August 14, 2009 - London, England - Wembley Stadium

Media Review:

The Guardian

U2: Wembley Stadium, London

4 stars (out of 5)

by Alexis Petridis

As befits the arrival in town of the world's biggest band, U2's 360 tour fetches up in London amid a flurry of news stories. Tonight's show is reported to be record-breaking: the audience is said to number 88,000 people, the largest crowd ever assembled at Wembley stadium. Elsewhere it is announced that the show's vast claw-like set is be turned into a permanent gig venue when the tour is over, presumably in a country where planning permission for a 164-foot luminescent blue claw that belches out dry ice isn't much of an issue. But most striking of all, the Sun's Bizarre page reported that it had received a hand-written letter from Bono promising that tonight's show would be a success. "I swear by the green green sacred grass of Wembley stadium that the sun will shine out of our collective arses this weekend," he wrote.

It's a long time since U2's frontman had to deliver guarantees regarding their live shows. But the 360 tour began badly: the journalists shipped out to the opening night came back bearing reports of technical hitches and fluffed intros. You could say, as some critics did, that it lent the show a rather charming sense of human frailty, but the kind of person who turns up to see U2 live probably isn't overly concerned with the band's ability to communicate a rather charming sense of human frailty. They want a huge, slick, impressive show.

They don't go home disappointed. They get what they came for, complete with a specially taped video introduction from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Bono certainly doesn't perform like a man who spent yesterday hastily scribbling assurances to the Sun. He performs like a man who has spent the last quarter of a century doing this for a living and knows that it's difficult to be too hokey when you have to reach the peanut gallery: basking in the applause with arms outstretched, appearing in a suit bedecked with red lights, announcing "I always think of Joe Strummer at moments like this" during Sunday Bloody Sunday and "it's summer, you're not on a beach, so you must really want to be here," between songs, as if he'd expected to find Wembley empty except for a handful of curious tourists who had got lost en route to Buckingham Palace.

The set comes toploaded with songs from the recent No Line on the Horizon, which you could argue also shows a certain confident swagger, although given that it went to number one in 30 countries they are hardly clobbering the audience with unknown material. The crowd even go wild for Get on Your Boots, rather than greeting it with the gasp of mortification warranted by Bono singing "hey sexy boots".

And yet, it's obvious why: whatever objections you might raise about U2, you would have a tough time indeed saying that their music isn't fit for purpose when it comes to stirring vast crowds, and a tougher time still remaining unstirred yourself. Indeed, you could argue that songs such as Vertigo or Where the Streets Have No Name only really come into their own accompanied by the weird, disembodied sound of tens of thousands of people bellowing along. Understandably, tens of thousands of people seem perfectly happy to oblige.

© 2009 The Guardian