The phenomenal visuals are the highlight as U2 kick off their Experience + Innocence tour in the USA

U2                                                                                                    SAP Center, San Jose 

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After 42 years together, the four members of U2 could be forgiven for wanting to spend more time with their yachts. Instead, they’re working like there’s no tomorrow.

This time last year they started a world tour, performing The Joshua Tree in full, to memorable effect. 

By Christmas they’d released a punchy new album, Songs Of Experience. And now they’re on another tour, which is entirely Joshua-free.

After 42 years together, U2 are back on tour. While Bono (above) may bang on a bit, he sings like an opinionated angel and the production of this show is phenomenal

After 42 years together, U2 are back on tour. While Bono (above) may bang on a bit, he sings like an opinionated angel and the production of this show is phenomenal

Entitled Experience + Innocence, this tour picks up where Innocence + Experience left off in 2015 and shares its party trick: a vast, two-sided video screen slicing the arena in half, with a catwalk underneath and a stage at either end. 

It turns bad seats into good ones. Only U2’s designers – Willie Williams, Es Devlin and Ric Lipson – could have dreamt it up.

Revolutionary in 2015, the screen still seems futuristic, and the images are sharper now. It’s as if you’d bought the biggest telly in the high street and taken it to the gig with you.

Not long ago arena crowds peered into the distance to see idols the size of ants. Here they can see everything from Larry Mullen’s hair to Adam Clayton’s small smile at the end of Vertigo

Not long ago arena crowds peered into the distance to see idols the size of ants. Here they can see everything from Larry Mullen’s hair to Adam Clayton’s small smile at the end of Vertigo

Not long ago arena crowds peered into the middle distance to make out idols the size of ants. 

Here they can see everything from Larry Mullen’s boot-polish hair to Adam Clayton’s small smile at the end of a vibrant Vertigo. Thanks to an app, spectators can even have Bono’s face on their phones, which may be taking stage technology too far.

If the visuals are consistently satisfying, the set list is patchy. The 26 tracks include eight from the new album, which is too much of a good thing.

No doubt it made sense, at a band meeting, to banish The Joshua Tree: been there, redone that. 

IT’S A FACT

Nearly three million YouTube viewers have watched the 2015 clip of The Edge’s embarrassing tumble from the corner of a stage in Vancouver.

But it’s a rare case of U2 failing to please the crowd. With Or Without You, and its sisters Where The Streets Have No Name and I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, are too well loved to sit on the shelf.

The classics we do get retain their power: a surging Beautiful Day, a storming Pride, a spine-tingling One

A pared-down Sunday Bloody Sunday is superb; I Will Follow is pretty fierce for a teenage anthem; Staring At The Sun, with Bono and The Edge forming a folk duo, is fabulously soulful.

Bono does bang on a bit. ‘No matter how many times he saves the world,’ The Edge said recently, ‘it always manages to unsave itself.’

But he still sings like an opinionated angel. And the production is phenomenal.

Experience + Innocence plays UK arenas October 19-28. u2.com

ALBUM OF THE WEEK 

Arctic Monkeys      Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino    Domino, out now 

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Arctic Monkeys’ last album, AM, was so successful that they now occupy a unique position. 

They are the only young British rock band who can behave like the superstars of the Seventies and do whatever they want.

They can release an album without bothering to send out a single first. They can pose for publicity shots in polo-necks, as if French existentialism had finally reached Sheffield. 

Arctic Monkeys’ last album, AM, was so successful that they now occupy a unique position but the band's new album, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino is a giant leap in the wrong direction

Arctic Monkeys’ last album, AM, was so successful that they now occupy a unique position but the band’s new album, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino is a giant leap in the wrong direction

They can even abandon rock for electro-lounge-jazz-pop and make a concept album about moving to the Moon.

Space has had a place in pop ever since David Bowie’s Space Oddity in 1969. But Bowie persuaded us to care about Major Tom, whereas Alex Turner’s protagonist has no name and little charm.

Like a character from one of Martin Amis’s lesser novels, he consists mainly of his maker’s voice. 

The odd good line – ‘dance as if somebody’s watching, because they are’ – can’t rescue songs that are wordy, fiddly and whimsical.

Turner’s singing, committed as ever, is the only strand of Arctic Monkeys’ DNA that survives. 

Full marks for audacity but, apart from The Ultracheese, a Roy Orbison-ish ballad, this is a giant leap in the wrong direction. 

 

THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES

By Adam Woods 

James Bay                                  Electric Light                           Virgin EMI, out Fri 

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James Bay’s 2015 debut, Chaos And The Calm, earned him Brit awards as an impassioned troubadour type. This is groovier. A dark, Arctic Monkeys-flavoured riff wraps around opener Wasted On Each Other, but R&B trend-setter Frank Ocean is a deeper influence. Bay weaves in plenty of big tunes

James Bay’s 2015 debut, Chaos And The Calm, earned him Brit awards as an impassioned troubadour type. This is groovier. A dark, Arctic Monkeys-flavoured riff wraps around opener Wasted On Each Other, but R&B trend-setter Frank Ocean is a deeper influence. Bay weaves in plenty of big tunes

 

Courtney Barnett                         Milk! Records/Marathaon Artists, out Fri                                            Tell Me How You Really Feel

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A blearily acute singer-songwriter from Melbourne, Barnett is a true rising star, her Lotta Sea Lice album with Kurt Vile whetting appetites for this. More consistent and less whimsical than before, this casts Barnett as the fresher heir to Kurt Cobain and Evan Dando, with a sharper pen than either

A blearily acute singer-songwriter from Melbourne, Barnett is a true rising star, her Lotta Sea Lice album with Kurt Vile whetting appetites for this. More consistent and less whimsical than before, this casts Barnett as the fresher heir to Kurt Cobain and Evan Dando, with a sharper pen than either

 

Ry Cooder              The Prodigal Son         Caroline International, out now

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Cooder’s 18th record, this is a dependably brilliant collection of wry protest songs (Gentrification), midnight trips to the crossroads (Nobody’s Fault But Mine), reverent gospel standards (You Must Unload) and the odd clanking blues (Shrinking Man, In His Care), all of them teeming with life and moral sense

Cooder’s 18th record, this is a dependably brilliant collection of wry protest songs (Gentrification), midnight trips to the crossroads (Nobody’s Fault But Mine), reverent gospel standards (You Must Unload) and the odd clanking blues (Shrinking Man, In His Care), all of them teeming with life and moral sense

 

Stephen Makmus And The Jicks         Sparkle Hard           Domino, out Fri

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As frontman of Pavement, Malkmus was a leading man of foppish Nineties indie-rock. He’s been with The Jicks since 2000, and Sparkle Hard feels like a bit like an attempt to fully grow up, aged 51. It bites into America’s racial problems (Bike Lane) and other shortcomings (Middle America) against an elegant, melodious guitar backdrop with debts to the Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground and Pavement too

As frontman of Pavement, Malkmus was a leading man of foppish Nineties indie-rock. He’s been with The Jicks since 2000, and Sparkle Hard feels like a bit like an attempt to fully grow up, aged 51. It bites into America’s racial problems (Bike Lane) and other shortcomings (Middle America) against an elegant, melodious guitar backdrop with debts to the Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground and Pavement too



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