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Thirty years on, U2 perform The Joshua Tree with the same belief that rock and roll can change the world – review



“We’ve all come to look for America,” sang Bono at the dark, dreamy coda of U2’s classic Bad, giving a positive spin to one of Paul Simon’s most pessimistic song lyrics. It was the key to a night that started out promising the comforting embrace of nostalgia but delivered something much more urgent, a cri de cœur for a divided country, and a rousing plea for the restoration of America’s most noble ideals. “Some people think the dream is dead,” Bono called out during Pride, imploring 50,000 fans to sing along with an anthem celebrating Martin Luther King. “Maybe the dream is just telling us to wake up!”

Those songs were a prelude to the superstar Irish rock band playing the whole of their world-beating, multi-million-selling 1987 album The Joshua Tree in its original order. These kind of favourite-album sets have become increasingly popular among musicians and audiences of a certain vintage. In their 40 years on the road, U2 have previously resisted wallowing in the past, always insisting on touring new projects and determined to be viewed as active, contemporary artists. As it turned out, this 30-year anniversary revival of their breakthrough classic could hardly have been more timely.



The original working title was The Two Americas and it is made up of songs alternately lauding and attacking the best and worst of the American dream, confronting forces of oppression and offering succour to the downtrodden. The heavy rock assault of Bullet the Blue Sky remained a fierce howl of rage but it was balanced by the uplifting gospel soul of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and sheer rambunctious joy of In God’s Country.

The evil blues Exit saw Bono charging around the huge stage in the guise of a psychotic preacher, while guitarist the Edge stirred up a electrifying storm of distortion over drummer Larry Mullen Jnr and bassist Adam Clayton’s thundering rhythm section. It was preceded by short excerpts from an obscure Fifties TV show called Trackdown, in which a sinister charlatan by the name of Walter Trump tried to persuade a western town to build a wall. When a cowboy snapped, “You’re a liar, Trump,” an enormous cheer resounded through Seattle’s football stadium.



It was the only time the Trump word was mentioned during this reprisal of an album conceived in the era of Reaganomics. U2’s usually loquacious Bono was in fantastic voice but proved uncharacteristically tight-lipped between songs, letting the music do the talking. But the message could not have been clearer, reinforced by evocative imagery on a giant, super-high resolution screen. Each song was framed by an individual film made by long-time U2 photographer Anton Corjbin. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and support band Mumford & Sons joined U2 on stage for the album’s finale, Mothers of the Disappeared, delivering an emotional singalong of stoic resistance to fascism.

If the main Joshua Tree set demonstrated just how potent rock can be when boiled down to its primal guitar-band essence, the finale – which featured some of the band's greatest hits – was U2 fully armed with loops, sequencers, synths and special effects. On explosive versions of Beautiful Day and Elevation, Bono called for his American audience to take control of their political destiny: “Governments should fear their citizens, not the other way around!”

As the show drew to a close during a devastating version of Miss Sarajevo, a stadium full of Americans could be seen cheering the image of a young female Muslim Syrian refugee while Bono recited the Statue of Liberty quote from Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

It was moving stuff. U2’s original Joshua Tree tour back in the Eighties set out their claim to be the greatest rock band of their era. Thirty years on, still absurdly persisting in their belief that rock and roll can change the world, they may have even, er, trumped themselves.