For those of you who keep up with what others are up to while U2 aren’t on the road…Willie Williams has been busy with Darren Hayes - the former lead singer of Savage Garden. Hayes released a solo album and embarked on his Time Machine Tour during ‘07-’08, which has been recently released on DVD.

According to GayWired.com, Willie designed the tour and had costumes designed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. (Another U2 reference: Bono and Edge wrote music for the RSC for A Clockwork Orange in 1990.)

Hayes mentioned why he wanted to work with Willie in the article:

…during the making of the album it started to become this theatrical concept that this bird was a time machine and I was going to tell a story about myself… about revisiting my childhood, revisiting the pain, making peace with it and that kind of thing.

That intrigued Willie Williams, the show designer. Willie usually works with U2 and The Rolling Stones and does these massive, massive productions but I guess it was one of those great moments where he was looking for something simple and quiet and designed and theatrical. He had a copy of the album for a good six months before it came out. So I guess it was gestating for a long, long time and it was just one of those perfect situations creatively where everybody basically got to do what they were really wanting to do….As I’ve gotten older, a few things have come into place. Willie Williams is a mentor to me. He’s someone who has taught me so much. He sees something in me that, for whatever reason, he has decided to encourage and to nurture.

It’s good to know that even while entertaining Big Stars in France, yer man still has time to keep an eye on what the critics are saying. Seems Bono stumbled on a Rolling Stone review of the remastered Boy album over the weekend, and was prompted to write a reply.

A 1,200-plus word reply, that is.

Here’s a bit of yer man’s memories:

For us music was a sacrament …an even more demanding and sometimes more demeaning thing than music as ART, we wanted to make a music to take you in and out of your body, out of your comfort zone, out of your self, as well as your bedroom, a music that finds you looking under your bed for God to protect your innocence…

Bono was so long-winded loquacious that RS had to reprint his reply as a separate news story. Here’s the full link.

Oh, yeah, he also mentioned what the band is doing now: trying “to finish our most complete and radical album yet.” No mention of Edge being on fire. Yet.

According to this OSOYOU blog, U2 threw a rousing party, rich with A-list celebrities, last weekend at the French home that the Hewson and Evans’ families share.

I’m hoping this was to celebrate another ‘officially completed’ U2 album…

No matter what city or town you travel to, you’re always reminded of your obsession (and tend to seek it out).

That’s what happened to me this weekend while I was in LA on business. I was staying in a downtown hotel, and I got lost on the way there.

Cursing myself for refusing the GPS the rental agency offered me, I began driving almost in circles around the entire area. One of the streets I ended up on was Main, and my first thought wasn’t to pull over and find on the map where Main was in proportion to the street my hotel was on, it was to locate 7th so I could see where the video for “Streets” was filmed.

But I was running late, so I refrained…until today, when I had some time to kill at lunch.

I drove to 9th where the parking was safer and left my rental, then walked down to the not-so-nice intersection of 7th and Main. And just as U2 faqs.com reports, the Republic Liquor Store is now a Mexican restaurant.

The photo below is what it looks like now.

This time, the Soap Box is not a political one, it’s a car!

Late last month, at the 71st Annual All-American Soap Box Derby, 17-year-old Maddison Stapleton of Salem, Oregon took 2nd place in the “Super Stock” category with her How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb-themed car (thx to Stan, for the tip).

A photo of Maddison and her winning car is below. Congratulations Maddison!

Paul McGuinness spoke with Paul MacInnes (tongue twister - I know) recently for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. As the article also featured other content, here’s the meat-and-potatoes of what Goose had to say:

U2 manager reveals why people don’t normally bother interviewing managers

Let’s hear it for the managers! They’re the unsung heroes of the music industry! And just because they’re generally balding, overweight and devoid of musical talent doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be championed in a style formerly reserved for a Dragons’ Den panel. So let’s hear it for bigging up the big men, and where better to start than with U2’s Paul McGuinness?

There’s only one journo up to the job of interviewing the man Bono described as his group’s “iron first in a velvet glove”. That, of course, is Bono’s schoolfriend and chief music critic for the Telegraph, Neil McCormick. In a lengthy and, indeed, tedious encounter with McGuinness, we get to learn the following about his vital role:

U2 have control over when they release retrospectives and compilations. “We felt it was the band’s responsibility to compile and order its own catalogue”

McGuinness expects to see a new business model “in partnership with ISPs, where they effectively become revenue collection partners for rights owners”.

U2 are about to create a “digital visual co-efficient” for album sleeve artwork. “Watch this space because it’s something U2 are addressing on their next album.”

McGuinness also believes that “copyright is part of civilisation” and that “if new ways of stealing from department stores were being developed, you wouldn’t just give up running department stores”.

Well, Mr McGuinness, In the News and its pack of loyal street urchins ARE currently developing new ways of stealing from department stores. And when we bring down BHS, we’ll see who’s laughing then! And, as for the revenue collection thing, we wish you every success!

By the way, Mr. McInness - you may have been the only “journo” *granted* the interview. There are plenty out there (including yours truly) who’d be up for the job and love the opportunity to interview him!