December 6, 2000
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Tuesday was a historic day for U2 fans, when U2 played a set to a 1,000 people at New York’s Irving Plaza. Unfortunately I had to settle for listening to the broadcast on the radio. Here are some highlights:
- The set was a mix of old and new U2 songs, covering mostly the favorites. But 11 O’Clock Tick Tock was an old surprise.
- Bono dedicated Stuck in a Moment to one of my favorite singers of the 80s, INXS’ Michael Hutchence.
- U2 played a hommage to one of my favorite bands, Radiohead, when they broke into a segment from Radiohead’s Creep in the middle of Elevation
- U2 is known for their covers at concerts, today they covered two new songs: The Ramone’s I Remember You and The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again. In addition to Creep, they also played snippets from Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing, The Stones’ Ruby Tuesday and the song Stepping Stone, by I-don’t-know-who
- Bono really screwed up the song Bad, missing lyrics and skipping an entire segment.
- “We’ve been a band longer than we haven’t,” Bono reminisced. Can you imagine? These guys have been playing together since they were teenagers!
In other U2 news, their webpage has recieved a massive facelift, going from one of the worst band webpages to one of the best. The old page was a series of flash animations powering a terrible user interface. Though the new site still utilizes flash, it is one of the few band websites that cater to the desires of die-hard fans.
The site is just a huge mine of data on U2; it provides a discography, detailed biography, lyrics, concert lists, news… Pretty much everything fans used to rely on unofficial fansites to compile. And the depth of information is unbelievable. Most discographies are a list of albums and dates. The new U2 site provides album info, single release info, a writeup on each album, lyrics for each song, and news from when the album was released. The website is a smart move for U2; an indication that a band is finally on the pulse of what fans want. I hope its a direction more bands follow.
Comments (4)
Sounds cool. I’d like to listen to that set. I wonder if it’s gonna be for sale somewhere.
Actually a quick search on Napster with terms “U2″, “Irving Plaza” and/or “12/05″ will turn up tons of bootlegs of the show. Unfortunately I’m sure most if not all of them are taped off the radio, which means some static and the annoying “KROCK!” tagline are in the broadcast. I’m sure someone will have a bootleg sourced from the master recording soon…
“Stepping Stone” was performed by the Monkees. Yes. The Monkees.
Yeah, a quick Napster search revealed that… There also seems to be many covers out there… Funny, I never remeber it from the TV show…