Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Induction of U2 - 2005

This blog entry is just about four years too late. So while you are reading this, please pretend that you are back in 2005. I didn’t realize this until the other day but thanks to YouTube, one of my all time favourite bands consisting of Bono, Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Broadcast on VH1 in the states, the footage which has been taken off of YouTube due to contract disagreements between Google and the media companies, U2 entered the elite group of rock legends as soon as they became eligible.

This should be no surprise as they still tour the globe and put out great albums after all these years. Although I do admit that they sort of lost me for about six to eight years after Rattle and Hum. The end of that world tour had seen the show morph from the Zooropa album into the Popmart show and the bands persona had changed from good to a bit weird. I think Bono got carried away with playing his on stage characters.

It wasn’t until 2004 when they came back with the album ‘How to Dismantle a Time Bomb’ that I recently started to listen to their new material. Albeit, almost five years after it was released and thanks to YouTube. The world tour in 2005 was their biggest apparently. I think U2 probably still has the best live performances because even during a lesser known song which you wouldn’t normally hear on the radio, you will still be bombarded with a huge array of cool images and graphics which their concerts became well known for. You could take any one of the millions of images they’ve splashed across the screen and make a t-shirt out of all of them. I’d buy, most of them if I could. One for each day of my life. Who needs to do laundry with so much clothes?

Stage designs were of monstrous proportions almost no other band or performer has bothered to put together in a similar fashion for their own shows. The 2001 tour in support of the album “All that you leave behind” featured the same impressive set up but with an arc in the shape of a heart. This arc extended out into the audience and allowed the Bono, Edge and the rest to run pretty deep into the crowd in a way without touching the ground below. The heart became just a round circle and all the giant flat panel screens which used up so much power through all those years were replaced with a much more energy conserving curtains of LED lamps. These lights hung from rafters extending from the stage up into the sky light skyscrapers as they were meant to depict the theme of the song “City of Blinding Lights” on their most recent tour. This latest set up is probably the easiest for them to set up, tear down, move, and program whatever messages and images they wanted.

City of Blinding Lights - Photo by Joe Pugliese

Their induction into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame occurred just after midnight at the famed Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. Bruce Springsteen gave the welcome speech for U2 as Bono had done for Bruce Springsteen when he himself was inducted back in 1999.

• Induction Speech by Bruce Springsteen Part 1
• Induction Speech by Bruce Springsteen Part 2

The evening was capped off by a four song mini set which included They played Vertigo, ‘I Still haven’t found what I’m looking for‘ with Bruce Springsteen, Pride(In the Name of Love) and ‘Until the End of the World’.

Some other interesting info which I came across. Someone on YouTube actually went to Bono’s house in Ireland. All they saw was the giant iron gates and you could not see inside through the gates and the surrounding stone walls. After milling about for a couple of minutes, the intercom came on and the security staff asked the people to go away.

Bono is also a featured columnist at the New York Times. They just published an article about how Bono thinks that Frank Sinatra’s voice does not have ’sentimentality’.