U2 have performed the 6th, 7th, and 8th shows of their residency in Las Vegas.
After two nights of 21 songs, the 6th show saw the set expand back to 22 songs. After a couple of nights where the band slipped in “Pride” and “MLK”, night 6 saw a full return to the Rattle and Hum segment of All I Want Is You, Desire, Angel of Harlem, and Love Rescue Me. Angel of Harlem was played for the 300th time this night. Sting was in attendance and Bono snippeted two Police songs, Can’t Stand Losing You in Beautiful Day and Invisible Sun in Love is Blindness. Invisible Sun is notable as the first appearance of the song since 15 June 1986 on the Conspiracy of Hope tour when U2 performed it with the Police. Possibly of interest to some readers, Beautiful Day is now at a total of 116 different songs snippeted within it.
The 7th show featured no change of songs but there was still one alteration to the set. After Love Rescue Me the band charged right into Acrobat instead of So Cruel, firing the second Achtung Baby set off in a surprise way. So Cruel was next and followed by Ultraviolet and Love is Blindness as usual. There were some issues with the mixing during the final three songs of the main set, with the synths being off from usual. This is possibly why there was a slightly longer break than normal before the encore began with Elevation, at which point the problem seemed to be resolved.
The 8th set also featured one change, with Angel of Harlem being dropped in favour of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Bono was noticeably emotional as the audience sang the first verse. He was in excellent humour during the band introductions during “Desire”. Talking of Adam, he described him as the man “with the dirtiest mind and the cleanest hands”, a comment which actually caused Adam to nearly stop playing as he doubled-over in laughter. Edge was also laughing after Bono’s self-introduction where he described himself as “the humblest man I know”.
At the first few shows Bono described the four songs after the first Achtung Baby set as a rotation to show off material from their other albums. To date the only album “featured” in this slot has been Rattle & Hum (with perhaps the exception of night 4, when he joked that it was “Greatest Hits”), and it is noticeable that in the last few nights he has stopped describing it as a rotational slot. There have been some complaints voiced online about the lack of variety, but I just want to emphasize how incredible this particular part of the set is given the historical context.
Keep in mind that Rattle & Hum was a critical disappointment on release. Meant to be an exploration of America’s musical influence on the band it was instead taken the wrong way as the band explaining America’s music to America. The lack of success of the project was one of the reasons Bono and Edge were adamant about pursuing a different direction when it came to recording Achtung Baby, a change that only stopped after a decade of pushing the boundaries through Zooropa, Pop, and the oft-forgotten Original Soundtracks 1. It is perhaps no coincidence that the project’s missed expectations factor into why the Lovetown Tour – a tour supporting an album about America’s influence on U2 – is also the only U2 tour that never went to America.
The rarity of Rattle & Hum in the live setting is very noticeable when going back through the band’s tour history. Before this residency began, the last time a set featured three songs from the album was 31 May 2015. The last time the three most-played Rattle & Hum songs (Desire 386x, Angel of Harlem 302x, All I Want is You 204x + 110 snippets) were all performed in the same set was 30 November 2006. That may not seem too long ago to many reading, but it is a period of almost 17 years – someone born on that date can now legally drive and vote. And the last time one concert had four Rattle & Hum songs was way back on the last night of Lovetown in January 1990. So while there may be some unhappy about the lack of variety I just want to highlight how incredible it is that four songs from this album about America, an album seemingly rejected by America, are now being played in America in a quantity they never have before (and sequentially at that).
This content was originally published here.