should buzz the plane by him,” Bono muses, “And yell, ‘We were only kidding.'”

The truth is, Bono — who is friends with Jay-Z and enlisted Will.i.am to do production work on No Line — relates to the bigger-is-better ethos of mainstream hip-hop a lot better than he does rock’s increasing tendency toward self-ghettoization. “I love the idea of what you might call a more porous culture, where there’s much more crosstown traffic,” Bono says. “Jay-Z is a pioneer. He’ll work with an indie band. He likes to be in places no one else has been.

“In this age of celebrity and pop stardom, maybe it’s a sensible thing to question the values of being a pop star,” Bono continues. “Radiohead, Pearl Jam, a lot of people, who maybe had much more sense than us, rejected it. But the thing that’s suffered from that stance was that precious, pure thing, what they used to call the 45. That new Pearl Jam song [“The Fixer”] — it’s brilliant. It’s got that attitude, like, ‘We want it.'”

The U2360° Tour makes a case for the idea of a vital mainstream, for the power of a stadium full of people taking off their earbuds to sing together. “How long can it last? I don’t know,” Bono says, pondering his band’s increasingly singular superstar status. “Most people are content in their ghetto, and their ghettos are big. I still hold on to this old-fashioned idea of the meta-event — meta goes across, it becomes more than it is.”

The show is an unlikely fusion of the two extremes of U2’s tours — the technological overload of 1992-93’s Zoo TV and the no-frills, bare-stage Elevation Tour. “This is our masterpiece,” says Williams, who’s been planning this tour since 2006, and comes along on every date to tweak the show as it goes. “It’s sort of the culmination of everything I’ve done with U2.” On the band’s plane one afternoon, he opens his MacBook and shows off iteration after iteration of architect Mark Fisher’s potential designs for the stage (which was known as the Claw until the spaceship idea settled in). One file has a “wheel of style,” with adjectives next to corresponding pictures of possible shapes: “domed, kinetic, spiky, pointy, archy, skeletal, wrapped.”

But the real point is that from the band’s perspective — which I get to see one day when I climb onstage during a soundcheck — the design elements of the stage all but disappear. What the musicians perceive instead is its openness, the in-the-round trick that gives the tour its “360” name — you can spin around and see every seat in the house. The sound system, lifted out of the crowd’s way thanks to the four-­pillared design, is the largest ever built for a tour — and four separate sets of speakers allow for the live equivalent of surround sound: Sound engineer Joe O’Herlihy gives Mullen’s drums and Adam Clayton’s bass an entire speaker column of their own, for instance.

Not incidentally, the design also means that, unlike any other stadium tour, every seat in the house can be filled — which is one reason why McGuinness says the tour is on track to be the highest-grossing of all time.

“Somebody asked us last night, ‘Do you need this stuff?'” says Clayton. “And the truth is, you don’t really need this stuff. But part of show business is you have to change people’s perceptions, you have to find ways to make the songs touch people more, to disorientate people so they’re more open to being touched.”

On the Elevation Tour, one month after September 11th, 2001, U2 played three of the most emotional shows of their career at Madison Square Garden, with the audience all around them. It’s that experience the band is trying to replicate, on a larger scale. “What happened was that the audience were looking at each other,” Bono says. “Saying, ‘We’ve come through this.’ That’s the magic trick. The rabbit out of the hat is to make the audience the star of the show.”

A month before Chicago, U2 are 17 dates deep into their European tour, and the Edge has exactly 10 minutes to play tourist in its most exotic port of call. He climbs into the back of a van outside his hotel for a drive through Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, to Maksimir Stadium, home of the nation’s greatest soccer team, and of tonight’s U2 concert. “This will be my Zagreb experience,” says the Edge, a smile crinkling the corners of his goatee. “It’s the one thing that’s strange about touring — you don’t get to see things.” As usual, he’s dressed in black — T-shirt with a geometric pattern on it, jeans, leather Converse, head-covering cap. On a silver chain around his neck hangs a razor blade with the words “Don’t Mess” carved into it.

It’s U2’s first-ever show in Zagreb, and the first time they’ve played in the once war-ravaged region since a dramatic Sarajevo show in 1997. Edge settles into his black leather seat and begins snapping pictures out the window. The sights of the now-flourishing city rush by: a statue of medieval king Tomislav on a horse; posters for recent concerts by Patti Smith and Dale Watson; clotheslines between buildings (they remind Edge of his Dublin childhood: “I remember clothespegs. Who buys clothespegs anymore?”); streetcars; and, to his amusement, a vast metal structure poking past the top of a dowdy sports stadium. “The view I got, it looks like just another building,” Edge says.

The van pulls into the venue’s loading dock, beside giant white tents set up for production offices and catering — it looks like a good-size festival is in town. Shaking hands as he goes, Edge walks through a concrete corridor, steps over thick, bound electrical cords and climbs the clanking steel stairs that lead to the top of U2’s stage, which looks almost comically garish in the daylight. He greets Dallas Schoo, his genial guitar tech, straps on the first of a series of guitars and begins a one-man soundcheck.

Schoo hands Edge a Rickenbacker, and he plays the intro of “Mysterious Ways” — which, upon close observation, consists merely of one seventh-fret barre chord, a couple of rhythmic scratches and two notes — but it’s enough to induce goose bumps when you hear that exact squelchy, sexy sound from Achtung Baby come directly out of Edge’s four modest amplifiers. As Edge begins adjusting his guitar’s settings and punching the 36 buttons on the pedal board at his feet, Schoo whips out a digital camera and photographs the positions of the knobs and switches on the guitar.

To give him freedom to roam the vast expanse of the stage, Edge is using a Garth Brooks-style headset mike for his backing vocals and also allowing Schoo to control his guitar effects — the tech has a duplicate of Edge’s board under the stage.

But Edge keeps wandering back to his own board at stage right, tweaking settings. It’s not unusual, Schoo says with some awe, for Edge to create new combinations of effects midsong in front of a full stadium, and then hit “save” to create a preset. “I’m so particular about guitar sounds, because it is the identity of the song in many cases,” Edge says. He half-grins, half-winces at this uncharacteristic moment of immodesty, and revises himself: “a large part of the identity of the song.”

W hether it’s Zagreb, London or Chicago, every show begins roughly the same way: a segment of “Kingdom of Your Love” — an unreleased U2 song with a pulsing beat and choral vocals — blares over the PA, and Mullen struts out onstage alone. A single spotlight shines on the drummer while he plays an extended whirl of tom-toms, snare and cymbal that serves as an intro to the No Line track “Breathe,” a sort of power waltz with Dylanesque verses and a chorus that’s as U2-anthemic as it gets. Mullen’s bandmates join him one by one — Bono pops up last, yanking his mike stand back as if it’s a crank that makes the band go.

“It’s amazing to walk out when the audience is expecting Bono,” says Mullen, over a dinner of rice and vegetables at a picnic table outside the catering tent before one of the Zagreb shows. “I’ve been waiting 35 years for the drum solo. Wouldn’t want to be holding my breath, but this is the closest thing.”

It’s not the guy that fans expect to see first onstage — and not the song they might be waiting for, either. After “Breathe,” there are three songs in a row from No Line (the title track, “Get On Your Boots” and “Magnificent”) — and three more tunes from the album show up, including the epic ballad “Moment of Surrender” as a show-closer. The emphasis on the new stuff is all the more brave when you consider that No Line on the Horizon has barely moved a million copies in the U.S. — placing it among the lowest-selling U2 albums — and that the album has thus far failed to produce a hit single. “I walk out and sing ‘Breathe’ every night to a lot of people who don’t know it,” says Bono. “I’m a performer — I’m not going to hang on to a song that doesn’t communicate and add up to something. They’re great songs live, and I think it’s a great album. I think it will be seen as ‘Gosh, one of their more challenging albums.'”

On the way to Chicago, though, Clayton worries that Americans might be more impatient than Europeans: “I’m a little concerned about whether or not we can open with four new songs,” he says. “That might be tricky.” And after the second show in Chicago, Bono notes that the show “still needs a little more toasting.” So by the second week of the U.S. leg, U2 try taking “Breathe” out of the set list, kicking off with “Magnificent” instead and reducing the number of new songs at the beginning of the show to three. (“What strikes me about them is they’ll hold on to an idea,” says video director Krueger, “until they find a better one.”)

The one new song every crowd knows is No Line ‘s first single, “Get On Your Boots” — which the band plays in a more straightforward, harder-rocking arrangement live, stripping it of its electronic elements. U2 love playing the song, but three out of four members now acknowledge that it was the wrong choice for a first single (Edge continues to defend it). “Interestingly, it’s going off live,” says Clayton. “But I think probably what happened was it’s a common U2 problem. I think we probably worked on it and worked on it and worked on it, and instead of executing one idea well, I think we had probably five ideas in the song, and it just confused people. They weren’t sure what they were hearing.”

Bono has his own ideas. “Look, sometimes our audience isn’t as groovy as we’d like,” he says with a smile. “ ’Get On Your Boots,’ as it was released, is a sort of crossover, half-club, half-indie-rock record. People are not sure about the club side of U2. They want ‘Vertigo.’ And when we did this the last time — with ‘Discothèque,’ from Pop , they didn’t like it either.”

But in what must be considered an act of defiance, the band is including one of its clubbiest moments ever in the current show — playing its recent single, the midtempo pop tune “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” in a nearly unrecognizable LCD Soundsystem-style remix, complete with whimsical video of the band members bopping their heads to the beat. Bono had decided the show needed the song during rehearsals in Barcelona, after walking to the top of the stadium and deciding that there had to be a musical moment as futuristic as the stage. Even Mullen, traditionally resistant to such moves, enjoys the remix — not least because it gives him a chance to roam the stage with a hand drum while an electronic beat takes over. And Clayton particularly loves it, because it’s based around a sample of a piece of his bass part that his bandmates had almost vetoed as too “twiddly.”

The band was apprehensive about debuting this version in front of its less groovy American fans. On the plane from Zagreb, Mullen and Bono discuss the possibility of starting with the standard arrangement of the song and then moving to the remix, before the drummer turns to me. “It would really help,” Mullen says, “if you wrote that it’s one of the highlights of the show.” They end up not changing a thing for the U.S., and in Chicago, the “Crazy Tonight” remix is, in fact, one of the highlights of the show, with the Edge wildly pogoing and Bono singing snippets of Sly Stone.

In the most jarring transition of the night, “Crazy Tonight” moves directly into “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which the group has effectively re-contextualized by adding footage from this summer’s Iranian protests. (“We tried just using green backgrounds,” says the Edge, “but it was too subtle. People thought, ‘Ireland.'”) Images from Iran begin to appear on the screen as Bono sings the final chorus of “Crazy”: “It’s not a hill/It’s a mountain/As we start out the climb.”

At that point, as Bono sees it, the second and more political section of the show begins. “The first act is a sort of personal narrative, about overcoming obstacles,” he says. “Suddenly, from this song about hedonism and self-destruction …  you’re on the streets of Tehran. ‘It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain/As we start out the climb’ — your personal odyssey is thrown into harsh relief with what’s going on in the outside world. Maybe this is how I’ve sorted my life — all the saddest people I knew were people focused on their own well-being. ‘I, I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me.’ The way I found a route out of depression, the way I found a route out of idiocy, has been the harsh juxtaposition of other lives, be they around me or in the wider world. I love that moment in the show — I really understand that feeling.”

T he 360° tour’s sound system may be the loudest ever built — but in a surge of voices tonight in Zagreb, the crowd is somehow almost drowning it out. “Love is a temple,” they sing, latching on to the line as if it’s from their national anthem, “love the higher law.” Standing at center stage, holding a green guitar, Bono repeats the line, his own voice shaking with sudden emotion. “We get to carry each other,” he sings, tweaking the lyrics slightly to lend the lines some more syncopation: “Whether you’re my sister, or whether you’re my brother.”

Moments later, as the Edge turns the chord progression into a keening cry and the rhythm section churns the song into something too propulsive to be a ballad, Bono has the house lights turned out and asks the crowd to take out their cellphones — a concert cliché that becomes something much larger: “Turn this place into a bigger universe,” he says, and then, maybe surprising himself, starts to yell, “Turn on your own light! Your own light!” The lights blaze, a miniature galaxy of souls. The show achieves liftoff.

Bono had carefully introduced “One”: “This next song means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” he said, as a Croatian translation appeared on the video screen. “Tonight we want to play it for everyone in this region who’s had their warm hearts broken by cold ideas.” There was a hush as the crowd took in the words, then an explosion of applause.

The next night, Bono is still thinking about those moments. “The Balkans invented a certain doggedness, a certain stubbornness,” he says. “And so it would take a bitter and twisted love song like that for them to really relate to: ‘Did I disappoint you?’ The anger, the bile, the spleen of that song makes it OK. We’re not one. We’re one, but we’re not the same. We are not the same. These people gave up everything over a difference. I think everybody has a different take on that song, and on a nightly basis it changes for me. I can hardly breathe when I’m singing it. I can hardly get the words out.”

For the first time in my half-dozen encounters with Bono, his sunglasses are pushed up on his forehead, and his naked blue eyes are blazing with intensity — either he’s still adrenalized from the shows, or that’s just what they look like without the shades. He’s sitting in the band’s leased jet as it heads back to U2’s touring home base in the South of France. This one is almost disappointingly unflashy — the back, where the band’s touring staff sits, looks like a first-class section of a commercial airliner, while the front, for the band members and their families, is something like first-class-plus, with tables to sit around.

Across the aisle sits Bono’s wife, Ali Hewson — striking, dark-haired, with the brown eyes that he’s never stopped singing about — who is reading newspapers and eating dinner, and their two young sons, who are both curled up for naps after sprinting about backstage for most of the night while their dad did the same onstage.

“Love is a big word to be throwing around in these parts,” Bono continues, building up steam, talking over the engine noise. “Carrying the badge of nonviolence, at first glance, looks well on an Irishman, but we lived 100 miles from troubles. So in a way, it was no great act of courage for us to drain the flag of color and preach nonviolence.

“It’s a completely different thing if you live in Croatia or if you live in the western Balkans. These people have, within recent memory, seen just what a thin skin of civilization we had in the late 20th century. We had just made Achtung Baby and Zooropa — and people weren’t only not loving their neighbors, they were torturing their neighbors. They were attaching electrical cables to their private parts and making them squeal. I would not be at all offended if somebody were to say, ‘How the fuck dare you come and speak about love?'”

Bono is wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, and he’s at peak tour fitness, looking a few pounds lighter than he did in January. He doesn’t drink much on the road anymore, but he’s not exactly an ascetic. (Later, he sheepishly admits to “an Elvis moment”: stopping a motorcade rushing out of Chicago so he could get a Big Mac.) Underneath the table, his pale feet are bare — he’s kicked off an extremely un-rock & roll pair of sandals.

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He reaches an unexpected conclusion, making the case that his band, among the few rock superstars without Woodstock-era roots, is still driven by the best ideas of that time. In the end, maybe the spaceship is a time machine — and the destination is 1967. “You think of the Beatles and you think of ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and that burst of ideas, that renaissance that was the Sixties,” he says. “The core of it was this idea of love, out of which came the women’s movement, gay movement, anti-war movement. It was all based on this simple Judeo-Christian idea, the philosophy of having to love your neighbor, it not being advice, it being an order, an edict: ‘Love your neighbor.'”

Bono smiles for the first time since he started talking about torture and hate. “It’s a strange thing,” he says, “when you come out with this stuff at a rock show.”

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U2 360 Tour Delayed After Bono Injures Back

After undergoing emergency back surgery, Bono had to postpone U2's 36 tour.

May 27, 2010— -- Preparing for a worldwide music tour can be backbreaking work, especially if you're pushing 50.

Bono, U2's lead singer, learned this the hard way last week when he suffered a herniated disc and severe compression of the sciatic nerve and had to be rushed to a nearby hospital for emergency back surgery .

While training for the upcoming U.S. leg of U2's 360 degrees tour, the singer experienced severe back pain and partial paralysis of his leg before he was admitted to Maximilians-University Hospital in Munich, according to a statement on his website.

"Surgery was the only course of treatment for full recovery and to avoid further paralysis," said Dr. Jorg Tonn, who performed the operation, in a press release. Tonn said Bono's prognosis was excellent.

"Maybe he just overdid it and hurt himself," bandmate the Edge said in a Skype interview posted to U2's website.

With months of recovery ahead of him, Bono had to call off -- at least for now -- U2's North American tour.

In an interview posted to U2's website, Bono said he was "heartbroken" about the cancellation. U2's manager, Paul McGuinness said, "'Our biggest, and I believe best tour, has been interrupted, and we're all devastated ... but the most important thing right now is that Bono make a full recovery."

Bono was released from the Munich hospital Tuesday and will follow a rehab regimen for at least eight weeks.

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Bono Announces 14-Date Solo Concert Tour to Promote 'Surrender' Memoir: 'I Miss Being Onstage'

The tour, which kicks off at New York's Beacon Theatre on Nov. 2, coincides with the release of the U2 rocker's new memoir

Bono is going on tour!

Earlier this week, the U2 frontman, 62, announced a series of solo shows in support of his forthcoming memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story , which is due out Nov. 1.

"I miss being onstage and the closeness of U2's audience," Bono said in a press release. "In these shows, I've got some stories to sing, and some songs to tell... Plus I want to have some fun presenting my ME-moir, Surrender , which is really more of a WE-moir if I think of all the people who helped me get from there to here."

The tour kicks off at New York City's Beacon Theatre on Nov. 2, and Bono will make stops in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles before heading overseas for shows in Europe and wrapping the run in Madrid on Nov. 28.

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, the book — named after a track on U2's 1983 album War — comprises 40 different chapters, each named after a U2 song and featuring original drawings by the Irish rocker.

Surrender chronicles Bono's Dublin childhood, including the loss of his mother at 14, U2's rise to fame, and his activism in the fight against HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty with "candor, self-reflection and humor," according to a press release.

"When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I'd previously only sketched in songs," Bono said in a statement. "The people, places and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me."

He continued at the time, "Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim's lack of progress . . . With a fair amount of fun along the way."

Bono will also narrate an audiobook through Penguin Random House.

In May, an animated video with an excerpt from the chapter titled "Out of Control" was released. The video featured some of the star's drawings which documented the story of Bono writing U2's first single on his 18th birthday in 1978.

Tickets, which will include a copy of the book, are on sale now. More information is available at the Surrender website .

See below for Bono's Stories of Surrender Tour dates.

Nov. 2 - New York, NY - Beacon Theatre

Nov. 4 - Boston, MA - Orpheum Theatre presented by Citizens

Nov. 6 - Toronto, ON - Meridian Hall

Nov. 8 – Chicago, IL - The Chicago Theatre

Nov. 9 - Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium

Nov. 12 - San Francisco, CA - Orpheum Theatre

Nov. 13 - Los Angeles, CA - The Orpheum Theatre

Nov. 16 - London, U.K. - The London Palladium

Nov. 17 - Glasgow, U.K. - SEC Armadillo

Nov. 19 - Manchester, U.K. - O2 Apollo Manchester

Nov. 21 - Dublin, Ireland - 3Olympia Theatre

Nov. 23 - Berlin, Germany - Admiralspalast

Nov. 25 - Paris, France - Le Grand Rex

Nov. 28 - Madrid, Spain - Teatro Coliseum

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'Stories of Surrender'. The Book Tour.

'Stories of Surrender'. The Book Tour.

'An evening of words, music and some mischief…'. 

Live Nation and Penguin Random House have announced a 14-date city book tour in support of SURRENDER: 40 Songs, One Story , the forthcoming memoir by Bono.

The book tour, titled ' Stories of Surrender ' and produced by Live Nation, is a limited run of theatre dates to mark the release of a memoir in which one of the world's most iconic artists writes for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with. Bono will bring the stories of his life to life — live and in person— to 14 cities across North America and Europe. Kicking off at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Wednesday, November 2 , ' Stories of Surrender ' will make stops in Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Nashville, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Glasgow, Manchester, Berlin, Paris —and Bono's hometown of Dublin — before wrapping on Monday, November 28 in Madrid . " I miss being on stage and the closeness of U2's audience ," said Bono. " In these shows I've got some stories to sing, and some songs to tell… Plus I want to have some fun presenting my ME-moir, SURRENDER, which is really more of a WE-moir if I think of all the people who helped me get from there to here" .

TICKETS: Tickets go on sale starting Friday, October 7 at 10am local time and will be available at: www.ticketmaster.com/bono . 

Each ticket purchased comes with a copy of SURRENDER , released on November 1, and all tickets purchased online will be delivered as secure mobile tickets . There will be a two ticket limit per person.   SURRENDER: 40 Songs, One Story , tells the story of Bono's remarkable life, the challenges he's faced, and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him. 

The subtitle, '40 Songs, One Story,' refers to the book's 40 chapters, each named after a U2 song. Bono has also created 40 original drawings which will be featured throughout the book. In his unique voice, Bono takes readers from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2's unlikely journey to become one of the world's most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. 

Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life—and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him.   Additional information about SURRENDER: 40 Songs, One Story here . 

'Stories of Surrender' - SURRENDER: 40 Songs, One Story - BOOK TOUR DATES Wed Nov 02 – New York, NY – Beacon Theatre Fri Nov 04 – Boston, MA – Orpheum Theatre presented by Citizens Sun Nov 06 – Toronto, ON – Meridian Hall Tue Nov 08 – Chicago, IL – The Chicago Theatre Wed Nov 09 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium Sat Nov 12 – San Francisco, CA – Orpheum Theatre Sun Nov 13 – Los Angeles, CA – The Orpheum Theatre Wed Nov 16 – London, UK – The London Palladium Thu Nov 17 – Glasgow, UK – SEC Armadillo Sat Nov 19 – Manchester, UK – O2 Apollo Manchester Mon Nov 21 – Dublin, IE – 3Olympia Theatre Wed Nov 23 – Berlin, DE – Admiralspalast Fri Nov 25 – Paris, FR – Le Grand Rex Mon Nov 28 – Madrid, ES – Teatro Coliseu

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