Free and Gratis

May 19, 2011



FREE and GRATIS!

Welcome to a new area on U2.com where we'll be hosting free graphics, photos, wallpaper and other cool stuff for you to take away. (Our subscribers, of course, get the biggest choice and the rarest content.)

Help yourself...and keep checking back as we'll be adding more content regularly.

U2.com

A Class Act

May 19, 2011

Bono has recalled former Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald who has died in Dublin.

Mr FitzGerald, 85, served twice as Taoiseach between 1981 and 1987 at the head of Fine Gael/Labour coalition governments.

'The Queensbury rules amongst street fighters... a gentleman.' said Bono. 'He rebranded Ireland with his grace and intellect. I remember feeling very proud that he was our leader. A class act, cut crystal, diamond mine of information, statistics, the detail of peoples lives, that he so cared about. Us.'

U2.com

Radically Diferent

May 20, 2011



'If you compare the set list of the opening of this tour to what we're doing now it's radically different, as is a lot of the show imagery and the production effects.'

On the eve of the US and Canadian dates, Edge reflects on how U2360° has changed since opening night in Barcelona in June 2009.



U2.com

Special Olympics Denver

May 20, 2011



Tonight in Denver - Sydney, Skylar and Cody from Grandview Highschool will attend a dress rehearsal of U2 360. The three participate in a special education spirit programme organised by the Special Olympics in Colorado.

Tonight's dress rehearsal will be the first time the teenagers have seen U2 in concert and they were pretty excited to meet U2 and have their picture with The Claw. U2 performed at the Opening Ceremony of the Special Olympics in 2003. This is third time the band have opened up a dress rehearsal to participants of the Special Olympics and other invited guests - with previous events taking place in Brussels and Barcelona.

U2.com

The Edge Remembers Red Rocks

May 21, 2011



With the U2360° Tour kicking off in Denver, the Edge remembers the band playing at Red Rocks. As it turned out the concert went well and became their first live recording, released as 'Under A Blood Red Sky'. Listen in to how they played in the middle of a rain cloud and how important this concert was.



U2.com

'Louder Than Any Rock Band...'

May 21, 2011



'You who across such distances sent such support to Burma - we thank you: students, teachers, workers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, music fans - U2 fans like me.
'When you raise your voices we hear them in our country and around the world, they are louder than any rock band, than any army, than rocket fire or fighter jet...'

Remarkable moment tonight as the North American tour opened in Denver when Aung San Suu Kyi, sent a video message thanking U2 fans for campaigning for the freedom of the people of Burma.

'Your voices,' she said, 'Are the future - the voices of reason, equality and justice.'

As Bono puts it, Aung San Suu Kyi is to Asia what Nelson Mandela is to Africa and only recently did the military government release her from nearly 20 years of house arrest.
'She's out now and that's very special for us, for U2 fans and for Amnesty International who campaigned for her release,' said Bono, 'This campaigning stuff really works.
'Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to say thanks, but also to remember all the remaining prisoners. This is a message of love from Colorado to south-east Asia...'

In fact this was a pretty unique night all around, the band opening up their postponed US and Canada dates, a year to the night that Bono left surgery in Munich and with a set list transformed from the one that opened this tour nearly two years ago.

Bono thanked a passionate Denver audience for their patience. 'I thank God... and the Germans! Through the wonders of science I'm not just fixed, I'm better! Bono 2.0...'

It was a good moment to introduce the wonders of the band.

'A wonder of nature, Adam Clayton became a father in the last year, still a young buck though!
'Part-Terminator part Duracell Bunny....Larry Mullen Jr on drums...
'In the place where art meets science, the super hero who was bitten by a spider and turned into a nerd...on guitar, The Edge.'

And reiterating his thanks for the patience of the fans, we were into one of the great fan favourites All I Want Is You - one of ten tracks that were not in the show when the band began their first leg of US/Canada dates.

The rain, which had been threatening all week, held off and we were set for a special evening.
Special with the Denver audience welcoming some of their own when The Fray were first up on stage in their home town.
Special because this is the home town of a legendary member of the U2 crew 'who's been looking after Edge's guitars for nearly 25 years. Stand up Dallas Schoo...'
Special because this is Red Rocks country, where Under A Blood Red Sky was recorded... how else would you introduce Sunday Bloody Sunday?
'Where's Red Rocks? Right here!' And it felt like it was.
And special because despite all the predictions in the end the world didn't end - but they'd prepared a song for it. Just in case.
'This is for the Rev Harold Camping.' explained Bono, introducing Until The End of the World. 'Such a disappointment... somewhere feels like the end of world but not right here!'




U2.com

I was in the area for the people with disability (I'm in the left side with black shirt)


My sister Patricia and my nephew Enzo, who loves a lot U2, during his 1st (ever) show






Enzo and his Music Rising shirt

Op-Ed Guest Columnist
What I Learned From Sargent Shriver
By BONO

Published: January 19, 2011

The Irish are still mesmerized by the mythical place that is America, but in the ’60s our fascination got out of hand. I was not old enough to remember the sacrifices of the great generation who saved Europe in the Second World War, or to quite comprehend what was going on in Vietnam. But what I do remember, and cannot forget, is watching a man walk on the moon in 1969 and thinking here is a nation that finds joy in the impossible.



The Irish are still mesmerized by the mythical place that is America, but in the ’60s our fascination got out of hand. I was not old enough to remember the sacrifices of the great generation who saved Europe in the Second World War, or to quite comprehend what was going on in Vietnam. But what I do remember, and cannot forget, is watching a man walk on the moon in 1969 and thinking here is a nation that finds joy in the impossible.

The Irish saw the Kennedys as our own royal family out on loan to America. A million of them turned out on J.F.K.’s homecoming to see these patrician public servants who, despite their station, had no patience for the status quo. (They also loved that the Kennedys looked more WASP than any “Prod,” our familiar term for Protestant.)

I remember Bobby’s rolled-up sleeves, Jack’s jutted jaw and the message — a call to action — that the world didn’t have to be the way it was. Science and faith had found a perfect rhyme.

In the background, but hardly in the shadows, was Robert Sargent Shriver. A diamond intelligence, too bright to keep in the darkness. He was not Robert or Bob, he was Sarge, and for all the love in him, he knew that love was a tough word. Easy to say, tough to see it through. Love, yes, and peace, too, in no small measure; this was the ’60s but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him. No long hair in the Shriver house, or rock ’n’ roll. He and his beautiful bride, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, would go to Mass every day — as much an act of rebellion against brutal modernity as it was an act of worship. Love, yes, but love as a brave act, a bold act, requiring toughness and sacrifice.

His faith demanded action, from him, from all of us. For the Word to become flesh, we had to become the eyes, the ears, the hands of a just God. Injustice could, in the words of the old spiritual, “Be Overcome.” Robert Sargent sang, “Make me a channel of your peace,” and became the song.

Make me a channel of your peace:

Where there is hatred let me bring your love.

Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord,

And where there’s doubt, true faith in you.

Oh, Master grant that I may never seek,

So much to be consoled as to console.

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace,

Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope.

Where there is darkness, only light,

And where there’s sadness, ever joy.

The Peace Corps was Jack Kennedy’s creation but embodied Sargent Shriver’s spirit. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty but Sarge led the charge. These, and the Special Olympics, were as dramatic an incarnation of the ideas at the heart of America as the space program.

Robert Sargent Shriver changed the world more than a few times and, I am happy to say, changed my world forever. In the late ’90s, when the Jubilee 2000 campaign — which aimed to cancel the debts that the poorest nations owed to the richest — asked me to help in the United States, I called on the Shriver clan for help and advice. What I got were those things in spades, and a call to arms like a thump in the back.

In the years since, Bobby Shriver — Sarge’s oldest son — and I co-founded three fighting units in the war against global poverty: DATA, ONE and (RED). We may not yet know what it will take to finish the fight and silence suffering in our time, but we are flat out trying to live up to Sarge’s drill.

I have beautiful memories of Bobby and me sitting with his father and mother at the Shrivers’ kitchen table — the same team that gazed over J.F.K.’s shoulder — looking over our paltry attempts at speechifying, prodding and pushing us toward comprehensibility and credibility, a challenge when your son starts hanging round with a bleeding-heart Irish rock star.

Toward the end, when I visited Sarge as a frailer man, I was astonished by his good spirits and good humor. He had the room around him laughing out loud. I thought it a fitting final victory in a life that embodied service and transcended, so often, grave duty, that he had a certain weightlessness about him. Even then, his job nearly done, his light shone undiminished, and brightened us all.


Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.


A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 20, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition..


nytimes

Big names like Dylan, U2 dot producer Daniel Lanois' life story
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 12,
By Kevin Canfield
San Francisco Chronicle


Soul Mining: A
Soul Mining: A Musical Life
by Daniel Lanois
Faber and Faber, $26


view photos


With radio-ready hits like Sledgehammer, Big Time and In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel's 1986 record, So, represented the biggest triumph in a long, successful career. But that doesn't mean it came together easily.

One day, it seems, the singer was writing a few verses in a barn in rural England, while next door the album's producer, Daniel Lanois, readied himself in Gabriel's recording studio. This usually worked well, Lanois explains in his new memoir, Soul Mining, but Gabriel would occasionally wander off, wasting precious time with pointless phone chat.

"Solution: the next time Peter went into the barn, I took these giant railway spikes and nailed him in," Lanois writes. "... I'm not sure that all the lyrics came out of that one session, but it was a good tone-setter for discipline, even if it almost got me deported from the West Country of England."

In the 25 years since this bit of makeshift carpentry, Lanois has positioned himself as one of the most successful producers in the business, the craftsman behind some of the era's finest albums: U2's The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind, Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball and Willie Nelson's Teatro (not to mention fellow Canadian Neil Young's recent Le Noise, an album that takes its title from Lanois' nickname). Accordingly, this book is bursting with memorable anecdotes about his collaborators, another of the debut author's many gifts to fans of rock and country music.

From Rick James to Brian Eno

Brief and episodic, Soul Mining begins on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, where Lanois, born in 1959, "spoke only French until the age of ten." A love of music ran in the family, which was populated by fiddlers and singers. As a boy he spent a week's allowance on a toy pennywhistle, and over time he devised his own musical language.

Reproduced in the book, his Morse-code-like symbols look like nothing much -- until they're compared with the notations Lanois kept many years later when working with U2 (also shown in the book). Juxtaposed, the pages offer a fascinating look at the development of a creative mind.

A young man with an ear for popular music, Lanois built a studio in his mother's basement. Word of mouth quickly led to pivotal early jobs -- one day, for example, he found himself recording Rick James. "I felt like I was in the presence of Bach or Beethoven," Lanois writes. "His understanding of the tapestry of funk in my experience remains unparalleled. ... I didn't even mind that Rick never paid me for the session."

He also found work alongside Brian Eno, the former Roxy Music keyboard player who, like Lanois, would later enjoy great success as one of U2's producers. In perhaps the book's most fascinating tale, Lanois describes how Eno conjured the dreamlike compositions found on his "ambient" records of the 1970s and '80s: "Years before, he had been hit by a taxicab in London. While lying in the hospital bed he noticed that the classical music playing over the speaker in his room was audible only at the crescendos of the arrangements. In the quieter passages there was seeming silence. ... This was the beginning of Eno's Ambient Music Theory."

No personal details

Elsewhere, Lanois offers vivid snapshots of his encounters with some of the era's musical geniuses. One chapter, for instance, finds him visiting Leonard Cohen's house to talk about a Cohen song he had just recorded: "Leonard greeted me with a platter and asked if I wanted any chopped liver. ... I accepted a glass of wine, as Leonard listened to my version of The Stranger on my Walkman headphones."

Another chapter captures the intimate feel of a Dylan recording session: "The Oh Mercy studio was essentially a kitchen. Bob and I sat like two guys on a porch. He played my nice 1952 butterscotch Telecaster that I plugged into an early sixties Fender Concert amp tucked around the corner, five feet from Bob, with moving blankets around the mic to avoid vocal spill."

For a man writing something like an autobiography, Lanois is notably circumspect about his personal life. The debauchery and damaged relationships found in many music memoirs have no place in this book. Maybe that's best. With a career this fascinating, there just isn't room for self-mythologizing filler. As Lanois writes at one point, "I don't want to give away all my secrets." He's referring to the experimentation that resulted in one of his best bits of studio work, but you get the sense that he has told all the stories he wants to tell.

star-telegram.com

'U2 were up in the clouds...'
January 4, 2011



Ever since anyone can remember, Irish rock journalist and broadcaster Dave Fanning has been the first person to air the first single from a new U2 album.

Dave has been friends with the band since their earliest days even though, when he first saw them play, ‘there were 5 or 6 other bands that I much preferred’. But, he recalls, ‘they had a belief in their own ability that none of the other crowd had.’


With the publication of his memoir, ‘The Thing Is…’ we tracked Dave down to ask him about the waning power of the DJ, how music has changed and some of his most memorable interviews. (In Part II, coming in a few days, Dave talks in more detail about his relationship with U2)




Congratulations on your autobiography! Are you glad you wrote it?

I really am! Originally, I was thinking, “This is stupid. Does the world really need a book about Dave Fanning, written by Dave Fanning?” But I realised there are those who grew up in Ireland in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s who will relate to it.




But it goes wider than that. Not only did you have a ring-side seat and access to the great artists of those decades, but you played a significant part within popular culture, starting with pirate radio…

I was the biggest fish in a small pond, and that’s why I got so much of what I got. Not because I was good, or bad, but because I was ‘Ireland’ to the PR people. I could offer print, radio and TV. Robbie Williams gave half an hour to each country, and I got the half-hour here because I was able to offer all three. Don’t make me into Sir Dave Fanning. It’s just what I did.




But you were able to do something with it when you got it. You helped to introduce new bands to their audience, including U2…

No question, yes. But the world was different, then.

The power of a DJ like John Peel has completely diminished these days. If you want to find something new, you can do it instantly. You don’t need anyone guiding you through.

I think a lot has been lost. Most bands don’t get time to develop. It was only when U2 got to Unforgettable Fire - album 4! - that they really started moving, but it was to get to that point that was important, because then you get the breakthrough: suddenly it becomes The Joshua Tree.

That sort of thing doesn’t really happen any more, which I find sad. It’s all so ephemeral.





Did you ever have to play music from a play-list?

Never once in my entire life did that happen. Never. We were always meant to be the experts and we were left alone to do it.




How important does music remain within popular culture?

Good question. I do think it’s diminished… Once, if I saw someone carrying a record bag, I had to know what was in the bag, and would instantly decide on what sort of person they were! They were either an idiot or really cool…

Getting your hands on music was so difficult. Even listening to music. BBC Radio 1’s ‘Sounds of the Seventies’ was so important; even more essential than Peel. And I’d listen to the live gig between half 6pm and 7.30, even if the band was boring.

Today there are 40 channels playing music all the time, and if you go into your local supermarket, there’s a TV playing a video of the latest Black Eyed Peas cover band. Jesus Christ! What’s it become? There’s no listening to Radio Luxembourg under the covers any more, waiting to see what they’re going to play next.

Maybe I’m just too old…




Are today’s kids the Generation X-Factor?!

I’m stunned at the number of people who watch X Factor. It’s such glue for the family. Every age group, even hardened rockers… I just don’t get it.

You have Louis, who I like a lot, being pathetic every week. And then you have Simon Cowell saying, “You’re what this show’s all about.” No it’s not. It’s all about you, Simon…

These idiots have hijacked everything that was dear to me: the pop charts. And yet the amount of pleasure people get out of X Factor! So who am I, but an old fogey with my slippers and rocking chair and my Bovril?




What, for you, makes a great interview?

I’m not sure. Sometimes, you just know. The other day I interviewed Ron Wood and it didn’t work. But usually, the bigger the star, the better the interview. They have more to say, they understand the game, and they perk up if they realise you’re not just asking the normal series of questions.




Do you get star struck?

My interview with Joni Mitchell was the biggest one of all for me, because she came into the studio. I realised then that I was a little bit star-struck. For me, she was the greatest thing in the 1970s and to have her come in to do her first interview in six years – I still have no idea why she agreed to do it, to this day.

But there is always something bigger than the star: you’re consumed with having to get it right. Once I went all the way to Cincinnati to interview Peter Frampton, then straight to LA for Fleetwood Mac. It just has to work in those circumstances. And making it work is always bigger than the person I’m sitting in front of.

I usually get a bit bolder towards the end. That’s why I was so annoyed with Lou Reed. He stopped the interview 20 minutes before the end and I would love to have gone elsewhere with him.




U2 weren’t stars when you first met them - and you didn’t see much in them that suggested they would be. Is that right?

Yes. There were 5 or 6 other bands that I much preferred. U2 were trying to do something new that sounded different. And in 1978, that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. The Undertones were based on decent pop music; the Rats were stealing from the Stones, and a thousand people were making short, sharp aggressive pop music. U2’s music was ethereal, up in the clouds. And it was like, “Jesus! Who do they think they are?”

It’s easier for someone like Jack White or Jimmy Page to look cool because their coolness is built on the blues, from something in the past. Edge, meanwhile, was trying to bring music into the future; and that’s a much more difficult thing to try and sell.

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