Midnight Oil

Subject: RE: [powderworks] NMOC - U2 in Perth, 18 December
From: "Jeff and Jane Scott" <jscott@iinet.net.au>
Date: 19/12/2010, 11:03 pm
To:

-----Original Message-----
From:  Tom


Oils fans might enjoy the following (highly objective!) 
report of a recent U2 concert, by a friend, Roger, given that 
the Oils had a similar vibe, and were mates.

t

<snip>

I saw U2 last night in Perth.  It may be hard to believe, but I've actually
been a U2 fan longer than I've been a Midnight Oil fan!  The first concert I
ever went to was U2 in Perth in 1984.

Was a pretty good show, and I think I'd get on well with Roger as I agree
with pretty much everything he said.  The Perth show was more or less the
same as posted, apart from a couple of songs, eg we got I Will Follow
instead of New Year's Day at the start.  We got an unrecorded new song
(North Star or something?) and Pride instead of Bad.  And even better, they
didn't play the crap Batman song, they did Light My Way instead.  And we got
an encore of Moment of Surrender at the end.

The band intros were good.  In view of what had been going on at the WACA in
Perth yesterday, Bono introduced the band as their Australian cricket
equivalents - Adam Clayton = Shane Warne, Larry Mullen = Adam Gilchrist.  At
this point I was thinking, The Edge would have to be Mike Hussey, and Bono
was thinking the same thing.  Finally he got to himself, and said he'd like
to see himself as Alan Border, but realistically he's more David Boon (which
sparked a crowd "Boonie! Boonie!" chant from a group at the front).

The biggest and best difference from the Brisbane experience was that the
Transperth people did have an extra 25 trains on standby at the end.  So I'd
caught the train from Subiaco into Perth, picked up my car from where I'd
parked it at work, and was home within about 30-40 minutes of the show
ending.

Overall I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I was going to.  I'm a bit
off U2 these days - the last album was crap, and the two previous had only a
couple of good tracks each.  But they do play well live, and the whole
production was pretty impressive.  My only mistake was getting there early
enough to see Jay-Z as support, who enthralled me by playing what seemed to
be the same song eight or nine times, broken only once in the middle by what
seemed to be playing a recording of someone else's song for the audience to
sing along to.


jeff...