Sunday Independent, June 25, 2005

Barry Egan

By the time darkness had fallen on Croke Park on both Friday and Saturday night, nearly 160,000 pilgrims had come to regard Bono as some sort of secular saint.

They sang along in an almost religious manner to the unbridled emotionalism of One, his enduring masterpiece. It was a touching moment to hear the words ring out across Dublin: "Is it getting better/Or do you feel the same?/Will it make it easier on you, now you got someone to blame?"

Watching Bono perform One after he had sung Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own I wondered how the exuberant showman, the Northside Elvis, can co-exist with the private poet of such searing sensivity. But somehow he has reconciled the contradictions beautifully.

Both shows opened with Vertigo. Then Friday's went straight into I Will Follow, while on Saturday it was Out of Control, which eventually segued into Backstabbing by the O'Jays.

And if I'm allowed to do a bit of my own backstabbing, Saturday's sound was abominable. It was tough to make out Bono's comments - though he could be heard telling us that Bertie Ahern was in the house and hopefully would keep the promises he'd made about world debt.

Still, it was good to see them making a effort and varying the set-list somewhat. Last night, Beautiful Day segued into Blackbird, while on Friday it went into Here Comes the Sun. Last night, they also did All I Want is You, which didn't make the cut on Friday.

All night we were treated to Bono's patented messianic slow walk along the ramp. "It's the funky side of town - the Northside," he announced. His talk about the magic of U2 playing in their home town had the crowd (and not just Dubs - there were fans from Japan, and America, and beyond) eating ravenously out of the palm of his hand. There is a virtual a capella intro to Elevation with Bono seeming to recite Japanese haikus. "Won't you tell me something true," he sings. "I believe in you."

So did the crowd.

The tightly strung drama of New Year's Day had a remarkable potency. And that potency seemed to grow inexorably as the show progressed. I saw U2 play London's Twickenham last Saturday week and California the month before but there was something so powerful about watching U2 perform at home.

The hymn-like quality of the crowd singing the chorus to I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For on Friday was hard to ignore. Indeed, hard not to be moved by.

It scarcely needs mentioning that hearing this particular song live was profoundly emotional. It's certainly not the kind of spirituality normally found in popular music.

But then Bono - the child of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father, a rock star singing about mortality, death and the ongoing dilemmas of human existence - was never going to be normal. Nor was he ever going to be ordinary. And almost everything he did this weekend was out of the ordinary.

Songs like City Of Blinding Lights were incandescent, starting just as the darkness was descending on the city. The band followed this with a rare outing of Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses. "That was the third time we ever played that," Bono explained. "I hope it was to your liking."

It was. Everything he sang the crowd found to their liking. In Croker Bono's lyrics resonated in a such profound way - you could physically see it in the faces of the concert-goers - because they contain a universality, a depth of humanity, a vunerability and a longing that the audience understood and identified with. And at their core, U2 offer us soul music in its most literal sense; indeed Bono's every growl and murmur seemed to speak from the depths of his soul.

But that's not surprising because that's where U2's magic springs from. What makes Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own so special is that all of us can understand and identify with the lyrics at some level. All of us have fathers who, sadly, are either dead or will die one day.

So when Bono introduced the song for his father, Bob Hewson, everyone understood his emotion. "A great man. I miss him." It is not some rambling esoteric musing, it is simple pain and suffering - a song about loss.

Bono's stage presence was such that it didn't seem to matter that his dedication of Miracle Drug to "the scientists, doctors and nurses who keep us alive - especiallythe nurses" had exactly same intonations and pauses as when he said it a whole week ago in London.

This weekend we were witness to the magnificent sight and sound of U2 at their peak, at their rawest and in many ways at their most real. Irony was given the night off. As were the giant lemons of the PopMart tour.

There was no Bono dressed as Macphisto or getting Salman Rushdie to appear on stage with him (the polemic author appeared on stage with the band at Wembley Stadium in August 1993). There was none of that.

What is was was simple: it was four chords and the truth and it was Dublin. A sort of homecoming, indeed.

At the end of a seething version of Love and Peace, Bono put on a blindfold covered in religious iconography and pounded a loud drum at the end of the ramp. The symbolism could have been both of jihad terrorist or hostage about to be beheaded on Arab TV.

The drumming of the final beat of Love And Peace went straight from violence in the Middle East into violence in the North on an emotive rendition of Sunday Bloody Sunday. "Abraham speak to your sons! Tell them no more! Wipe your tears away!"

Before we knew it, the dark cinematic vista generated by Bullet The Blue Sky was upon us and we've been dragged to Central America where death squads are on the rampage. This was Bono as messianic preacher. Pride, In The Name Of Love was dedicated to Martin Luther King, whose death the song references. "A shot rings out in the Memphis sky," Bono sang as Adam Clayton's bassline boomed across Croker. "The dream goes on," Bono said at the end of the song (he's talking of Dr King's dream of an end to racism). Perhaps the racism so prevalent in Ireland contradicts this but we all knew what Bono meant.

When the band performed the amazing One and Bono sang: "One love, we get to share it/Leaves you baby if you don't care for it", everyone happily joined in. Then they were gone, to eardrum-denting applause.

They began their Friday night encore with Zoo Station from Achtung Baby with Bono sporting a black peaked cap that wouldn't have looked out of place on Freddie Mercury. Then it was The Fly and Without Or Without You. The Edge's euphoric guitar rush was just that: euphoric. Larry Mullen stood in the middle of the stage like a cherub in black denim. "You're beautiful Dublin," Bono said as he punched the air. "Thanks for coming."

The feeling was clearly mutual. Then the secular saint and his three disciples walked off to the kind of cheers from the crowd that is hard to articulate. Five minutes later, the quartet re-appeared for the last time to close an amazing set with a second rendition of Vertigo. "It doesn't get better than this for U2 playing in Dublin," Bono said, as the crowd went absolutely apeshit.

As that other esoteric spiritualist Van Morrison sings on Coney Island: "Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?"

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