“It was a beautiful thing”: the tour where U2 repeatedly trapped themselves in a lemon
Even if you’re the biggest artist in the world, you can’t avoid making comical gaffes or faux pas on stage or in public appearances, and no matter how much you might try and hide behind a stony facade to cover up your embarrassment, sometimes you’ve just got to own these errors. As much as they might like to cover it up, U2 are no exception to this rule, and while they’ve had many mishaps on stage in the past, there’s one slice of misfortune that they’ll forever be remembered for.
The Irish rock group may appear to take themselves incredibly seriously, but surely they’ve got to realise that it’s a necessity to have a laugh about things when it all goes tits up at their expense. However, when it repeatedly happens to you for the same exact reason, then it’s going to become a cross you have to bear forever rather than something you can reflect on with a knowing smirk.
We could be kind to the band and only bring up the fact that guitarist The Edge once walked off the side of the stage during a show in Vancouver in 2015, plummeting around five or six feet into the pit. The guitarist was thankfully not seriously injured by his clumsy footwork and has laughed off the incident on many occasions since despite becoming a laughing stock online.
This would be the ideal way to handle a live goof, but they certainly didn’t seem to get the memo on this back in 1997 during their infamous PopMart tour. The corresponding album, Pop, that they were touring in support of had continued to see the band develop upon their stadium-friendly rock and propelled them to even greater levels of commercial success. At the same time, this watered-down iteration of their sound was beginning to grate on some audiences, and U2 were becoming something of a punchline for anyone wanting to ridicule a band for selling out and going too far up their own behinds.
So, when they decided to take things too far and descend to the stage for their encores in a giant reflective lemon, many people were left thinking that it would be incredibly hilarious if they accidentally got trapped inside and weren’t able to finish their shows. That’s exactly what happened. At least three times, in fact. The first instance took place in Oslo, where the gargantuan fruit malfunctioned in a way that prevented it from opening, and while the band all emerged looking a little embarrassed after a little longer than anticipated, they were able to swiftly move forward with their set.
However, the fact that it would then happen again in Tokyo and Las Vegas, either getting stuck on its descent or failing to open its doors fully, and in other cities, having to have technicians scramble to find a way to remove the band from their citrus cocoon, meant that it became something of a nuisance for the band to have to deal with. Why they didn’t abandon the idea after the second time is beyond comprehension.
Bono would later claim: “I still miss our lemon. That was a beautiful, psychedelic kind of funky. It was a beautiful thing, travelling in that lemon.” He may well have thought it was beautiful, but to most of the rest of the world, it was a symbol of a band with too much ego trying to put on a display that was far beyond their means.
