by Simon Skals

To pick up where Martin left: The five countries mentioned prior to the encore were USA, UK, France, Russia, and China. The text on the screen first read "The five permanent (permenent? I didn't notice this typo) members of the UN Security Council" and then "The world's five biggest arms traders".

As for the show itself I definitely enjoyed it. The performance was great, the band seemed to be having a good time, and a lot of the songs were quite energetic indeed. Also, the sound was considerably better compared to yesterday.

That said, I'm slightly disappointed in regards to the duration of the concert, particularly the rather modest amount of songs appearing on the setlist: A mere 18 songs makes this show the shortest on the tour so far.

The setlist from Friday was identical to that of June 21, 2001 / E. Rutherford except for a) Staring at the Sun replacing Stay and b) The Fly being left out.

With that in mind, I was expecting tonight's setlist to be something along the lines of June 22, 2001 / E. Rutherford, with Stay instead of Staring at the Sun.

Making that comparison, we did get to hear Stay instead of Desire (and there was much rejoicing), plus All I Want Is You, but this was at the expense of In a Little While, Wild Honey, Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Bad. On top of that, Pride was missing in the encore. Not the best bargain I could imagine...

Perhaps the shows were cut short due to the weather - the arena was a white-hot melting pot! Still, I'm sure I wasn't the only person hoping for a little more rather than a little less compared to the US shows. Heck, I would've been quite satisfied, had they simply added a song or two to the repertoire.

In particular I would've appreciated hearing a few more songs from Zooropa and Pop. Tonight's show gave us eleven songs from the Boy-Achtung Baby era, six songs from ATYCLB, one from Zooropa, and zero from Pop.

Remembering the reaction from the crowd when Gone was played last night, however, I'm sure this would never work. The majority of the audience appears to prefer "the good ole hits". While they are able to cope with a handful of new songs stashed in here and there between the classics, they probably would've been rather displeased to see, for instance, songs such as Lemon, Dirty Day, Please, Velvet Dress, and Miami replacing their long-time favourites.

Oh well. In the words of another great rock band, "you can't always get what you want". It was nice to hear the new material - Elevation is a marvellous opening song, Walk On is the perfect last blow, and in between there's kite as a new, beautiful anthem. New aspects were added to some of the older material, too. I especially enjoyed the new versions of Mysterious Ways, The Fly, and Bullet.

Prior to the two Copenhagen shows, I hadn't seen U2 live since Barcelona '97, and I won't be catching anymore shows on this tour. Hopefully it won't be another four years until the next time, and hopefully they will deliver yet another great album in the meantime.

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