Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has some strong praise for Bono in Blair’s just-released memoir, A Journey. He says Bono “could have been a president or prime minister standing on his head.” Here’s a snapshot of the full paragraph sent in by @U2 reader Neil W.
Your turn: Whenever U2 calls it quits, will Bono make a good politician if he pursues that path?
You know that U2 is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but did you know they’re also in the Pro Football Hall of Fame? It’s true!
I visited the Cleveland area in late June, and you may have seen the Flickr photoset of my Rock Hall/U2 pics. Some pretty cool stuff.
But just about an hour south of Cleveland is Canton, Ohio — home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And since I love football almost as much as U2, I had to drive down and check out the HOF. It’s a great place. If you’re a football fan, you really have to make the trip to Canton. And if you’re also a U2 fan, you’ll enjoy seeing this on the wall in the Super Bowl Gallery area:
This is from a glass display highlighting some of the Super Bowl halftime shows, and as you can see, U2’s performance in 2002 is featured front and center. Pretty cool.
(By the way, if you’re interested, here’s my full Flickr set of photos from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.)
It was March 1989 when The Edge joined Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, Brynsley Forde (of Aswad), Annie Lennox, the Thompson Twins, Chrissie Hynde, Jerry Harrison, and Karl Wallinger (of World Party) in Moscow to support Greenpeace’s efforts to educate and impact environmental change in the Soviet Union. As Greenpeace put it, “The gathering in Red Square represented, by several orders of magnitude, the largest and most potent collection of rock’s elite ever to gather in Eastern Europe. It also serves as a sort of crescendo to rock-and-roll’s environmental chorus. Like dozens of other major rock acts, the artists who gathered in Red Square are converts to eco-activism. They were in the Soviet Union as volunteers, to promote the release of an album of songs they had donated to Greenpeace. The record, called Breakthrough, would introduce environmental issues in general, and Greenpeace in particular, to young people in the Soviet Union. Each record included a brochure that described environmental problems, Greenpeace and provided an address in the Soviet Union for more information.”
Elsewhere in the world, the album was known as Rainbow Warriors, however Greenpeace wanted to use this as an opportunity to use popular music to reach out and break through (as it were) to the millions in the then-police state of the Soviet Union. It was 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall had yet to happen. Billy Joel had just completed his tour of the Soviet Union a couple of years prior and the feeling of glasnost was still present. Greenpeace took this as an opportunity to get their message out.
So, as U2 tour Moscow this week, the buildings may be the same but so much has changed since Edge visited Red Square in 1989. Greenpeace asked the question on the front page of their November/December 1989 magazine, “Can Rock ‘n’ Roll Save the World?” Two decades later, the answer is it certainly has helped to an extent.
To find out more about Edge’s trip to Moscow with Greenpeace, check out the Hot Press article written by Bill Graham, reprinted in Propaganda.
No, not me. But one of our @U2 readers recently won a pair of Bono’s shades — the pair he wore at last year’s Rose Bowl concert.
It was one of the prizes auctioned off recently to raise money for the St. Francis Hospice. If you’re on our news mailing list, you might remember us sending out this story about the auction and Bono’s donation.
Damien F. was the big winner of the sunglasses, and a full U2 360 at the Rose Bowl prize package. He sent in this photo.
Notice that Bono also autographed the DVD pack on the far right. Pretty cool. Damien’s been a fan for 28 years, and he’s an @U2 reader, so cool to see him win this auction. And no, he’s not telling how much his winning bid was … but it was a lot of “hard-earned,” as yer man would say.
From NASA’s Space Rock web page:
The wakeup song has been a part of the space program since the days of the Apollo missions, and now NASA is giving you two chances to be a part of this history! We need your help selecting wakeup songs to be played during the final missions of the Space Shuttle Program!
At the time of this posting, “Beautiful Day” is in the lead.
Never found this video until just now. It’s one of the craziest and most trusting things I’ve ever seen Bono do in concert. Maybe the craziest. And most trusting.
It’s from last year’s 360 concert in Raleigh. Right in the middle of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Bono tossed his microphone to a fan in the crowd so that the fan could sing a bit of “People Get Ready.”
I remember watching that unfold on the video screens while I was standing just outside the inner circle area. And my jaw went to the ground. Did he just throw his microphone into the crowd??? He did!! He’s crazy!
And he’s pretty damn trusting, too. Turned into an amazing moment in an amazing show, one of the best moments I’ve ever seen in person at a U2 show.
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