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2015-09-24 - Berlin
 Tour: Innocence and Experience tour
Songs played: 27
Audio recordings: 4
  5. It has been almost a week since I have returned from Berlin, where I have seen all four U2 shows in the week between 24th - 29th September. I have gone through my photos and videos and it is time to write a review and to post it here.

    All the shows were full of pleasant surprises, the biggest one was how relatively easy it was to get really close to the stage, thanks to the concept of the show, which takes place basically all over the floor and so while the biggest portion of the show takes place on the main ("I") stage, a lot of people who arrive very early prefer to be by the "e" stage or along the catwalk which runs through the whole arena or maybe even a little bit further from the catwalk to see the screen and what goes on inside the screen. So after the gates open, there is no usual run towards the stage, everything is very civilized and calm and really surprisingly easy. At least it was that way in Berlin.

    Now, I am usually not a fan of any visual extravaganza, even the usual "B" stage that most of the bands use nowadays normally bothers me. I like the bands to simply be on the stage and play music. But I have to admit that the current U2 concept works perfectly. It just does, and it is great fun even when the band is not directly in front of you at some point. Plus it really adds to a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Every day I arrived to the venue shortly before 5 p.m., the gates opened between 5:30 and 6 p.m. and I have ended up twice in the third and twice in the second row by the main stage. Three times on The Edge's and once on Adam's side.

    Anyway, let's proceed to the show itself and here I have to start with the intro, which on this tour is a song called People Have The Power. I have to admit that I have never heard this song before and it is amazing how it works. I mean I can't recall any other concert where people in the whole arena would be jumping and singing the into song which is not even from the band they came to see. It was not until I returned home that I googled it was a Patti Smith song and when I played it loud, it took me instantly back to the arena. What a song and what a concert intro.

    The intro fades away and Bono appears on the far end of the arena, singing the intro of The Miracle together with the whole audience. Bono walks towards the main stage, where he joins the band and the show kicks off for real. The first four songs are done in an amazing pace. Four fast energetic songs without a pause to catch a breath (well, except that The Edge has to change the guitars :-) So after The Miracle, the second song varies from night to night and it is always an oldie. We got Out Of Control on the first and fourth night, The Electric Co. on the second night and amazing Gloria on the third night. The third song is Vertigo, followed by I Will Follow.

    Now, after the first four songs, when everybody on the floor (at least by the stage) really needs to catch a breath, it is time to slow down a bit. Bono tells the audience that they will take us on a trip to their youth and to their hometown and will play a couple of songs from the last album. The first one is Iris, which Bono sings for his mother and introduces the song by telling the story how his mother deceased when he was fourteen and how he tries to fill the hole since then. On the third night Bono added: "She died at the funeral of her father, which was...kind of mad." Wow... Okay, beautiful emotional Iris is followed by Cedarwood Road, a song about the street where Bono grew up, and for the first time we get a glimpse of what the huge screen above the whole catwalk, which runs across the whole arena can do. There is a Cedarwood Road animation on the screen, while one can see Bono walking inside the screen and Edge walks bellow the screen, while his guitar sounds particularly urgent and cuts through the arena like a knife. The next song is A Song For Someone about young Bono trying to write a song to impress a girl called Alison Steward - Ali of course. Next comes Sunday Bloody Sunday, which is done semi-acoustically and it is the first time also Adam and Larry leave the main stage and the band stands along the catwalk, but for Raised By Wolfs the band except of Bono returns to the main stage. During Until The End Of The World, one of my all time favourites, we get another trick with the screen. The Edge walks inside before the solo and a huge image of Bono on the screen fiddles with him. He teases him, holds him, spits water on him. It all culminates in an ecstatic wild guitar driven outro and the band disappears.

    Yes, there is a break, the show has two parts, which one would not consider very rock'n'roll, but The Fly remix which fills the arena together with the animations make it a natural part of the show and if I didn't read in advance that there was an intermission, I absolutely wouldn't call it that way.

    But okay, the short "intermission" ends and there comes Invisible. The band is inside the screen and there appear "holes" in the animation to reveal one or more of the band members just to close the view again and finally to get completely transparent as Bono sings "I am here!" It is a great song ind it works perfectly. For the dancy version Even Better Than The Real Thing the band remains inside the screen, which shows colorful exploding animations of each member of the band on the place just where he stands. With the end of the song the U2 move to the small "e" stage, where it all gets funky.

    The portion of 5 songs performed on the "e" stage starts with Mysterious Ways and even though they don't do the guitar solo, it is just amazing. I get goosebumps everytime The Edge plays the funky auto-wah main riff. The sound is just priceless. Okay, time to shake things up a bit, there are 2 songs that vary from night to night on the e-stage. The first night we got ZOO Station, which was not played since 2006 and is there a better place to play it than in Berlin? Surely not. The reaction of the audience was ecstatic of course. Then Elevation got beautifully wrong when Bono and The Edge completely messed it up. After a vain attempt to put it back on the track Bono touches his ear monitor and says "Keyboards, bless the keyboards!" and the song takes shape again. The second night we got Desire and Angel Of Harlem, the third night New Year's Day and Elevation again (no mistakes this time) and the fourth night Desire and then a big surprise - Two Hearts Beat As One - a rarely played song from the War album, followed by a nice story of how Bono was intensely working on the War album during their honeymoon, how "surprised" Ali was, and how playing her this song made it all right.

    Okay, those two "surprise" songs are followed by Every Breaking Wave. I have heard the song for the first time in 2010 in Vienna, when they played it as an unfinished demo, just Bono and The Edge on the guitar. It didn't impress me at all. It was a great surprise to find out what have they done with it and how the full band arrangement sounds on the last album. It is probably my favourite track from the album. And what a disappointment it was to find out, that on the tour it is performed acoustically again, just Bono and The Edge on piano. I listened to it once on Youtube and it left me absolutely cold. I found it uninspired, Bono pushed the vocals too hard, I thought. What a waste, thay turned it back into an uninteresting demo. So what a surprise it was again to find out how great it works in reality, how perfectly Bono sings it with the exact amount of urgency. It was definitely one of the highlights of each show.

    The last song on the e-stage is October and the band returns to the main stage, where they stay until the end with the exception of Bono walking towards the e-stage for With Or Without You. Bullet The Blue Sky somehow never worked for me and so it is mostly time to take some nice pictures, since I found out that my camera somehow liked the way the show was lit during this song. However, very interesting moment comes after about two minutes, when Bono starts with "So this boy comes up to me...," which he turns into a conversation he takes with his young self (or actually "a boy who looks a whole lot like me") We all know about Bono's side activities, and how much a lot of people can't stand it. I personally have different views than Bono on many things but I will never be able to understand why so many people love to hate him so much. Funny is, that most of the time the reasoning goes something like - "He speaks about Africa and charity, but look how rich he is!" I mean...really? But back to the point. Bono actually acknowledges this in this "conversation" with the young boy during Bullet The Blue Sky, saying that they both stand on a different side of a barricade. The young boy asks Bono: "Have you forgotten who you are? Have you forgotten where you come from?....We don't want you in our revolution, you're part of the problem, not a solution!" The conversation goes on, the boy tells him among other things that he has one hundred...two hundred...three hundred times more than he needs... and Bono finishes it with a desperate cry: "I feel like a fraud, but I know I'm not, trying to do the very best with everything that I've got!" Whatever I think about Bono's non-musical activities, I think he made a great bold step with taking the opinions of his oponets and transforming them into a fascinating and honest part of the show.

    All right, let's lighten the mood. After Bullet comes Zooropa and then the first notes of Where The Streets Have No Name. Yea, it is the song that everybody wants to hear. It is the song that everybody has heard thousand times. But it is just pure ecstasy and having The Edge dancing (yea - dancing!) with his guitar playing the riff right in front of you - that's the dream. Streets are followed by Pride and the mood in the arena might easily lift the roof. The last song of the main part is With Or Without You and after more than two hours it might easily be the end of the show. But of course, there are the encores.

    U2 return and do City Of Blinding Lights followed by Beautiful Day. It is great, but it is impossible to beat the Streets / Pride / WOWY run from a couple of minutes ago. The last song differs from show to show. On the first and third night we got One. Because of his injury, Bono doesn't play guitar and so the song has way more intimate feel and is actually half sung by the audience. Not exactly bad, but it can not be compared to the amazing "normal" version, that has been played on all U2 concerts for more than two decades. The second night the show finished with I Still Haven't found What I'm Looking for. Way stronger ending than this current version of One. The real treat came on the last night. It was not an absolute surprise, since both the fourth nights in Amsterdam and Stockholm ended that way, but it was still amazing - after Beautiful Day came Bad. Sublime. Beautiful. Just perfect. And then...The Edge and Adam switch sides and instruments, which can mean only one thing: 40. The whole arena goes: "Hooooow looong to sing this soooong...." and U2 walk one by one down the catwalk do disappear in a red haze. The guy next to me, whose first U2 show was in 1984 and has seen many shows since, shouts: "Amazing, I don't need to see another U2 show!"

    Yeap, the very end was the very best. I mean, all those 4 shows were very well comparable, except for the ending. That's where the last show won. Other than that The Edge seemed to be particularly eager on the second night, when especially during the first four songs he was jumping and running around the stage way more than usual. At least it seemed to me. The second show (25.9) was actually a U2 Birthday - the 39th anniversary of Bono, The Edge, Adam and Larry gathering in Larry's kitchen for the first time, which of course Bono mentioned during the concert.

    Anyway, how to end it? I read somewhere, that the only bad thing about the current tour is the color of Bono's hair. And...yes, it looks strange :-) But seriously, there is nothing that is not absolutely spectacular. The setlist, the energy, Bono's voice, the screen, the sound...yea, the sound is phenomenal. They have loudspeakers all over the arena and the sound is really perfect. But the most important is how the whole show really holds together, how the old songs, the new songs, the visuals and just everything makes for a perfect concert experience. I have seen U2 four times before (2005 - Chorzow, 2009 - Berlin and Chorzow and 2010 - Vienna) and it was always great, but hands down, this Belin residency was the best. If I could go again tonight, I would. And tomorrow.

    I enclose some pictures, plus there are more in HD here:

    2015-09-24: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125395939@N03/albums/72157659130233948
    2015-09-25: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125395939@N03/albums/72157659547921355
    2015-09-28: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125395939@N03/albums/72157657207603374
    2015-09-29: https://www.flickr.com/photos/125395939@N03/albums/72157659550505785





















































































































  6. Very nice pictures !
  7. Great write up
  8. Great pictures!
  9. the pics are absolutely great
  10. *right-click saves every edge picture* ... ahum, thanks
  11. Fab pics Happy24 & nice review
  12. Great review and great photos, Happy24! One remark about the opening song by Patti Smith: the title is People Have the Power.
    Also, we stood just a few steps apart at the third show, and I guess I would be able to tell who you are.
    There was a guy in the first row who was nasty as hell, though. He nearly started a fight with another guy there (I guess he would have hit him if there weren't security staff just a meter away). Never thought there are people like that among U2 audience. A shame.