U2 review, O2 Arena London: Absorbed by their own spectacle

As their eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE tour winds to a close, completing a four-year encapsulation of U2’s lives and career over the course of two semi-autobiograpical albums, what have the band learnt? That forcing 2014’s Songs of Innocence into 500 million iTunes accounts isn’t a benevolent gift to the world but, to many ears, the sonic equivalent of having your front room unexpectedly selected to host the inaugural Piers Morgan Lecture? That, come last year’s sister-piece Songs of Experience, they’re no musical William Blake? And, perhaps, that a little humility might go a long way in winning over new generations of music fans who see U2 as the epitome of smug, cosy, ego-riven and tiresomely preachy rock superstardom?

To their credit, they’ve gained an inkling. “We’re the greatest rock’n’roll band on the north side of Dublin!” Bono cries before launching into a desert disco-style “Even Better Than the Real Thing” out on a glitterball festooned second stage. But the self-mythologising rock god images so often blasted across the gigantic screen stretching the length of the O2 tonight suggest that his modesty is only skin deep.

Instead, after Songs of Innocence and its accompanying tour explored the band’s youth and roots on the rough end of Dublin’s Cedarwood Road and Songs of Experience tackled the personal and political ills of the modern day, the conclusion their journey has brought them to is that “wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience”. Or, as Bono puts it in one of his many confessional between-song TED talks, they’ve reconnected with the “four Irish boys lost in the Eighties…”

If anything, U2 have become lost in technology over the past four years. They first appear playing inside their elongated transparent screen hanging along the centre of the arena, repurposed from 2015’s Songs of Innocence tour to display images of modern dictators like Trump, Putin and Kim Jong-un as Charlie Chaplin’s rousing speech from The Great Dictator booms out and “The Blackout” declares “democracy is flat on its back, Jack”. There’s no more fitting metaphor for the way U2 have become absorbed by their own spectacle.

Their music is entirely predictable – panoramic pomp rock, devilish disco, the odd spot of gospel. The thrill is almost entirely in the show, a technological marvel that fills the O2 with war footage, brain scans, clacker board soundbites (“Ambition bites the nails of art”, “Taste is the enemy of art”, “Watch more TV”) and, during one interval, a five-minute U2 comic book animation. But this seems a little scattershot in the wake of Muse’s similarly arena-strafing – but far more coherent – Drones tour.

There is a loose narrative to the night: a potted history of U2. As the band emerge from the screen onto a fixed stage, Bono yells “we’re U2 and this is our new song!” and they launch into 1980’s quasi-punk “I Will Follow”, stripped to its raw bones and standing righteously on its own two feet. If Bono wasn’t doing his stature enhancing leaning-into-the-wind pose like a billionaire Marcel Marceau, we could be back in a Dublin club basement in 1979.

Before long, he’s reminiscing about “playing to 34 people at the Hope and Anchor”, riding the central walkway as it transforms into a Berlin subway carriage for a gnarled, rattling “Zoo Station”, and recalling band breakdowns while recording in Berlin’s Hansa studios in 1990 in search of “the spirit of David Bowie and Iggy Pop”, dark days marked with the gorgeous, slow-cooked groove of “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)”. Bono’s demonic 1993 alter-ego MacPhisto even makes a cameo, digitally mapped onto his face and claiming responsibility for destroying world unity like a cheap CGI Pennywise the Clown.

Such interjections are, by turns, touching, revealing, humanising and just plain laughable. After a virile “Vertigo”, there’s a moving integrity to Bono dissecting how fame and ego “went to our heads” in the Nineties. Yet a tears-of-a-clown confessional that finds him admitting “I had just enough low self-esteem to get me where I needed to go” during a soppy fake call home could make a house brick cringe. The narrative lacks its cornerstone too: having played The Joshua Tree in full on an anniversary tour last year, they ignore it here, leaving a gaping hole at the heart of the gig and faint echoes of its majesty reverberating through the far inferior recent material.

There are powerful moments – a stirring “Beautiful Day”, a storming “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”, an uplifting tribute to Aleppo with “Summer of Love” – but too often the politics stifle the songs. As the EU flag is hoisted behind the stage and Bono applauds it as stoically as a statesman, old-school crackers like “New Year’s Day” and “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” suffer from being infused with political poignancy rather than hammered out full-throttle.

And Bono still hasn’t grasped that, as much as we might agree with his messages of unity and togetherness, it’s still a little galling to be lectured on poverty and social dissolution by a billionaire with labyrinthine international tax arrangements and a major stake in the notoriously HMRC-shy Facebook. Still, as hollow and self-important as it can all seem, the U2 spectacle is still capable of sucking you in. A rollercoaster eXPERIENCE.