by Aaron Palmer

I just stumbled into this site-glad I did! The show at the Neu Stadt airfield was our second U2 concert (we saw them first in Budapest during the Zoo TV tour at the Nepstadion). We made the drive in from Hungary for the show in Austria. We actually delayed our flight home to Salt Lake City by a week so we could catch them. It made up for us missing them in SLC in May. Anyway. The show. As a huge U2 fan since the early eighties, I enjoyed the old stuff immensely, and I think POP is a brilliant album underneath the glitzy surface. I've yet to ever see or hear a better two song pairing than the Please-Where the Streets Have no Name segueway.
The music ruled the concert, but I was less than thrilled, --actually downright PISSED-- at the crowd. So much for the concept of clean button down Austrians. We were a) soaked in flying beer, b)assaulted by drunk profane idiots, and c) constantly enveloped in a huge haze of cigarette smoke. I've got no problem with cig smoke (having lived and worked in Budapest for years) but good lord, 75,000 people wedged into an airfield, all trying to light up at the same time...Made my wife physically ill. We ended up abandoning our great position about 30 feet from the stage and escaping to the back where we could better concentrate on the reason for being there, the awesome music. Overall, the tunes outweighed that horrendous disease of a crowd and we drove back happy.. I am looking forward to catching them on the "All that you can't leave behind" tour in Denver or Las Vegas, where there should be fewer loud drunks and no cig smoke....

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