Are U2 the greatest rock band ever?

By Neil McCormick

U2 are now, officially, the most popular live band of all time. Their 360 tour has broken previous ticket sales records set by the Rolling Stones, and there is still another three and a half months on the road to go. By the time the three year world tour winds down in North America at the end of July, they will have sold more than 7 million tickets and grossed more than $700 million dollars.

I don’t expect them to be banking too much of that money. Talk to U2’s accountants off the record and they express horror at the high costs and low profits of this whole enterprise. Manager Paul McGuinness commented that “the dollar figure for the gross looks enormous. Of course I can’t tell you what the net is, but I can tell you that the band spend enormous sums on production for their audience.” Keeping the U2 show on the road costs close to a million dollars a day, whether they are playing or not. And, of course, this one was disrupted for several months when Bono put his back out.

It has always been a slight bone of contention between band and management. Bono comes in to meetings raving about ideas to build an alien space station and convert stadiums so that they can play gigs in the round, promoters and designers and accountants queue up to tell the band it can’t be done, and then they do it anyway. U2 are mounting not only the greatest show on earth, but the most expensive. It has been this way since they set new standards for stadium rock in the early 90s with the astonishing Zoo TV show, which ran for two years and nearly bankrupted the band. “I remember that whole tour as a triumph, although it didn’t actually make any money,” McGuinness once admitted to me. He and the promoters had implored the band to raise the ticket price, which they refused to do. “If we had put on another couple of dollars it would have been not only a creative but also a huge financial success. I suppose it was an investment in the future, which is what we always used to say to make ourselves feel better about the money.”

But the underlying reason for U2’s continuing popularity live is that they more than match the jaw dropping spectacle and ground breaking hi-tech wonderment with the heart and emotion of their music. The Rolling Stones, who have long billed themselves as the world’s greatest rock band, (and have four tours in the top ten, to U2’s two) have rarely got the balance quite right. The Stones’ music, which is so much better suited to the clubs that they came of age in, can veer towards a showband parade in a stadium, all trademark riffs and no heart, while the spectacle verges on circus silliness. A bold pop act like Madonna can certainly put on a show, but the music is barely live, a pre-recorded and sequenced soundtrack to the dance extravaganza. The Police and AC/DC both feature in the top ten grossing tours of all time, and, interestingly, they go the other way, relying on their musical muscle, with the visual side almost an afterthought.

U2 have an advantage in these settings because they make big gesture music, that suits a stadium scale, performed live by a rock band that depend on the primary musical colours of guitar, bass and drums, while in Bono they have a frontman with the charisma, warmth, personality and almost mad drive to fill a vast space and reach everyone out there. He is aided in this by his almost evangelical (his detractors would say Messianic) desire to affect political change in the world, by moving the greatest number of people to respond to his charitable causes. Bono’s activism adds a sense of worth to the whole endeavour, by giving U2 fans the feeling that they are participating in something selfless, so the audience surrenders not just to the lure of a communal sing song, but is suffused with the heartwarming feeling that by doing so they are actually aiding their fellow man. It is heady if contradictory stuff, like a protest march in Las Vegas, but the inbuilt ironies of the dazzling barrage of video imagery on display embrace that complexity, cleverly illustrating the band’s own awareness of the contradictions, and facilitating all kinds of individual responses to the performance. The U2 message is not as simplistic as “love will save us all”, because while Bono is singing his redemption songs, the screens are just as likely to be flashing up motifs declaring Everything You Know Is Wrong.

A U2 show is a bustling, complex affair, because creatively, U2 have never stopped moving, never got stuck in a nostalgic trap, so that the whole endeavour feels live in more than just the obvious respect, it is alive to the moment. Even after an amazing (and unparalleled) 35 years together with the same line up, there is still the strong sense that U2 really want to be there, they are in it for something more than the money, or even the glory.

There are, of course, plenty who will disagree, and for whom U2 represent a rock nadir, the triumph of the blockbuster tendency over rock’s primal roots. Some people prefer small and intimate, and distrust special effects. Which is fair enough, but U2 have an answer to that too, and we will see it at Glastonbury this summer, when they take to the stage without their sci-fi 50 metre high alien claw and all their hi-tech gizmos, and try to win over the festival crowd with the very essence of what they do: playing passionate, brilliant, white hot rock music and singing songs that stir the soul. At Glastonbury, U2 won’t be playing to converts, and it is there that we will see what they are really made of, and whether they have really earned the right to claim the Rolling Stones title as their own: not just the highest grossing rock band ever, but the greatest.

[blogs.telegraph.co.uk]