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U2 - Live at Glastonbury Festival (2011)

Posted By: Notsaint

Date: 5 Aug 2011 23:29:54

"Look at you!" cries Bono midway through U2's opening song, Even Better Than the Real Thing. "A whole city in the rain." Dreadful weather has a way of focusing the mind. U2's booking has divided festivalgoers since it was first announced, before Bono's back injury forced a postponement. But their healthy back catalogue and formidable showmanship seems well-placed to raise sodden spirits.

Working with an additional video screen, they reach back to the early-90s not just with an opening salvo of songs from Achtung Baby but with the frenetic visual overload of the Zoo TV tour. It finds them at their fiercest and most urgent, The Edge wrenching bolts of noise from his guitar during Until the End of the World. One and Where the Streets Have No Name, usually preserved for the finale of their touring set, follow. It's a lean, combative, frontloaded set calibrated to win the unconverted at their first festival show since the 80s. You can't persuade everyone of course, but it's good to see a band this big taking nothing for granted.

Aside from an a cappella verse of Jerusalem, Bono wisely keeps the Avalon blarney to a minimum. "Could be the leylines," he begins. "Could be the jetlag. But it's a very special feeling being here." He has an instinct for the right gesture. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for closes with a refrain from Moving on Up by Primal Scream, who are headlining the Other stage. In a flamboyant coup de theatre (Look! We have friends in space!) he enlists an astronaut to recite lyrics during Beautiful Day from the international space station. Other memorable moments are generated by the crowd. They take a whole verse of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, while a field of flags blowing in the night breeze during Sunday Bloody Sunday intensifies the song's martial feel.

If there's a problem, apart from the wretched weather, it's that the opening sprint is never equalled for energy (and, thanks to the wind, volume), though Beautiful Day, Elevation and Vertigo come close. In the encore, after a glittering With or Without You, the sombre Moment of Surrender feels anticlimactic: a big moment for U2's fanbase but not well-known to anyone else. But they pull it back with a rampaging version of their punky debut single Out of Control, a reminder of when they were unknowns with everything to prove. Thirty years later, on unfamiliar ground, they reach for that fierce hunger and it's that sense of urgency – even a hint of nerves – rather than triumphalism that makes this such a charged and memorable set.
~guardian.co.uk

Considering it was a Friday night at the legendary Pyramid stage and there were only fifteen minutes to go the crowd was worryingly small. Though with an open mind I used the spaces to my advantage and waded through the mud to get a closer look. The lights went down and instantly David Bowies’s ‘Space Oddity’ blasted out of the speakers tricking the crowds excitement into overload only to let it come crashing back down to earth when Bono’s serious face appeared. I noticed that more people had arrived but it felt more like they were just there with nothing else to do. The flat atmosphere then turned for the weird as fairly disturbing images of mating insects appeared on the screen as the band nodded along in time with the uninspiring opening ‘Even better then the real thing’. Next they attempted to brainwash us with phrases such as “Everything you know is wrong” followed by a whole compilation of rude words and ‘intelligent’ messages you couldn’t help but fixate on as they rapidly flashed from one to the next: probably to distract the crowd from the dull song being performed.

However an attempt at an uplifting atmosphere, that is usually found around the Pyramid stage, occurred with ‘One’ and a mass sing along to ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’. They eventually went back to their vague space theme by playing a message from astronaut Mark Kelly to his wife, though what was to be achieved by this still boggles me as as far as I’m aware his wife was not present at the U2 performance. Though the classic ‘Beautiful Day’ saved the show slightly as it never fails to create a slight warm fuzzy feeling inside, even though the rain hadn’t stopped. Obviously ‘With or without you’ set us all swaying in our now sobered up state, desperately needing a strong drink and not being able to ignore the part of us that cruelly wished that Bono’s back problems had returned for the festival this year.
~ themusicmagazine.co.uk

Tracklist
1. Even Better Than the Real Thing (Remix version)
2. The Fly
3. Mysterious Ways (with "Independent Women" snippet)
4. Until the End of the World
5. One
6. Where the Streets Have No Name (with "Jerusalem" intro)
7. I Will Follow
8. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (with "Movin' On Up" snippet)
9. Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
10. Beautiful Day (with "Rain" snippet)
11. Elevation
12. Get On Your Boots (with "She Loves You" snippet)
13. Vertigo (with "GarageLand" snippet)
14. Sunday Bloody Sunday
15. Bad (with "Jerusalem" snippet)
16. Pride (In the Name of Love)
Encores:
17. With Or Without You (with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" snippet)
18. Moment of Surrender (with "Yellow" Snippet)
19. Out of Control (with "Pretty Vacant" intro)

Thanks to original uploader !

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