U2 - 360 Tour

Review: U2 are big. We get that. The second the audience enter the stadium and are rendered ants by history's most massive stage, standing spindly in the middle of the football pitch like a LSD-addled insect, you can see just how globe-straddlingly enormous they have become. Only U2 are audacious enough to build a tour of this monstrous scale around an album as tepidly received as No Line On The Horizon. But subtlety has never been their strong suit, so nearly three years after the release of that album, here they are. And if you want to see spectacle, then this is the ticket for you. It's a long way from the four post-punk boys who could barely play their instruments 35 years ago.

They might be the biggest band in the world*, but U2 are fallible giants, as a set which veered between the transcendental and mawkishly overbearing from one song to the next proved tonight. Lowlights included the pretty spectacular ballsing of an acoustic ‘Stuck In A Moment (You Can't Get Out Of)'**, when the Edge repeatedly hit the wrong chords going into the chorus, and took the wind out of its tribute to Michael Hutchence. Then there was a frankly bizarre techno-tribal remix of the wholly forgettable No Line... track 'I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight', complete with ample bongo, which was exactly as head-scratchingly awful as it sounds. It segued artlessly into political battle cry Sunday Bloody Sunday whereupon the band were joined on-stage for a freeform verse from support act Jay-Z. Then Bono gives shout-outs to guests Oprah Winfrey, Bob Geldolf and Nicole Kidman, proving as if there was any doubt, that U2 live on their own planet – and have done for some time.

And though as jarring and sledgehammer-subtle as these moments are, there is always U2's unique ability to punch a hole through the night with something as awe-inspiring as the sight of the light-drenched fifty-thousand strong crowd losing their collective minds to the tailor-made grandeur of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name', or brought to the point of communal love-in by the enduring ‘One'. Similarly, there are few bands who could tear through their first single 30 years after the fact with the ferocity with which U2 can burn through ‘I Will Follow'. The band also dusted off several rare fan favourites: Achtung Baby's ‘Until The End of the World', ‘Bad' off The Unforgettable Fire and the glam-punk Batman Forever single ‘Hold Me ,Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me', thrilling the gathered faithful. And Bono did not earn his place as rock's pre-eminent frontman of the last 25 years for nothing: he is possessed of a truly fine set of pipes with which he can both emulate Pavarotti on the gorgeous ‘Miss Sarajevo' and hit the falsetto on ‘Mysterious Ways'.

U2 once used the medium of the stadium show to deconstruct the act of playing in a stadium, in the 90s mainly when their Zoo TV and Popmart tours cleverly skewered the oncoming information overload of the decade, and consumerism, respectively. But the 360 tour doesn't seem to be about anything other than how big it is (or acknowledging the fact it's played in the round? We can see that). There is no doubting that its immense machinery, primarily a cylindrical hydraulic screen which beams Bono 40 feet high to the outer reaches of space^ is extremely impressive and is unlikely to be surpassed by anyone else. But this is the first time that U2's whiz-bang set design has at times threatened to overwhelm their performance. The Claw is so huge it nearly peaks beyond the stadium's roof, but if you walk away more impressed by the enormity of it all than moved by the connection forged across vast distances between band and audience, then perhaps it's time for U2 to take a page from their own playbook, maybe from 'Numb', Edge's spoken word litany of directives for the information-addled from 1993's Zooropa: "Too much is not enough." Elmo Keep, pix by Dan Boud

* this is pretty much a one horse race, but okay, for what it's worth.
** no rules against tautologies for Bono.
^ probably.