by Dan

I drove in from St. Louis for this show. I had already seen 3 tours live and virtually every other tour on video. I own hundreds of bootlegs and every single piece of studio music U2 has ever put out. The last show I attended was Popmart St. Louis and I had center stage front row seats for that (~5 feet away from the stage - made the screens very difficult to see =) I am without question a huge fan of the band. I loved "ATYCLB" and love all the other albums as well. I know every lyric to every song played on this current tour and better than 95% of the entire U2 catalog.

All I can say from this most recent tour is PLEASE STOP TOURING NOW!

In all of the shows I have seen and listened to on tapes and CDs over the years, this one was by far the most disturbing. One of the things I have always loved about U2's live performances is their ability to transform lackluster album tracks into great live numbers. I much prefer live versions of 'Please','Staring at the Sun', 'Love is Blindness','Trying To Thorw Your Arms...', 'Bad', 'With or Without You', 'Exit', 'Mothers of the Disappeared' and many others to their album versions. I hope it was the poor acoustics of the Conseco Fieldhouse (obviously built to reflect crowd noise, and hence music, back to the floor level for increased noise levels during basketball games); but not one of the new songs played truly made me say "Damn, that is so much better live than on the album!"

I had high hopes for 'Kite' and 'Walk On' as live numbers ever since I first heard the clips on the internet before the album release last year- what I got was a terrible disappointment. I did not like 'New York' before the show, and I don't like it any more now after seeing it live. I was disappointed to miss the setlist that includes 'In A Little While' and 'GBHF'. The only songs that were not huge let downs were 'Beautiful Day', 'Elevation' or 'Stuck In A Moment'; but none of those came across as definitive-must-see-or-at-least-hear live versions. U2 has either lost its ability to transcend its own songs or has simply mailed in one performance on this tour.

I will suspend judgment until I see or hear another show from this tour, with the proper acoustics (ie.- actually able to HEAR LYRICS, not just echoes and bass with a strange disconnected sound that made viewing the concert for me in the stands seem like an out-of-body experience), but I am actually embarassed for them by this performance. The people I was with had never seen U2 live and I had spent the entire day telling them how awesome the show would be. They were quite unimpressed, and they have been followers of the band's music since the late-80s!

If the rest of the tour sounds as awful as this one did to me in the rafters of Conseco, please get the boys to stop touring and just put out new albums or hang it up. The old songs have been done much better in the past and the new songs do not inspire the heart nor expand the catalog of great U2 live songs.

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