All Kinds Of Everything

Today I realised that it's almost a full year since I was last in Dublin. It has never been this long between visits, ever since that first trip in 1995. Wow. Small wonder I'm getting bouts of homesickness for good ole Áth Cliath then! Anyway, it'll probably be a while longer before I'll go back - the question of employment has to be settled first , but then! Oh then :)

So I was listening to that live version of 'Mercy' from Bruxelles last year, when we were there ourselves, and now I can't get that last line of the chorus out of my head: 'Because we can, we must'. Simple, and somehow enormously uplifting, I find..... It's very typical of Bono, and I mean that in the best possible sense. It might have sounded incredibly dumb coming from someone else, but not him. It certainly also resonates with me now in the context of all the fundraisers going on for hunger relief in Africa and all those other catastrophes happening over the last long while.... That line is going to rattle around my head for a while to come, I think.....

Then I went and picked up John Waters' book 'Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2', because it's been sitting on my shelf for a few years and I haven't read it yet. I think I got it at one of those Saturday morning markets in Temple Bar Square. See how homesick I am? Anyway... the book starts out describing the aftermath of a Zoo TV show, and it struck me how little U2 concerts have actually changed for me since I started going to them - sure the settings are all different, but the magic and the sheer effort put into communicating with us, the audience - that wanting to connect - it's still the same, undiminished power. I still wish I could've seen a Zoo TV show - I would have loved to have been a fan pre-Achtung Baby, and to have experienced that whole transformation upfront, because it was so massive.

Someone said (can't remember who) that the 360 Tour had all the best elements of all tours from Zoo TV onwards, and there is some truth to that I think. Technology has been catching up to the visions in their heads - what was that story of Bono simply drawing a sketch of The Claw on a napkin and Willie just running with it? But at the end of the day, no matter where you were for this show - and there were no crap seats in the house for this one, I can tell you - the music still reigned supreme, all that other stuff was there to make sense of playing in a big space. It's going to be so much fun to see what they come up with next time!