Enjoy! (And don’t miss the final minute, where it really sounds like yer man is called out as “Bono from YouTube!”)

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

VIDEO: Here It Is … All 15 Minutes of Bono Singing in Timbuktu

It’s from the festival organizers and features about nine minutes of non-stop Bono — the first seven minutes are from his performance, and then a couple minutes of him enjoying the music from the crowd.

Look for his typically subtle entrance at the 1:00 mark and don’t miss the 5:00 mark, when he starts pulling out some of his favorite stadium moves.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

VIDEO: 9 Minutes of Bono at the Desert Music Festival in Mali

After a nearly three-year legal battle, a court order has forced the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority (NJSEA) to make public hundreds of contracts that it signed for concerts that have been held at the Meadowlands complex — the stadium and arena. You can read more about the court fight on NJ.com.

Also on that page is a viewable PDF with thousands of scanned pages from those contracts (and a link to download the PDF if you’re so inclined).

It just so happens that the released documents includes the contract that NJSEA signed with Live Nation for the two U2 concerts on September 23 and 24, 2009. I’ve read through that material and put together this collection of notes that any U2 fan might find interesting.

Note, too, that U2 was originally scheduled to perform on September 24 and 25, but the second show had to be moved after the New York Jets football team rescheduled their September 27th game.

Here are the details that I found interesting…

Live Nation rents the facility from September 20 at 7:00 pm until September 26 at 11:59 pm.

Stadium rental fee: $252,500, plus $15,000 per day if additional time is needed

Ticketmaster is the approved ticketing agency.

All seating is reserved, floor is general admission.

Four ticket prices: $253, $98, $58 and $33

Stadium authority gets to set aside 750 tickets per show and buy them from Live Nation at discounts: $25 for $253 tickets and $15 for $98 and $53 tickets.

Stadium authority gets to collect and keep $15 service fee on $253 tickets, $10 service fee on $98 tickets and a $5 service fee on $58 tickets.

Ticket prices include $3 facility fee, to be split equally between stadium and Live Nation. Ticketmaster also entitled to charge a convenience fee.

Stadium gets to keep use of 9 suites at no charge.

Stadium can hold tickets related to obstructed view suites until Sept. 14 – after that date, all held seats will be released to general public for sale.

Live Nation gets 100 parking passes, plus parking space for working personnel.

Live Nation has a separate contract with Aramark for merchandise sales. Split is 77.5% / 22.5% on sales, which can change to 80/20 split based on sales totals. (Assume Live Nation gets larger portion of the split.)

Stadium determines where merchandise booths are located.

Live Nation required to purchase minimum $5 million insurance policy to cover bodily injury and property damage. Live Nation and U2 also required to have Workers Compensation insurance as required by state law. Proof of insurance must be supplied at least 10 days prior to the concert.

Stadium agrees to open doors at 5:30 pm.

September 25th rescheduling:

• Stadium liable to pay for 1) ticket refunds, 2) cancellation of suite holds/requests, and 3) any other claims by ticket holders including lost expenses like travel, hotel. Stadium and Live Nation agree to cooperate to “defend and/or minimize and/or settle” type 3 claims.
• Stadium liable for all those claims up to $735,000 (which represented 10% of ticket/suite sales at time of contract).
• Stadium discounts the rent for September 23 show from $155,000 to $77,500.

All advertising and promotional activity will be directed by Live Nation’s Tour Promoter.

Stadium agrees to turn off all signs inside the stadium during the concert, and agrees to use “best efforts” to cover signs near the stage to avoid appearance of sponsorship/endorsement with U2.

Blackberry has right to participate in all press/publicity events.

All advertisements, promotions must include “U2 presented by Blackberry.”

Blackberry is allowed to run booths/kiosks on-site for marketing, and may include giveaways; any sales must go through Aramark.

Stadium will provide a 100-person hospitality suite to Blackberry for pre- and post-event parties.

Blackberry gets up to 20 “prime” pairs of tickets for free, and right to buy more tickets.

Stadium allows Live Nation to distribute charity-related pamphlets.

Stadium must provide daily ticket sales counts to Live Nation, but is not allowed to provide ticket counts to anyone else.

Stadium and/or Ticketmaster will provide Live Nation with ticket customer details, including “addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.”

Contract recommends that seated and floor tickets be withheld from sale to allow for “unforeseen seating difficulties” (i.e., relocating troubled ticket holders).

Live Nation has right to contract with a third party for ticket/transportation packages.

U2 gets two private suites.

Venue is allowed to sell VIP packages and gets 10% commission on the gross, less the cost of tickets.

“It is the policy of the Tour that no cameras or recording devices of any kind be admitted to the Venue.”

Tour policy disallows sales of bottles, cans and other “potentially dangerous objects” and venue agrees not to serve refreshments in cans, bottles, glassware or other hard containers.

Live Nation gets use of venue’s in-house video screens/scoreboard at no extra charge.

Venue will supply parking for up to 70 tractor-trailers, 12 tour buses and 50 vehicles at no extra cost.

T1 lines (internet) are installed at $250 plus $75 per additional day of service.

(END)

So now you know a little more about what goes into a U2 concert contract! Thanks to @carynrose on Twitter for the tip.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

U2 at Giants Stadium: A Look at The Live Nation Concert Contract

The blog BrandNewRetro has posted four scans from a 1979 Dublin fanzine called Imprint, and the scans include an interview that Larry and Bono did immediately after their Sept. 9, 1979 show at the Dandelion Market. You won’t be surprised to learn that Bono did pretty much all of the talking:

“We want to sell records. We want to be big. Independent labels are all very well, but mostly they preach to the converted. We don’t want to be a cult.”

And that quote was before U2 had a sniff of a real record deal.

Coincidentally, it’s pretty much the same thing Bono has been saying lately about U2. Some things haven’t changed in the slightest, have they?

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Bono, 1979: “We don’t want to be a cult”

New and renewing members will get a double-live CD called U22 that will feature 22 live songs from the U2 360 tour. And, fans get to vote on which songs will be included.

U2.com posted 46 possibilities yesterday, but there’s no obvious indication where the songs were recorded. Except that U2Wanderer.org managed to source the filenames for each 45-second clip, and that tells where a lot of the performances come from. Have a look:

There was some fear that a lot of the tracks would be sourced from the U2 360 Pasadena recording (hey, U2.com has a history of giving the fanclub stuff that’s already been released), but as you can see there’s no mention of Pasadena anywhere in the filenames. There are a few tracks without a cityname (“Breathe” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” for example), so those might be from Pasadena … but who knows?

(Yes, we notice what appears to be a concert date next to some of the filenames — see “Breathe” with 310809, for example — but those don’t actually appear to be concert dates. There was no U2 show on August 31, 2009. So we don’t know what those numbers are, nor do we know what the “DG AC/HQ” stands for, but that seems like a reference to the source recording.)

Anyway … the overall variety of song sources is impressive, and that’s the bottom line.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Where Are The Live Songs On U22 From?

Thanks to Declan M. for sending us these images.

On a semi-related note, Hot Press has news that a Northern Irish band called The Skin We’re In has also covered Achtung Baby in its entirety. That will be available online beginning November 8, according to Hot Press.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

(PHOTOS) Q Magazine with Achtung Baby cover CD

Many in the stadium did not realize that Bevell was blind. At the end of the song, Bono gave Bevell his Gretsch Goal Is Soul guitar.

Bevell has turned this experience into the song, “Hand In The Darkness,” as a thank you to Bono. He said to Arizona’s FOX television, “I was able to send him a thank you letter to pass it on to Bono. I didn’t think the thank you letter was enough so I ended up writing a song.”

He described the song title’s inspiration:”I thought how often has it happened to me that someone has reached out to me through the darkness and led me to safety. … I thought that idea, a lot of people can relate to that idea, because you don’t have to be blind to have lost your way… and that whole idea of hand in the darkness came along and I felt inspired to write this song.”

“Hand In The Darkness” is available for download on iTunes for 99 cents and all the proceeds will be donated to ONE.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Thank You To Bono: Hand In The Darkness

Steve Jobs died today at the age of 56. That’s not normally the kind of thing I’d be writing about on a U2-related website, except for the fact that Steve Jobs transformed the music industry and U2 had a big hand in it.

The photo above, you surely know, was taken during the launch of the U2 iPod in October 2004. That announcement was greeted mostly with excitement in U2 fandom, but there were plenty of loud voices upset that U2 had “sold out.” In promoting the U2 iPod on TV, Edge explained it this way:

…our position on sponsorship hasn’t changed, it’s always been that we do not sell our reputation or our fans’ regard for our work to anybody. But this is a different thing, this is a technology partnership. Because we’re in business with our record labels, we’re in business with our merchandising companies, and we’re now in business with Apple.

The iPod announcement also included the first “digital box set” in music history — The Complete U2, a 400+-song collection of downloadable tracks.

There was also a two-song live performance during Jobs’ presentation: Bono & Edge sang “Original Of The Species” and “All Because Of You.” Our friend Firas captured it from the front row and you can watch it on YouTube:

A couple weeks before the iPod announcement/event, Apple released a new commercial for its iTunes Music Store that featured U2′s new single, “Vertigo.” It’s not a stretch to say that the popularity of this commercial helped How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb sell more copies in its first week than any other U2 album (before or since).

But all of that wasn’t actually U2′s first involvement with Steve Jobs and Apple: The year before, when Jobs introduced iTuned for Windows, Bono appeared on the big video screen during Jobs’ presentation using Apple’s iSight and iChat products and called Jobs “the Dalai Lama of integration.”

More recently, there was speculation that the U2-Apple relationship had soured after U2 accepted a Blackberry sponsorship for the U2 360 tour. But just last month, Bono defended Jobs when news reports suggested that Jobs hadn’t been a strong philanthropist. Bono reminded everyone that Jobs threw his support behind Product (RED) years ago with the launch of a (RED) iPod Nano.

And in the famous words of Steve Jobs … one more thing: Many years ago, Bono bought a NYC apartment from Steve Jobs.

It’s a pretty strong connection between U2/Bono and Apple/Steve Jobs. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Bono has something to say about Jobs’ death.

UPDATE: As expected, Bono has paid respects to Steve Jobs:

What made Steve Jobs truly great is that he was only interested in doing truly great things. He was bored by an easy ride or easy profit. In a world littered with dull objects, he brought the beauty of clean lines and clear thought.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

The U2 – Steve Jobs Connection

Kevin Myers of Ireland’s The Independent weighs in on the normal issues surrounding this topic, while also responding to the Glastonbury Festival Michael Eavis’ move to crack down on protestors who came to disapprove of U2. I liked reading this piece, at the very least because he took the clever approach of linking U2′s operations with the other U2′s operations, as you pick up in the headline “When historians look back at the 20th century they’ll write about real U2: the Lockheed spy plane.”

Myers condones U2′s business decision but can’t resist getting his digs in on what he thinks is Bono’s hypocrisy:

… I know their manager Paul McGuinness well: a man of outstanding personal integrity. Moreover, you will not hear from him, or from three members of U2, any demands that western governments give more aid to Africa. We only hear this from Bono, even as he takes advantage of tax loopholes to reduce his contribution to the central Exchequer from which aid to Africa must come.

And then in an unusual move for The Edge, he responded in print to Simon Moroney’s recent letter to the editor, “Senator Cardin’s affection for Bono’ foundation is indefensible,” which appeared in The Baltimore Sun. ( Here is Senator Cardin’s op-ed that prompted Moroney to write.)

In “The Edge: U2, Bono have not evaded taxes,” he suggests Moroney may have libeled U2 and Bono by calling them tax evaders (which they are not, Edge says). Then Edge adds:

I hope that his [Moroney's] fears of an Obama tax increase affecting him personally turn out to be as unfounded as his statements about U2′s tax affairs and Bono’s ONE campaign.

Just after I had read Kevin Myers maintain I would not hear from other members of U2 “any demands that western governments give more aid to Africa,” I read The Edge speak up for Bono’s ONE campaign which, sure, is not the same as The Edge demanding more aid from a western government go to Africa, but I get the strong sense that if The Edge would write a letter to The Baltimore Sun to speak up for the ONE campaign, he probably approves of the methods and goals of DATA and Bono’s humanitarian advocacy work in general.

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

U2′s Taxes In The News Today x 2

Featuring book and lyrics by Travis Ferguson and music and lyrics by Dave Ogrin, the new musical, according to press notes, “tells the story of the rise and fall of director Julie Taymor and the behind-the-scenes scandals of Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark …. [The musical is taken] straight from the headlines and follows Julie’s course through the most expensive Broadway musical of all time; facing financial problems, actor injuries, technical malfunctions, opening delays, scathing reviews, all while battling her arch-nemesis, an unrelenting theatre columnist.”

Characters in the production, which will be directed and choreographed by Joe Barros (I Married Wyatt Earp at 59E59, Reefer Madness and Side Show at the Gallery Players), will include the “tyrannical visionary director, the unrelenting theatre columnist, the clueless rock star, the scheming producer, the naive young actor, and the movie star actress.” Songs will include “Broadway’s Burning,” “Boy Falls From The Rafters,” “65 Million!” “Julie, Julie, Why Did You Hurt Me?” “Tweet, Tweet, Tweet!” and “Julie’s Turn.”

This is a post from the @U2 blog.

Spider-Man Musical Mocked In New Show