(It was hard not to hear the bit of the late movie-star president’s 1980 “City Upon a Hill” speech piped in at one point in the evening as a rebuke.) The clear message of the tour is that U2’s point still stands. The challenge of The Joshua Tree to the core of the American dream is pointed: What is the value of a promise of prosperity we can’t all enjoy? How can a nation move forward when many of its own are “running to stand still?” The question was first posed to an American working class wracked by Reagan-era economic shortsightedness. Show opener “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” with its warning of a time when “fact is fiction and TV, reality,” feels doubly resonant as a television-star president actively attempts to erode the public’s trust in the press. A monochrome highway drive skirted by roaming hitchhikers matched the wanderlust of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Luminescent Joshua trees glowed in the night sky for “In God’s Country.” The screen also pumped out treated live footage of the band from cameras tracking each member onstage, and when the well of tricks seemed exhausted, it mixed and matched flashy moves at the same time, as it did during the dramatic ending of the rarely played “Red Hill Mining Town,” which pitted the band on the left side of the display against horn accompaniment from the Salvation Army Brass Band on the other.Ģ017 is a fortuitous time to revisit U2’s bleeding-heart ’80s.
U2 the joshua tree concert review 1987 full#
As the band presented The Joshua Tree in full in the middle of the set, the stadium was flooded with breathtaking visuals courtesy of star photographer Anton Corbijn. U2 played the first of two dates at East Rutherford’s MetLife Stadium last night in front of a 200-by-40-foot LED video screen pumping out crisp imagery in lurid, 8K ultra-hi-def resolution. The tour to commemorate the album must be seen to be believed. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of its seminal 1987 album, The Joshua Tree, the stone-cold classic that broke the Irish band in the United States, U2 released a vault-clearing seven-disc reissue complete with B-sides, outtakes, a full 1987 Madison Square Garden concert, and a disc of remixes from producer friends Steve Lillywhite, Daniel Lanois, Flood, and others. U2 cut a deal with Apple that pushed 2014’s Songs of Innocence to half a billion iTunes users’ libraries whether they wanted it or not. Every piece of the band, from singer Bono’s pleading intensity to the Edge’s whirring guitar arpeggios and bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.’s explosive rhythm section, feels world-beating and tremendous.