Keeping an open mind about U2 at Glastonbury
Next year the legendary Glastonbury festival, still one of the most well-known and well-respected festivals in Europe, celebrates its 40th birthday. Organisers Emily and Michael Eavis both promised that the headliner’s next year would be good reason to celebrate and would be of high quality to represent the anniversary. Today one of those headliners was announced and the band will kick start the party on Friday night will be…U2.
Yes, U2. To be fair, this was an appearance that was very heavily rumoured and those in the know will not find it surprising in the slightest. I can’t stand U2 most of the time and, a few good songs excepted, just bore me. Pop & Hiss, the LA Times music blog, think otherwise though. They reviewed the band’s infamous YouTube-streamed show at the Rose Bowl last month and said:
The Space Station allows U2 to make those musical and lyrical preoccupations physical in a new way. At the Rose Bowl, it created a new experience even for the most jaded concertgoer. U2 concerts have often included moments in which raised voices build goodwill, or shaking hips stimulate joy. But for the first time, perhaps, this band’s noise resulted in a kind of silence and stillness — not a literal one, but the rapture that comes when nearly 100,000 people relax together, as if held within a gentle, open hand.
“God will put a wind at our back and a rising road ahead, if we work together as one,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu in an on-screen message late in the concert. That vision of nations and individuals opening up to one another is at the core of U2’s mission. This extravagant tour gave the band another way to enact it and made for a whole new concert experience in the process.
The ‘Space Station’ is referring to the band’s massive stage show, once dubbed ‘The Claw’. How they’d even manage to get that to fit on Worthy Farm is unimaginable. The only way it could work fully would be for U2 to abandon the Pyramid Stage altogether and just place it on the fields itself. Or even get a new piece of land and re-name it the ‘U2 Field’. I’m sure they can think of U2-related activities before and after the band play.
Are they a wise booking? No one will know until the band plug in and play but I’m trying to keep an open perspective. Glastonbury does seem to have this massive effect where even bands that aren’t that amazing live sound like the greatest thing to ever grace Worthy Farm…until the next band comes on. It seems that this performance is likely to follow the Springsteen effect in uniting thousands of people through song in something that can only resemble a church service, except whilst Springsteen’s show was actually akin to an evangelical performance where the power of the songs transcended everything, U2’s church is a completely different beast with the main focus on show as opposed to songs.
Prove me wrong U2, prove me wrong.
What do you think? Is this a booking worthy of a 40th anniversary? If not, who would you prefer? Are you holding judgment until they actually perform?
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Posted on November 23rd, 2009 by Max
Filed under: Features, Gigs
My first reaction was one of disappoimntment, then rage… slowly went through all the ‘grieving’ stages, and have not reached acceptance.
It’s true, they will actually put on a hell of a show… and everyone will know pretty much every song.
PLUS, it’s Glasto, and they’ll be a million other things to do/bands to see anyway on a Friday night. PLUS I’ll be exceedingly drunk anyway, and won’t care.