The 1997 tour Bono called U2’s greatest work: “The best thing”
There is no shortage of moments in U2’s career that Bono hasn’t been able to take a great deal of pride in.
Even though many bands have tried to be a little bit humble about their gifts and tried to keep themselves from getting too big an ego, there are also several rock fans who claim that the Irish frontman doesn’t have the kind of filter when talking about all the work that he has done for charity or working on whatever new project that they are working on… But when you look past the man in the grandma sunglasses, the Bono underneath it all held a few pieces closer to his heart than others.
And, really, it’s not like the band didn’t have anything to be proud of, either – their entire ascent includes some of the best music of the 1980s, and even when they were a little bit preachy during their political era, it’s not like they didn’t have a point. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ is still one of the greatest protest songs of that era, and nearly half of what ended up on The Joshua Tree is everything that rock and roll was supposed to be.
It truly felt like the band could have taken over the entire world if they wanted to after that record, but Rattle and Hum did bring them back down to Earth a little bit. Up until then, that movie was the first time U2 dealt with the one thing that they hadn’t dealt with before: being embarrassing. The entire record had its heart in the right place, but when you see them coming off like one of the most pretentious bands in the world, they should have been the first band out the door once grunge came in.
So the hell were they able to stick around during the reign of Nirvana? Well, half of it comes down to some very careful marketing tactics. There was no way that Bono could have got away with putting on a flannel shirt and trying to be the next Eddie Vedder, but after playing the biggest stadiums in the world, coming off like a parody of a traditional rock and roll star was a lot more inspired than everyone else’s ideas.
Achtung Baby leaned fully into the irony of rock and roll, but it wouldn’t really come to life until they hit the stage. The band were always known for their massive live shows, and if they were playing themselves up as these post-ironic rock and roll stars, they may as well have gone all out and made the kind of stage show that looked like it was ripped directly from the book 1984 for the PopMart tour
The accompanying album was definitely a step down, but Bono wasn’t about to apologise for the massive shows that they could pull off, saying, “The film PopMart Live From Mexico City is the best thing, audiovisually, that U2 has done. It’s better than Zoo TV, it’s better than all of them. It’s really quite shocking.”
“It’s unfortunate that we weren’t able to play that well at the start of the tour as we did by the end of it, by the time we got to Mexico.”
Bono
And considering what was going on behind the scenes with U2, the whole thing could have been their last hurrah as well. Bono would eventually get word that he potentially had throat cancer before they began working on their next reinvention, so this was their excuse to truly go out with a bang if it was going to be the last time people would hear the band performing in any capacity.
While Bono’s health problems turned out to be nothing more than a scare, that doesn’t diminish the massive size and scope of everything that they made on that tour. The idea of taking rock and roll to the dancefloors may have been one of the more ill-advised choices of their career, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t still have some fun every single time they walked out onto that stage.
