Sunday Telegraph

19th June 2005

 

Icing on the cake

 

by Paul Morley

 

The stage is as big as a skyscraper, it's set inside a modern metal and concrete stadium on the edge of Manchester, and under a blessed blue sky U2, four men in black, appear out of nowhere, as if it's taken them just a matter of seconds to arrive, not 27 years.

 

To begin the first British show of their Vertigo tour, they play "Vertigo", the opening song from their most recent album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. They start from an emotional high, riding a vicious, victorious riff across oceanic tides of feeling into the thumping heart of their own blasted myth. As U2 take off, 40,000 fans look up to check yet again just how close they can fly to the sun without their wings melting.

 

"Vertigo" is the perfect way to begin a U2 show, triggering all the exhortation and posturing to come. It's strange to think that they have ever begun a show any other way. "Vertigo" is a song that announces: we may have been around for years, we may be surrounded by money, fame and age, but we can still come up with a riff as natural, now and wired as this.

 

All the music that influenced them a quarter of a century ago - Joy Division, Gang of Four, Public Image - is the music that now influences the more fashionable new groups. U2, who remained creatively restless because of their post-punk roots, and achieved success because of their romantic, almost insane need to convince sceptics that music is magic, sound as new and ambitious as they did in the early 1980s.

 

Night descends and the stadium vibrates as their set celebrates all the expected old hits, and yet also heavily features their two most recent, 21st-century albums. The exultant hymns are played, the irresistible love songs, the mysteriously specific anthems, the abstract pop fantasies. They pay tender tribute to Manchester's Joy Division, who first saw the light and dark that U2 developed - Joy Division's "Transmission" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" tantalisingly flicker in and out of U2's "Without or Without You". Sometimes they get on their high horse and sometimes they just want to make some noise and rearrange the senses, both aspects of a band that has fought hard not to disappear into decadent superstar limbo or the slimy pages of Hello! and who believed they could be part of history.

 

Bono, the band's unstoppable singer, is a mischievously alert multitude of hosts. By turns, he's the smooth, democratically elected leader; pushy, conniving dictator; conning, candid rock star madman; principled, optimistic pop-star friend; surreal healer; and ragged, generous Irish charmer. The Edge remains happiest when he geometrically traps a riff that's more Siouxsie and the Banshees-strange than Keith

Richards-flash. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen serenely pump rhythm into the stadium, thrust some lust into a situation that can get softened by the obvious love the musicians feel for each other.

 

U2 end the first show of their British Vertigo tour with "Vertigo". It's the perfect way to end a U2 show, ecstatically reprising all the love and life that's gone before. It's hard to imagine them finishing with anything else. They play again what sounds like - after a quarter of a century of classics - their best song. They played it first in the

clear light of day, as if it was a song from their early days, when they wanted so much to be noticed. They play it last in the atmospheric, dazzling dark, to represent the group they are now, the biggest, boldest rock band in the world acting as if they are the best ever, and actually getting closer all the time.

 

(c) 2005 Telegraph Group ltd