Inside U2’s ‘Innocence’ Spectacle: A Backstage Q&A With Bono and Edge
It’s about 25 hours before U2 kick off their Innocence + Experience tour at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena and Bono is sitting on a plush couch in a backstage lounge near the Edge. He’s fiddling with a laptop and looking at a CDR recorded at a recent tour rehearsal. Right outside the door, walkie talkie-wielding tour personnel frantically run about as they prepare for the big night, but Bono seems completely relaxed. Adam Clayton walks in, hands him a cup of tea and then vanishes. We’re instructed to sit between Bono and the Edge, knowing their schedule is insanely tight and they only have 20 minutes to chat.
We have 21 questions prepared, but since Bono isn’t a man known for his brevity, we only manage to ask about eight. But the band manages to cover a lot of ground – even if we don’t get to discuss the status of Songs of Experience or see if they’re finally willing to cave and perform super rarities “Acrobat” and “Drowning Man” at some point on the tour.
When you first started sketching out ideas this tour, what were your goals? What did you want to accomplish?
The Edge: I guess we decided pretty early on that we wanted to start indoors and see how that felt. Then it was really just a question of, “If we’re gonna be indoors and do something in contrast to that last outdoor tour, what is that going to be like?” The venue was the first consideration. What can we do that’s unique for that indoor venue?
Bono, how about you?
Bono: As a kind of challenge to us, to ourselves, we had this idea that we should play the first few songs only under one lightbulb. That was a discipline since the beginning. We’re not being literal about it now, but it’s symbolic. We’ve taken it as a symbol through the show. The lightbulb is a symbol of everybody’s intimate lives. The lives of their bedroom. The lives of their kitchen. The lives away from the spotlight. Ten Cedarwood Road and the box room in Cedarwood Road had a lightbulb with no cover on it because I thought that was cool at the time. That place is that the incubator of ideas, the incubator of early songs, the incubator of early ambitions to follow women home from school and plot to see them on the weekend.
Everybody is formed in those spaces. I’ve been telling people for years that megalomania wasn’t necessarily innate with me. It was whispered into my ear by John Lennon, Bob Dylan, later Joe Strummer. The idea that your ideas may have some value for others, at its core, is an arrogant one. That’s where it started for me, under that lightbulb.
“It can be tough being a U2 fan because we’ve been around a long time. People either love us or loathe us.”–Bono
I guess the challenge when creating a tour like this is to do something different. It must have been hard to think of something new and fresh.
The Edge: New, fresh and affordable was the thing we wanted to try and do. At some early meetings we really were pushing the envelope of what was possible. We had all kinds of inflatable rooms floating around the arena, some crazy ideas. It’s funny how it always seems to work for us that we allow ourselves to think without any constraints, and slowly in the process of trying to get more practical, more tight with everything, you end up with some of the same ideas. For instance, the bedroom is still there. It’s not a floating bedroom. It’s now part of the divider screen that we use.