by AJavaid

After months of anticipation, my wife and I watched U2 in the City of Lights -- beautiful Stade de France in Paris. What an experience! I had been to a U2 show in Washington D.C.'s MCI Center during their Elevation tour in June 2001, but this one just blew us away. The raw energy of a stadium full of people chanting "HELLO HELLO I'M IN A PLACE CALLED VERTIGO" at the top of their voice was just unbelievable. ‘Vertigo’ is perfect for kicking off a rock concert and no wonder U2’s been opening and closing the shows with it. We were surprised to see that the mostly French audience was quite familiar with all the songs and were singing along (around town many of our ‘Parlez-vous l'anglais’ queries were often met with silence). U2 sang about 24 songs and rocked hard for over 2 hours. –

On to the show. Stade de France in Saint-Dennis was a few metro stops north of our hotel and Gare Du Nord. We rode a double-decker train which was packed with people going to the concert. The actual stadium was a few minutes walk from the station – we walked with droves of excited fans. The excitement was building up! Stade de France is a beautiful stadium, but again, there was trash all over. Granted that there were a lot of people there but the entrances were littered with empty beer cups, cigarette butts, food wrappers and what not. There were trash bags all around but it seemed people were content with just throwing the trash in the general vicinity of the bag, not actually in it.

We were in our seats by 7 p.m. – the seats were pretty good and we had a good view of the stage. The opening band --Snow Patrol-- went on till around 8:30 p.m. Then the anticipation started building up and the crowd starting cheering “U2 U2 U2…” during the sound tests. Finally, around 9:15 p.m. the band walked up the stage among deafening noise by the crowd, they coolly started playing Vertigo. Bono went “Uno… Dos… Tres …… Catorce” and so it began. My only qualm about the stadium show was that there was still quite a bit of sunlight around when the show started, so the lighting and all the effects lose a bit of their jazz as compared to an indoor arena show like the MCI Center. The momentum kept building with each song. How they segued into Elevation was amazing – Edge just started playing the Elevation riffs. Bono was not singing, Larry was not drumming, there was no bass. The crowd just started going “ooohooohoo” and started singing Elevation. Then after about 2 minutes of this, Bono and the rest joined in. Bono even made Larry sing which was funny. Crowd went wild with City of Blinding Lights and Bono’s references to Paris. Sometimes you can’t make it on your own was a touching tribute to Bono’s father. This was followed by the powerful anti-war trio of Love and Peace, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Bullet the Blue sky. Bono interspersed the lyrics with messages of tolerance for Christians, Muslims and Jews (“Father Abraham talk to your sons – tell them no more”). He wore a bandana that said CoeXisT – the C was an Islamic Crescent, X the star of David and T was a Christian cross. The crowd loved Sunday Bloody Sunday the best out of these and was pumped to the max. Bullet the Blue Sky was received okay and an interesting bit was an image of an F-15 flying on the main screen over a red background – an obvious reference to the Iraq war. London’s recent bombings were mentioned before Running to Standstill: “A terrible thing has happened in the city of London. This song is our prayer so that we do not become a monster in order to defeat the monster.”


Two encores later with powerful renditions of Zoo Station, The Fly, All Because of You, the band ended with a thumping, rocking, mad Vertigo. We started exiting the stadium with hoards of Frenchmen and women – thankfully they ran extra trains. Paris is beautiful at night (maybe because you can’t see the garbage then). By the time we got to Nord it was past mid-night. What a night!

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