Radio Mastersound Blog

El cantante de la banda de rock más exitosa de las últimas décadas (U2), es reconocido por su prolífica carrera musical, así como por su activismo político. Determinación que también ha demostrado en su particular gusto por lo autos, razón por la cual, no es inusual encontrarlo en alguno de los mejores eventos mundiales de la industria automotriz.

Paul David Hewson más conocido como Bono, comenzó su carrera musical a mediados de los años setenta, tras acudir a una convocatoria realizada por Larry Mullen Jr. (Baterista) en el Mount Temple Comprehensive School, para conformar una banda de rock que a la postre se convertiría en la exitosa U2.

Sigue leando

Le chanteur de la formation rock irlandaise à grand succès de ces dernières décennies U2, est réputé pour sa carrière musicale prolifique tout comme pour son militantisme politique. Détermination qu’il a également montré en particulier pour son goût pour les voitures, raison pour laquelle, il n’est pas inhabituel de le rencontrer lors de quelques unes des meilleures manifestations mondiales dédiées à l’industrie automobile.

Paul David Hewson plus connu sous le nom de Bono, a débuté sa carrière musicale au milieu des années 1970, en répondant à une annonce punaisée part Larry Mullen Jr. (batteur) sur un panneau d’affichage à la Mount Temple Comprehensive School, pour former un groupe de rock qui plus tard deviendrait le groupe à succès U2.

Durant plus de trois décades de parcours musical, U2 s’est positionné comme l’un des groupes de rock au plus gros succès de tous les temps. Plus de 170 millions d’albums vendus et 22 Grammy entre autres nombreuses récompenses, valident pareille affirmation.

Le monde de l’automobile n’est pas étranger à Bono, c’est un visiteur assidu de divers Auto Shows du monde. D’ailleurs diverses automobiles firent partie de l’image de la tournée Zoo TV (NDLT : référence aux cultissimes Trabant), l’une des tournées les plus mémorables de U2.

L’un des véhicules que Bono a suivi avec ardeur est un modèle exclusive, une Maserati Quattroporte (quatre portes), produite depuis cinq générations, d’après celle produite pour la première fois en 1963.

La Maserati Quattroporte est équipée d’un moteur V8 avec une capacité d’aspiration de 4.8 litres, 400 chevaux sans compter ses 4.750 tours/moteur à la minute.

Le moteur de la Quattroporte est couplé à un système de transmissions de six vitesses qui lui permettent d’atteindre une vitesse supérieure à 200 km/h. Une combinaison d’atouts, de luxe et d’élégance qui séduit l’une des plus grandes stars de la musique de ces derniers temps.

Bonne nouvelle, peut-être, pour Kanye West. Il pourra s’en faire un petit peu moins pour ce qui est de la concurrence pour décrocher certaines nominations aux Grammys.

Pour la toute première fois de toute son histoire, l’année d’éligibilité aux Grammys a été avancée passant de la fin du mois de septembre à la fin du mois d’août. Ce faisant, la période d’éligibilité pour les Grammy Awards 2010 a été ramenée à 11 mois (l’année Grammy reviendra à la normale, à savoir douze mois, avec de nouvelles dates de qualifications pour les trophées de 2011).

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Pour l’heure, préparez vos stylos et vos cartes de scores. Voici notre tour d’horizon avancé de certaines des œuvres le plus vraisemblablement éligibles au titre de l’album de l’année, lorsque les nominations aux Grammys seront dévoilées à la fin de l’année.

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U2, ‘No Line on the Horizon’

Grammy potentiel :

C’est U2, les amis. Voici LE groupe qui a donné le coup d’envoi à l’édition 2009 des Grammy Awards, bien que n’ayant même pas un album en compétition lors de la période d’éligibilité de l’an passé. Ce groupe a remporté le titre de « l’album de l’année » pour « How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb » en 2006, mais également pour « The Joshua Tree » en 1988. Ceci étant dit, cet album ne génère pas le genre de fièvre acheteuse qui avait accueillie la sortie de « Atomic Bomb » et pas un single de « No Line » n’a véritablement percé. Oui, « No Line » et U2 seront nominés à de multiple Grammys, mais la question est dans quelle catégorie ?

Grammy mérité :

C’est là que les choses deviennent un petit peu intéressantes. Les deux derniers albums de U2 ont été nominés au titre d’album de l’année, le précité « Atomic Bomb » et « All That You Can’t Leave Behind » en 2002. Mais « No Line » est un disque significativement meilleur que ces deux là. Il n’est pas parfait — témoin la prévisible ballade rock pour sonnerie de portables « I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight » — mais en ratissant large, « No Line » montre un U2 reprenant des risques. « Moment of Surrender », en particulier, est un morceau rock’ n’ soul influencé par le gospel qui n’est que détente dans l’ambiance plutôt que pour être repris en chœur dans un stade. En bref, si les votants ont reconnu les deux derniers albums de U2, ils ne peuvent ignorer celui-ci car il est de facture supérieure.

Lire ce papier dans son intégralité

You might have heard it on the road, the remixed version of ‘Crazy’ was one of the highlights of the European leg of the tour. Listen in to Redanka’s remix from the new single, released next week.

Click here to play « I’ll Go Crazy (Redanka Kick Darkness Vocal) »

Friday 31st July 2009. Gothenburg. Show 1

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Woke up to a very unsettled day weather-wise. By show-time it was blowing a gale, freezing cold and not very dark. We decided to go with a set list including Mysterious Ways and Until the End of the World early on, to inject an extra bit of rock on a chilly night.

The band came on stage to a sea of white flags. The audience waving pieces of white fabric, by way of welcome, I assume. It looked great and clearly took the band by surprise and lifted the mood instantly. It turned out to be a great night which did not stop when the show ended. There were a couple of birthdays to be celebrated, on a party-crawl which began in the hotel and ended up in some techno-club at 4am. I sense there may be some ‘wine-flu’ hangovers in the morning…’

Saturday 1st August 2009. Gothenburg. Show 2

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What a difference a day makes. Gothenburg showed us a beautiful, sunny afternoon that segued into a calm and warm evening. I went into the stadium quite early, not that I had anything particularly pressing to do but I did want to spend a bit of time catching up with some of my key crew-members. In the rush of load-ins and load-outs finding time to just talk to people is often next to impossible, but I find it very helpful to get some perspective on the tour from viewpoints other than my own. Tour morale is very good, given the monumental nature of the task in hand. We have some remarkable people on board.

The Ullevi Stadium is ’saddle’ shaped (or ‘Pringle’ shaped, for fans of potato-based snack-products), meaning that the grandstand seats at the sides of the pitch are very high, then sweep down almost to floor level behind the goalposts. This makes the ends of the stadium wide open so much of our stage structure is visible from outside the building. By show-time there were at least a thousand people settling in outside, along the bank of the river next to the stadium, around the big crossroads, up on top of bus shelters and tram stops. There were people flipping burgers, others pushing trolleys of cold drinks around – there was a whole street party going on out there.

During ‘Walk On’ I took my camera and headed out of the venue to have a look. Seeing our stage production in action, looming up over the wall of the stadium, made it look even more like it had just descended from space. The mirrorball on top of the pylon must have been visible from half of Gothenburg.

Rather than do the ‘runner’ with the band, I opted to hitch a ride on one of the crew buses to get to Gelsenkirchen. It’s been a little while since I did a bus tour and I miss it. I appreciate that the idea of sleeping on a tour bus might not sound terribly appealing but, whilst it’s not quite the lap of luxury, modern tour buses are basically mobile homes and there’s something comforting and secure about crawling into your bunk and riding through the night…

Oh, and I made it through Sweden without needing any local currency.

Photo : Stefan

Sunday 2nd August 2009. Gelsenkirchen. Load in day

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Woke up on the bus with about three hours to go before arriving at Gelsenkirchen. We appeared to be in Germany, but my phone told me I’d been to Denmark at some point in the night. Some of the backline guys were beginning to surface, making coffee, breakfasty-bits and so forth, sitting about chatting as the wet landscape rolled by. The roof on the venue in Gelsenkirchen raises all sorts of sonic challenges, but I’d say we�ll be glad of it tomorrow.

Being a last minute addition, there was no room at the inn for me in Gelsenkirchen (everywhere’s sold out because of some concert that’s on) so I’ve wound up at a Sheraton in Essen. I headed out for a stroll into the centre of Essen on this wet Sunday afternoon and, ironically given the name of the city, couldn’t find anything to eat so headed back to the hotel. Spent the early part of the evening pottering before going into the venue with a photographer who is documenting the load-in tonight. The bulk of the crew only got to Gelsenkirchen from Sweden around 6pm, so it is going to be a long overnight load-in for most. The photographer, Ralph Larmann, takes extraordinary pictures and has photographed a few of my stage productions over the years, including the Vertigo Tour. He shot the 360 show in Berlin (including an incredible mirrorball shot which looked like the missing scene from Lord of the Rings) but is coming back for a second helping here in Gelsenkirchen which is a very different building. Ralph wanted to photograph the load-in as everything was being constructed and given that this was going to take most of the night, I left him to it.

Monday 3rd August 2009. Gelsenkirchen. Show day

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I woke up this morning to realise that not only is no-one else from the 360 tour staying in this hotel, but also that no-one else from the 360 tour in staying in the city. I’m never quite sure how it happens, but I do end up out in orbit on my own from time to time. This strange feeling was compounded by the further oddity of my not knowing where I would end up spending the night. The band are commuting to the show from Nice, but the nearest airport that they can land in is Cologne, an hour or more’s drive from Gelsenkirchen so they’re doing the last part by helicopter. The rest of the band entourage is in buses which is fine for the arrival, but means that for the runner after the show, anyone not in the helicopter needs to leave practically as the show starts, which is not terribly practical for me or for Tom the video director.

Tom and I had talked about a range of possibilities of how we might get from Gelsenkirchen to Katowice which included stopovers in mountain health spas, etc., various train connections, one-way car rental (road trip!) and camel train. However, the band have asked if we could spend the day on Wednesday going over DVDs of the show to have a look at what might be improved and ‘kick the tyres’ as Bono said. Consequently, we will need to get back to Nice by nightfall tomorrow, but that�s ages away…

The show was great and Ralph photographed away, including doing a few 360 degree panorama shots, appropriately. I got a message to say that they had made room for Tom and me to go with the ‘runner’ at the end of the show and head back to Nice tonight. We beat our way through the crowd to rendezvous behind the stage during ‘Moment of Surrender’, where tour manager Dennis yelled into my ear, ‘Ah, Willie. You’re in the yellow helicopter’. I remember thinking that this was something that no-one had ever said to me before.

The entire football pitch at the stadium in Gelsenkirchen is made in such a way that it can slide outside the building, to be fed and watered between games. Consequently, when there’s a gig on, out the back of the venue there is a full size football pitch, on which were parked two helicopters. Being the obedient sort of chap that I am, I made my way to the yellow helicopter and got in, to be shortly joined by Bono, Edge, Joe O. and a couple of others. The choppers revved up and took off in convoy, sailing up into the night sky and over the industrial landscape. It was all so Ridley Scott, that I leaned over to Joe and whispered in his ear ‘he say you� Braderunner!’ before looking out of the window and spotting some kind of refinery, which had those great Bladerunner plumes of flame belching out of its chimneys. Somewhere in my head I heard the Viewmaster click…

Peut-être l’avez-vous entendue sur la route, la version remixée de ‘Crazy’ a été l’un des points d’orgue de la partie européenne de la tournée mondiale. Ecoutez donc le remix de Redanka extrait du nouveau single, dans les bacs la semaine prochaine.

Cliquez ici pour jouer « I’ll Go Crazy (Redanka Kick Darkness Vocal) »

Alma Catel était la star du film documentaire de Bill Carter récompensé et sorti en 1995, Miss Sarajevo. Lorsque le groupe est retourné dans ce pays, pour un concert à Zagreb, nous sommes partis à la recherche d’Alma pour voir comment sa vie avait changé… et celle de cette partie de l’Europe.

Dans la 1ere partie Alma se rend au concert et se souvient de Sarajevo en état de siège.

Dans cette 2e partie, nous retrouvons Alma qui récupère ses places de concert, très nerveuse, se souvenant du concert de U2 à Sarajevo en 1997 durant la tournée PopMart… et après tout ce temps, de ses retrouvailles avec le groupe. Le concert, dit-elle à Bono : ‘était presque aussi bon que celui de Sarajevo… mais pas tout à fait.’

Tuesday 4th August 2009. Nice. Day off

It�s a ‘day off’, so I spent much of the day catching up with the backlog of email and paperwork which has crept up on me, especially now that the tour communicates almost exclusively via a continual tsunami of Blackberry email. Lurking deep in this ocean of spam is the occasional email which really did require some attention but sank without trace, so I’ve been trawling the depths to see what life-threatening deadlines I’ve missed over the past few weeks.

Needless to say this was a desperately dull way to spend a sunny afternoon, so I distracted myself periodically by reading the BBC news website. I read one story about a 14 year old girl who had fallen foul of the latest youth craze of ’sexting’. This (apparently) is how the young people are entertaining themselves these days, taking provocative snaps of various body parts and sending them to each other by SMS text message. This one girl had been dating a charming young man who had threatened to dump her if she didn’t join in. It would be just between the two of them, he promised, so she sent him a topless photograph of herself, which he thoughtfully published to the universe. Now everyone at school has seen them and her life is in tatters, not least because ‘I can’t go into pubs any more.’ (At 14?).

Anyway, being a man who prides himself of being down with the kids, I thought it was important for me to experiment with this new art form, so texted Frances a shot of my saucily posed naked foot. This she ignored, so I moved on to the elbow but it was only a close up shot of my creased up navel which finally got a response. Back came a picture of some random, unidentifiable but extremely suggestive area of flesh. OK – game on.

An hour later we’d exchanged about a hundred texts and dragged half the touring party into it, until we were in possession of the definitive library of curiously disturbing pink and red abstractions. It’s really fun, I’d recommend it for a quiet afternoon’s entertainment.

In the evening about twenty of us ended up around the big table of a local beach restaurant watching the moon come up over the ocean and downing several jeraboams of rose. From out of nowhere, a form of ’sexting tennis’ kicked off, with perverse images being sent from one end of the table to the other until we were crying with laughter. It was inane beyond words but absolutely hilarious. Do you think we’ve been on the road for too long?

At about 2am, Brian, Tom and I jumped into a cab to get back to Nice. It’s about a half hour drive, and after about ten minutes we’d fallen into a pleasantly woozy silence, zipping up the winding coastal road of the Cote d’Azur. WHAM! The next thing we know our driver nodded out at the wheel and crashed into a palm tree. We glanced off the tree and skidded for a couple of hundred metres before pulling over and stopping. We got out of the vehicle, now conspicuously absent of a left hand side, and were all pretty stunned as you can imagine. Our driver was in a complete panic but we all seemed to be unhurt. The police arrived within minutes, I guess coincidentally, and then another cab which took us home.

It was frightening of course, but also strangely unreal because we just carried on and didn’t have to see or deal with any of the aftermath. By the time we were continuing up the windy roads in the replacement cab, it just sort of felt like we’d rewound and pressed play again. Another metre to the left and we might not be here… best, I suppose, not to dwell on it. Nobody mention Grace Kelly.

Alma Catel was the star of Bill Carter’s award-winning 1995 documentary Miss Sarajevo. When the band returned to the region, for the show in Zagreb last month, we tracked down Alma to see how life has changed for her… and for this part of Europe.

In Part 1 Alma travels to the show and recalls Sarajevo during the siege.

In Part 2 we find Alma picking up her tickets, getting very nervous, reminiscing on U2’s 1997 Sarajevo PopMart show… and, after all this time, meeting the band again. The show, she tells Bono, ‘was almost as good as Sarajevo… but not quite.’