Saturday, February 28, 2009

Vertigo

Ok to get away for a day from talking about Being Human, I thought I'd share this instead. Normally I listen to Radio 2 when I'm cooking the tea on Friday evenings, and for the last two weeks Chris Evans has been talking about U2 coming into the studio. He was also hinting at a really big thing that was going to happen. Being a busy sort of person I kind of forgot all about it, and yesterday, because I was so busy running the kids around between singing auditions (no3), drama lessons (nos2&3) and school discos (no1) I completely FORGOT that U2 were on Chris Evans so I missed it. And because I missed it, I also missed that the Really Big Thing was them playing a concert on top of Broadcasting House which was just a little bit cool. Luckily having watched the BBC2 documentary on U2 last night we discovered we could watch the gig anyway by a simple dint of pressing the red button.

Being an eighties girl it is probably obligatory for me to like U2's music, even if at times I have found Bono a bit (0k alot) pretentious. However I liked him a lot more from watching the documentary, and I think the Edge is great and I loved they way they a) all took the piss out of Bono and b) are utterly dedicated to the idea that just because rock stars traditionally produce their best before they're 30, there is no reason why they shouldn't keep trying to produce their best now. I wasn't it has to be said wowed by the song they sang on Jonathan Ross earlier, but I was wowed by this:




and this



and of course appropriately, this:

(I did have empathetic vertigo watching Bono leaping around by the railings I tell you)



and of course they appropriately ended with this:




Really wish I'd heard it all live. Wish even more that I still worked in London so I could have snuck out to Broadcasting House on my way home, but hey... aren't that little red button and the internet wonderful things?

Truly, truly, magnificent...

PS Chris Evans runs a daily slot of Top Tenuous which are ten tenuous links to someone famous. I haven't got ten but my two top Tenuous for U2 would have to be, I have been interviewed for the radio at Broadcasting House, and Spouse touched Bono's boot once, when he wore suede, about a million years ago in Hammersmith...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I did something even worse. I was listening to Chris Evans and really enjoying the interview but it was tea time. So I TURNED IT OFF. I knew they were going to do something special, and I meant to turn it back on again, but I FORGOT!

Still, thank God for i-player and I think if I had watched it live I would have been having kittens about Bono being too close to the edge (not the Edge)

Beautiful Day made me cry.

Mad Twinxxx

PS Lots of great moments in the interview (Bono massaging Sally Traffic's hand and flirting outrageously with her and Foxy & as you say them all taking the piss of Bono) but have to say the best bit was Bono saying his best gig ever. Playing "Pride (In the Name of Love)" at Obama's inauguration, on the same steps that Martin Luther King made his speech. Somehow I missed that too, even though I was watching on and off that day. Must go and you tube it.

Jane Henry said...

They filmed the interview and we saw it on the red button loop last night cos we made the kids watch the concert. They fail to appreciate the importance of U2 sadly...No 1 pronounced Bono ok and no 2 conceded that Vertigo was allright...