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Sat, July 22, 2017 in Dublin, Ireland @ Croke Park
I went to Dublin and Paris to see 3 amazing shows by U2 (Saturday on Dublin and then Tuesday and Wednesday in Paris) from the "The Joshua Tree Tour 2017".
Celebrating 30 Years of "The Joshua Tree".
"The Joshua Tree transformed U2 into superstars. U2 is celebrating the album’s thirtieth anniversary with a world tour. The original album tackled weighty real-world topics. Bono and company want to connect the music to right now — to global anxieties about, immigration, human rights, and governmental regimes."
"But The Joshua Tree transformed U2 into superstars, with hit singles “With or Without You,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Where the Streets Have No Name”. It was their first album to hit No. 1 on the U.S. album chart. U2 found themselves on the cover of Time magazine. A Grammy was awarded to the music video for “Streets,” shot on top of a Los Angeles liquor store. And when it was all said and done, The Joshua Tree sold more than 25,000,000 copies worldwide, was awarded the Grammy for Album of the Year, and contributed to U2 entering the discussion for greatest rock band ever. When Rolling Stone Magazine compiled its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, five U2 albums were listed, with The Joshua Tree ranked No. 27 (U2’s highest presence on the list)."
"In 2017, U2 is celebrating the album’s thirtieth anniversary with a world tour that spans 33 shows for an estimated 1.7 million fans. But these Dubliners have no desire to present The Joshua Tree tour as a museum piece. Bono and company want to connect the music to right now — to global anxieties about labor, immigration, human rights, governmental regimes, and the environment."
Saw them 10 times before in other places, my Country and even other Countries.
Before "U2", played "Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds", they played 54 minutes.
Noel the member of the band "Oasis" (1991–2009).
U2, played for 129 minutes. Played 22 songs.
They were awesome live doing this stadium show. Amazing sound.
1st show I was Pitch 1 on the right corner of the VIP area just on front row.
2nd show I was 1st row corner of the B Stage (Tree Stage) with Larry Mullen drums just ahead of me.
3rd show I was on the stands with a Gold Hot Ticket from VIP Nation.
Tonight was U2's only hometown jaunt of The Joshua Tree 2017 Tour. The last time they played Dublin just once on a tour was all the way back on 29 June 1985, during the sixth leg of The Unforgettable Fire Tour, subtitled the European Summer Festivals leg. That concert also took place at Croke Park. Discounting those festivals, the last time they played Dublin only once was 26 January 1982 on the third leg of the October Tour, a night that saw the live debut of Tomorrow. U2 have never before played Ireland just once on a tour.
Bad was dedicated to Guckpants Delaney, the Lypton Village name for Andy Rowan. At the end of the song Bono snippeted Simon & Garfunkel's America for the first time this leg. During Streets there was a quadruple flyover by fighter jets, the contrails of each mixing to create the Irish tricolour as they passed over the stadium. Mothers of the Disappeared was played in Ireland for the first time ever, although it made a brief appearance in the past when it was snippeted on 25 July 2009. Amazingly, tonight's performance of Miss Sarajevo (the 183 for the song) was also the first in Ireland. Although a mainstay on both the Vertigo and 360 tours, it joined the set after the Irish concerts on both occasions. This is the longest gap (in both number of performances and time) for a song between debuting live and appearing in Dublin, though if Scarlet is ever performed there it will shatter that record for time.
01. Sunday Bloody Sunday 02. New Year's Day 03. Bad / America (Snippet)
04. Pride (In The Name Of Love)
05. Where The Streets Have No Name / California (There Is No End To Love) (Snippet) 06. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
07. With Or Without You
08. Bullet The Blue Sky / Black Dog (Snippet) + America (Snippet)
09. Running To Stand Still 10. Red Hill Mining Town
11. In God's Country
12. Trip Through Your Wires
13. One Tree Hill
14. Exit / Wise Blood (Snippet) + Eeny Meeny Miny Moe (Snippet)
15. Mothers Of The Disappeared
Encore(s):
16. Miss Sarajevo 17. Beautiful Day / Starman (Snippet)
18. Elevation
19. Vertigo / Rebel Rebel (Snippet)
20. Ultra Violet (Light My Way)
21. One / Hear Us Coming (Snippet)
Happy Birthday 22. The Little Things That Give You Away
In bold are the videos I made.
Videos of U2 (6 videos):
U2-New Year's Day, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/r9B38mMfrKM
And the video:
U2-Bad + America (Snippet), Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/mGqQ3Xf1ows
And the video:
U2-I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/O5Q54hlZx0U
And the video:
U2-Red Hill Mining Town, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/5fCM3dVQCEw
And the video:
U2-Beautiful Day + Starman (Snippet), Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/W_g3WRUAEHg
And the video:
U2-The Little Things That Give You Away, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, 2017-07-22 HD
https://youtu.be/foMLkSjP2AM
And the video:
Reprisal: The Edge and Bono on the original Joshua Tree tour at Croke Park in 1987
Michael Brook is a Canadian guitarist and composer who has worked with such leftfield musicians as David Sylvian, Robert Fripp and Iarla Ó Lionáird. But Brook has played his part in U2 history, too, even if his name is unlikely to register with many.
In the mid-1980s, Brook invented an instrument he called the infinite guitar, which allowed an electronic guitar note to be held with infinite sustain. His Canadian compatriot Daniel Lanois was intrigued by its capabilities and brought it to the attention of the Edge who, along with the rest of U2, was busy working on a follow-up album to The Unforgettable Fire.
That sustained-note technique would soon become very famous thanks to its use on 'With or Without You', the lead single of the resulting album, The Joshua Tree (both released in March 1987). The song is so well known by now that it's almost become sonic wallpaper, but listen to it with fresh ears and note how distinct Edge's playing is.
'With or Without You' has been a staple of the U2 live experience ever since, and it will feature at Croke Park on July 22 when U2 take The Joshua Tree on the road to mark its 30th anniversary.
It's the first time the band have toured a catalogue album but if there was one they were ever destined to showcase again, years later, it's this totemic 1980s release. Their biggest seller by far, it shifted 25 million copies and while I could make the case for both The Unforgettable Fire and Achtung Baby being even better albums, The Joshua Tree is, clearly, U2's most emblematic long player. Tickets go on sale on Monday at 9am and one can expect Joe Duffy to be fielding call after call on Liveline that afternoon from distressed U2 fans who weren't able to secure tickets amid the sales frenzy.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Edge said he couldn't say definitively if they'll play the album in sequence, but it would be quite a surprise if they didn't. And what a start it would be: the opening quartet - 'Where the Streets Have No Name', 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', 'With or Without You' and 'Bullet the Blue Sky' - is the sound of U2 at their stadium-baiting best and each of the four has long been part of the furniture of their live shows.
But while these songs - not least the incendiary 'Bullet' - are perfectly calibrated for Croker's scale, much of what's great about The Joshua Tree is to be found amid the non-single album tracks. 'Running to Stand Still' is one of Bono's finest vocal recordings and its subject matter is rooted close to home. It was inspired by a Dublin that was being torn apart by a heroin crisis fuelled by such notorious criminals as Tony Felloni and 'Ma' Baker, and the line "I see seven towers but I only see one way out" referenced the Ballymun skyline from the vantage of a pre-fame Bono growing up in nearby Cedarwood Road.
'Red Hill Mining Town' is a portrait of a blue-collar Britain that got an unmerciful kicking by the Margaret Thatcher administration. Remarkably for such an anthemic song, it has never been played live by U2. "I think," Edge noted, "it was probably one of those songs that due to tempo and arrangement, never found a place within the live set."
And then there's 'One Tree Hill', which is the band's sweet homage to their New Zealander roadie, Greg Carroll, who perished in a motorcycle crash in Dublin in 1986. The striking image conveyed by the title refers to the volcanic peak of the same name in Auckland that Carroll had taken Bono to some years before.
For an album whose sound is regarded as so American, and whose Anton Corbijn-photograhed cover evokes the great expanse of its desert plains, it's striking to note just how many of the tracks are concerned with places outside of the US. Besides the three album tracks mentioned, 'Bullet the Blue Sky' is about the unrest provoked by American foreign policy while 'Mothers of the Disappeared' looked at the crimes of the Argentinian and Chilean dictatorships.
If the album captured much of the turmoil of 30 years ago, it's being revisited once more at another time of great unrest. The Edge has admitted as much, telling Rolling Stone this week: "That record was written in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and US politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. Thatcher was in the throes of trying to put down the miners' strike; there was all kinds of shenanigans going on in Central America.
"It feels like we're right back there in a way [a reference to Brexit and Trump]. I don't think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, 'Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four years ago.'"
U2 started work on The Joshua Tree in early 1986 with the same Brian Eno-Daniel Lanois production team behind The Unforgettable Fire. The first time the public heard any new material was on short-lived RTÉ series TV GAGA back in January 1986, when a seemingly stylist-free U2 played an embryonic version of 'Trip Through Your Wires' and something called 'Woman Fish' that was soon abandoned, never to be resuscitated. A wise move.
Plenty of material was recorded during the album sessions, as proved by the deluxe edition, from 2007, which gathered several B-sides and unused songs. But, intriguing as 'Spanish Eyes', 'Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience' and the original version of 'The Sweetest Thing' are, it would be foolhardy to make the case that any should have been included on the original. Say what you will about U2, but they tend to know which of their songs should be released and which are destined for the recording-studio floor.
