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U2: The Joshua Tree Tour

U2 celebrates 30 years of the classic album "The Joshua Tree" by playing all 11 songs as well as their greatest hits on their tour around the world. U2 celebrates 30 years of the classic album "The Joshua Tree" by playing all 11 songs as well as their greatest hits on their tour around the world. U2 celebrates 30 years of the classic album "The Joshua Tree" by playing all 11 songs as well as their greatest hits on their tour around the world.

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• May 12, 2017 (United States)
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Review: U2 Revisits ‘The Joshua Tree’ in the Here and Now

By Jon Pareles

• May 15, 2017

SEATTLE — U2 doesn’t want to become an oldies act. But that Irish band couldn’t resist booking a tour of quickly sold-out stadium concerts featuring all the songs from its 1987 album, “The Joshua Tree” — songs that were still both brash and high-minded when U2 performed them here on Sunday night at CenturyLink Field. It was the first United States show, after a premiere in Vancouver, of an extensive world tour . The band will also release elaborate, expanded 30th-anniversary editions of the album.

U2 has been laboring over new songs. According to Bono, U2’s lead singer, the band had finished recording “Songs of Experience” — the sequel to its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence” — but the 2016 elections sent the tracks back for further rewrites. At least one new song is finished; the concert included it, “The Little Things That Give You Away.”

“The Joshua Tree” was worth revisiting. It was a pivotal album for U2, one that announced and then fulfilled grand aspirations. The songs pondered 1980s America as both myth and presence: its landscape, its ideals of freedom and openness, its culture, its sensuality, its violence. The lyrics addressed spiritual and romantic quests along with political and economic predicaments, connecting them with language that drew on the Bible and Beat poetry.

Meanwhile, the music on “The Joshua Tree” decisively expanded U2’s scope with a new influx of American sounds, a growing assurance in layering rhythms and textures, and a recognition of rock’s history before punk, back to Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. With “The Joshua Tree,” U2 assumed the mantle of a generationally important band.

“The Joshua Tree” was also a worldwide hit album that propelled U2 onto the stadium and arena circuit, where it has remained. It included U2’s only two No. 1 singles in the United States, “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”: songs about seeking love, faith and answers.

U2 started the concert on a small stage, lighted simply as if it were playing a club and performing songs from albums before “The Joshua Tree”: thoughts on terror (“Sunday Bloody Sunday”), displacement (“A Sort of Homecoming”), longing (“New Year’s Day”) and transcendence (“Bad”), full of arm-waving, chorus-singing audience participation.

During “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the 1984 song about the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a towering video screen showed words from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Then, for the performance of “The Joshua Tree,” the whole screen lit up and the band members took places on the full-sized stadium stage. They were ascending the way their career did.

“The Joshua Tree” was performed against that video backdrop, often with starkly beautiful desert scenes by Anton Corbijn, the photographer for the “Joshua Tree” album cover and many other U2 graphics. The band was dwarfed, but the music wasn’t. Larry Mullen Jr. on drums, Adam Clayton on bass and the Edge on guitar tore into the urgent rhythmic flux of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Against the craggy postpunk groove of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” both Bono’s falsetto and the Edge’s guitar leads were keening sirens.

“The Joshua Tree” was a high-water mark of an era when leading rockers were eager to be role models and do-gooders, giving benefit concerts like Live Aid and Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour , which both included U2. A backlash would dismiss similar efforts as naïve or pretentious, but U2 has persisted. It doesn’t write scolding protests; it strives for empathy, hope and, ultimately, exaltation.

One reason to revive “The Joshua Tree” is that its concerns — personal, societal, mystical — haven’t disappeared. Some of its songs hold eerie resonances with present American problems. “Running to Stand Still” is a portrait of an addict, while “Red Hill Mining Town” contemplates vanishing mining jobs. For “Mothers of the Disappeared,” an elegy for political prisoners, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam sang a verse, and U2 was also joined by Ben Harper and the concert’s openers, Mumford & Sons.

Before “Exit,” the screen showed a clip from a 1950s television show, “Trackdown,” about a con-man character named Walter Trump who promised to build a wall for safety. Then, after showing Robert Mitchum’s hands tattooed “Love” and “Hate” from his role as a fanatic preacher and killer in “The Night of the Hunter,” Bono strutted and gesticulated, declaiming the song in a black suit and preacher’s hat.

Songs from U2’s post-1980s catalog were linked to causes. Graphics turned “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” into a celebration of present and historical — make that herstorical — female achievers. “One” was dedicated to the battle against H.I.V./AIDS and to Bono’s antipoverty organization, ONE . In “Miss Sarajevo” by Passengers, a U2 side project, images of wartime devastation, refugees and a 15-year-old Syrian girl dreaming of immigrating to the United States were shown as Bono sang, “Is there a time for keeping your distance/A time to turn your eyes away,” and later recited the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” from the Statue of Liberty.

Still, U2 refused to rest entirely on its past. Its new song, “The Little Things That Give You Away,” has lyrics about anxieties and a creative crisis: “So far away from believing/That any song will reappear,” Bono sang. The music started out as a moody piano ballad, but before the end the momentum had multiplied, with a doubletime beat and even faster rhythm guitar.

The band couldn’t let that energy go; Bono impulsively called for an oldie, “I Will Follow,” U2’s first single. Bono urged the crowd to take the roof off, but this was U2’s longtime habitat, a stadium. There was no roof.

U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ Tour Through Aug. 1; comes to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on June 28-29; www.u2.com/tour.

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U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know

By Jordan Runtagh

Jordan Runtagh

The plot of The Joshua Tree is essentially an immigrant’s tale: Four guys from Ireland set off to find America, and what they discovered left them both invigorated and outraged. While the lyrics to U2 ‘s 1987 opus give voice to their ever-expanding social conscience, the roots of The Joshua Tree are planted firmly in blues, gospel and folk – with an outsider’s edge. Bono , the Edge , Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. were strangers in a strange land, and this sense of otherness is prevalent throughout the album.

“It doesn’t really sound like anything else from its time at all,” the Edge recalled in a 1999 Classic Albums documentary. “It’s not coming from an Eighties mentality. It’s coming from somewhere completely different. … When we were making this album we didn’t really feel like we were a part of what was going on in the music business at that stage. And we felt very separate.”

“It was so out of step with everything around,” Bono agreed. “It was mad. It was like an ecstatic music.” The spirit caught on –  The Joshua Tree went on to top of the charts in more than 20 countries, spawning hit singles with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “With Or Without You.” Technologically innovative, politically charged, spiritually conscious and radio-friendly in the extreme, the album built on U2 ‘s reputation as unparalleled live performers and vaulted them to the top of the modern-rock pile.

Decades on, The Joshua Tree remains the band’s highest-selling album and a touchstone among legions of fans. In honor of the album’s 30th anniversary, and in advance of an upcoming tour celebrating the LP, we look back at 10 little-known facts about its creation.

3. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was originally a completely different song. The DNA of one of U2’s most enduring anthems can be found in a demo from an early jam session, alternately titled “The Weather Girls” or “Under the Weather.” It was, according to Clayton, “a bit of a one-note groove,” while the Edge dismissed it as “a little like ‘Eye of the Tiger’ played by a reggae band.” The song’s only saving grace was Mullen’s unusual drum part. “It was a very original beat from Larry,” Lanois told Hot Press . “We always look for those beats that would qualify as a signature for the song. And that certainly was one of those. It had this tom-tom thing that he does and nobody ever understands.”

Keeping the drum track as a base, the band layered new instrumental tracks overtop to fit the rhythm. “It was like building a building. Foundation, next, then you put in furniture in the end. I enjoyed that process,” says Lanois in the  Classic Albums documentary .  As the new melody began to take shape, it bore traces of gospel – a relatively unexplored genre for the band. “I always loved gospel music and I encouraged Bono to take it to that place, which he did,” Lanois continues. “It was a very non-U2 thing to do at the time, to go up the street of gospel, but it opened a bit of a door for them.”

With the instrumental backing nearly complete, Bono entered the live room to experiment with a vocal melody through largely improvised lyrics. For the Edge, his bandmate’s performance evoked a phrase he had conjured up that morning, loosely inspired by the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” (“You’ll find out when you reach the top you’re on the bottom”).

“As I listened to this incredible song emerging out of the fog, I remembered something I had written in a notebook, a possible song title that I had actually stumbled upon that morning,” the Edge says in U2 by U2 . “I tried it in my head as Bono sang, and it scanned so perfectly that I wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to him as he sang. It was like a hand in glove.”

The line “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” would provide the song with both its title and emotional focus. “There are only a few moments of full-on electricity-in-the-air creativity that I remember from making that album, but the birth of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ is one,” says the Edge.

4. Recording “Where the Streets Have No Name” was such a hassle that Brian Eno nearly wiped the tapes in frustration. As the band started to assemble material for their new album, the Edge made it his mission to compose “the ultimate U2 live song.” Installed in an empty room at the top of his equally empty new home, Melbeach, he worked tirelessly with a 4-track tape machine until he’d completed a hard-driving guitar riff that would become “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

“It was a strange feeling when I finished the rough mix, because I thought I had just come up with the most amazing guitar part and song of my life, but I was totally alone in a big house with no one to share it with,” he recalls in U2’s autobiography. “I remember listening to the complete silence of the house for a few seconds after the music stopped and then doing a dance around the room, punching the air.”

The rest of the band, who viewed the tricky riff with trepidation, did not match his enthusiasm. “He figured a guitar part that could switch from the 6/8 time and bring it into 4/4 for when the band comes in,” Clayton explained in the Classic Albums documentary. “And I have to say, at the time I didn’t appreciate the probably hours of thought that went into the idea. It just seemed like a way of fucking the band up.”

In a 2008 interview with Mojo , Daniel Lanois remembers being equally perturbed. “It was a bit of a tongue-twister for the rhythm section, with strange bar lengths that got everybody in a bad mood. I can remember pointing at a blackboard, walking everybody through the changes like a science teacher.” Further complicating matters was the fact that the song was far from complete. “[The Edge] had the beginning and the end, but he didn’t really have the bit in the middle,” says Clayton. “So we would spend interminable hours figuring out chord changes to get the two bits to join up.”

Eventually, Brian Eno hit a breaking point (“It drove Brian mad,” Clayton confirms) and, according to multiple sources, he had to be physically restrained from wiping the tapes of the song. “Brian thought if he could just erase it from the tapes we could stop working on it,” Lanois told Uncut in 2003. “I’m sure they would have just come up with another song. It’s interesting, sometimes the songs that receive the most attention are the ones that don’t make it. You just hate to lose your investment. I’m not sure if Brian was right, but it did drive me a little bananas as well.”

However, Eno sought to clarify the famous tale in the Classic Albums documentary. “That story’s been told a lot of times and now I shall tell you the truth about it. That song was recorded so there was a version of it on tape. That version had quite a lot of problems. What we kept doing was spending hours and days and weeks, actually – probably half the time that the whole album took was spent on that song – trying to fix up this version on tape. It was a nightmare of screwdriver work, and my feeling was that it would be much better to start again. I [was] sure we would get there quicker if we started again. So my idea was to stage an accident and erase the tapes so we’d have to start again. But I never did.”

5. The Band’s Robbie Robertson dropped in on U2 as they recorded.

As sessions continued that August at Danesmoate, U2 received an unexpected visit from Robbie Robertson. The former Band guitarist was in Dublin to complete his first solo album with production help from Daniel Lanois. “I had started a record with Robbie but I had to leave because it was taking so long,” Lanois later told Hot Press . “I went to work in Europe, first with Peter Gabriel and then with U2. I felt bad for Robbie that his record wasn’t finished, so I said to him one day, ‘Why don’t you get out of Los Angeles, come out here and just visit for a couple of days?'”

Unfortunately, Robertson’s arrival was ill timed. He touched down in Dublin as the city was being pummeled by Hurricane Charlie, resulting in some of the worst flooding in decades. “There were cars floating down the streets,” the beleaguered guest recalled in an interview with Hot Press later that year. “It was really frightening. Thank God these guys [U2] were up for some spontaneous combustion!”

Robertson packed just a handful of song fragments, but the storm, the new location and U2 sparked his creativity. He and Bono improvised lyrics while the rest of the band provided backup, leading to a 22-minute take that would be edited down into “Sweet Fire of Love.” The track would surface on Robertson’s self-titled debut the following year, along with “Testimony,” which also featured the band.

6.”With or Without You” was saved by a prototype guitar. An early incarnation of “With or Without You” had been around since the band first gathered at Larry Mullen Jr.’s house to discuss new material after the Unforgettable Fire Tour concluded in the summer of 1985. By all accounts this primitive version was unremarkable, with Clayton insisting that the bare bones were “very traditional, because the chords just went round and round and round.” Under the guidance of Eno and Lanois, they continued to tinker away with the composition well into the Joshua Tree sessions, developing a myriad of arrangements—all of which were, in the Edge’s assessment, “awful.”

U2 were nearly ready to abandon the track entirely when the Edge received a gift from Canadian musician Michael Brook, his recent collaborator on the soundtrack to 1985’s Captive. Knowing the Edge’s penchant for unique sounds, Brook sent him a prototype of an instrument he had developed called the Infinite Guitar. Using a built-in electronic amplification system, it allowed notes to be played with limitless – or “infinite” – sustain. “It’s a genius thing,” says Lanois, who owns the second of Brook’s two prototypes. “You create a feedback loop. Since then, of course, people have started mass-manufacturing them, but back then it was unexplored territory.”

While undoubtedly impressive, the instrument came with some health risks. “It arrived during the [ Joshua Tree ] sessions with elaborate instructions on how to hook it up,” recalls the Edge in U2 by U2 . “One wrongly placed wire and you could get a nasty belt of electricity. This piece of gear would have failed even the most basic of safety regulations.”

After assembling the Infinity Guitar without major injury, the Edge began to test the boundaries of his new toy while the band worked at Danesmoate. “I had just taken it out of the box and was playing around with it in one room while [band associate] Gavin Friday and Bono were in the control room listening to the backing track of ‘With or Without You.’ We were really at an impasse in the search of the right arrangement, and were just at the point of leaving the song to one side. Then, through an open door, they heard the sound of the Infinite Guitar combining with the bass and drums and just went: ‘That’s it! But what the fuck is it!?'”

Bono was suitably impressed by what he later described as “a beautiful ghost of a guitar sound,” and the thrill injected new creative energy into the troubled song. “I asked Edge just to play a little something with it,” Lanois told Hot Press . “He did two takes and those are the ones in the ultimate mix of ‘With or Without You.’ Beautiful sounds, stratospheric.”

7. “Sweetest Thing” was recorded during the Joshua Tree sessions as an apology to Bono’s wife, but didn’t make the final cut.

The exhaustive Joshua Tree sessions, coupled with U2’s live commitments, put a strain on the band’s significant others – and particularly on Bono’s wife, Ali Hewson. “I live with a very strong person, and she throws me out occasionally,” he admitted to Rolling Stone at the time . “I hardly saw my wife Ali for a year. 1986 was an incredibly bad year for me. It’s almost impossible to be married and be in a band on the road.”

Bono penned a song for his wife, “Sweetest Thing,” as apology for his frequent absences. “It was written during the sessions for The Joshua Tree . It was Ali’s birthday and I didn’t make it for the birthday,” he recalled in 1998. Though the track was recorded for the album, it was never completed to the band’s satisfaction. “It was actually the one song we always felt we could have nailed better than we did. In my mind it was always a pop song, and I always felt we could do it better.”

It was elbowed from The Joshua Tree , eventually surfacing as the B side to the “Where the Streets Have No Name” single in September 1988. It would be a decade before the song was polished off with the help of producer Steve Lillywhite for inclusion on U2’s Best of 1980–1990/The B-Sides compilation. “We knew we hadn’t really finished it, and Edge came up with a couple extra chords and it was a really quick thing,” Clayton told Entertainment Tonight . “So we went, ‘Yeah, stick ’em in.'”

With new vocals and a revamped instrumental arrangement, “Sweetest Thing” was released as a single in its own right, climbing into the Top 20 across the globe. Ali agreed to appear in the music video – on the condition that all proceeds from the song be donated to the Chernobyl Children’s Project.

9. Bono got banged up on the Joshua Tree world tour. “Cuts and bruises, that’s what I remember from the  Joshua Tree [tour],” Bono lamented in the band’s autobiography. The 111-date jaunt across North America and Europe grossed over $40 million between April and December of 1987, but it took a sizable toll on the lead singer.

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The trouble began when Bono took a spill mid-song during rehearsals on April 1st, just one day before the tour was due to kick off in Tempe, Arizona. “I cut open my face falling off a light,” he said in U2 by U2 . “I’ve still got the scar on my chin. I was lost in the music and at the start of any tour you’re just getting to know the physicality of the stage, the geometry of it, and you’re overestimating your own physicality. You think you’re made of metal yourself and you’re not.”

He received stitches at a nearby hospital, but Bono’s luck failed to improve when U2 returned to the Arizona State University Activity Center the following night. After a week of intense rehearsals, the singer’s voice was reduced to a hoarse croak as they played to the first audience of the tour. “I must have stayed out in the sun too long,” he told the sold-out crowd, urging them to join in and pick up the vocal slack. “I’m glad you’re singing with me tonight.”

A day’s vocal rest allowed him to sufficiently recover, but disaster struck once again on September 20th during a concert at Washington, D.C.’s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. In the Edge’s memory, it was clear early on that the performance would not be one of their better ones. “In those days, when a U2 show went badly, it could go very badly indeed. … On this particularly night, in an attempt to try and get something going, Bono ran full pelt out onto one of the side wings. In the rain that was slowly falling, the side wings, which were covered in vinyl, became like an ice rink and his feet went from under him.”

More than the rain, Bono blames his own negative energy for the accident. “The song was ‘Exit’ and it had taken me to some ugly place. … I came down on my left shoulder and severed three ligaments from the clavicle. I was in terrible pain. Of course, they never healed back. My shoulder has come forward now, so I have to train my shoulder to go back. But it was rage that caused it. That was when I realized rage is an expensive thing for your general well being.”

10. U2 occasionally opened for themselves under the guise of a fake country group.

In between sets by the BoDeans and Los Lobos during U2’s Indianapolis show on November 1st, 1987, fans were treated to the debut performance of an obscure country group known as the Dalton Brothers. The quintet – “Alton,” “Luke,” “Duke” and “Betty” Dalton – played a short two-song hoedown consisting of an original ballad titled “Lucille,” and a cover of Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway.” Only those in the front few rows saw past the big hats and bigger hair and realized that these Southern Comfort–swilling gents were actually U2.

“We play two kinds of music: Country and Western,” claims an elaborate bio on a Dalton Brothers webpage , which cites Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn among their primary influences. The band took their alias from the Dalton Gang, a real-life group of outlaws who robbed banks and trains throughout the 1890s.

The Dalton Brothers rode again twice more: at the Los Angeles show on November 18th, and on December 12th in Hampton, Virginia. “This is just like Farm Aid and we like it that a-way. You people are beautiful people,” Bono (a.k.a. Alton) tells the crowd in a convincing rural drawl . “It’s great to know that in Los Angeles it’s love, not money, that makes the world go ’round.”

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U2’s Joshua Tree changed everything and Gen Z doesn’t know it

“What is The Joshua Tree? I’ve seen it all around,” a young Gen Z’er asked me of my U2 hoodie.

I replied, telling her it was a famous album by U2. The maroon hoodie I was donning was from the 2017 thirtieth anniversary tour.

“I’m Irish and I don’t even listen to U2,” the worker quickly replied with a laugh.

Surely, this is not a problem exclusive to Ireland’s Gen Z demographic. It feels like my entire generation ignores the band unless it’s to bring up their 2014 Songs of Innocence-iTunes fiasco.

And it sucks. Very few bands have had the legacy U2 has. And The Joshua Tree is a major reason the band is still relevant.

In fact, the album, which became a No.1 hit on April 25, 1987, is still relevant in the present day. Artists like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lopez are comfortable regurgitating their old greatest hits in lieu of good new material. U2 still makes quality music, but The Joshua Tree is a timeless classic. Here’s why Gez Z should give it a listen.

Why The Joshua Tree is iconic

Even if you’ve never gone out of your way to listen to U2, you probably have listened to portions of The Joshua Tree. The opening trio of songs, “Where the Streets Have No Name”; “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking”; and “With or Without You,” are some of the most popular songs ever.

“Where the Streets Have No Name” generates a euphoric feeling thanks to The Edge’s guitar riff. It’s a highlight of any live show that the band plays. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is a very grounded gospel song — Bono expresses his doubt over religion akin to how Martin Scorsese handles the subject matter in his films. “With or Without You” is a song popularly used; I’ve heard it at weddings and in TV shows alike.

But aside from the opening trio, the rest of the album is filled with gems. “Bullet the Blue Sky” is perhaps one of the band’s most aggressive political songs, quite literally taking listeners on a journey to the scene in El Salvador. “Running to Stand Still” begins as a whisper but ends with a crashing crescendo as the story of heroine addicts plays out.

Vocal highlights 

Songs like “Red Hill Mining Town” and “Trip Through Your Wires” aren’t among U2’s greatest hits. Even still, the songs are gems. In the former, Bono belts out to a degree unheard of since “Bad” from The Unforgettable Fire. The latter song is a fun homage to Americana music.

Bono once again shows off his vocal chords on “One Tre Hill.” Like most songs on The Joshua Tree, it’s a slow burn. But once The Edge’s solo hits and Bono begins shouting his “Rainin'” refrains, he hits a gear he rarely has since.

The Joshua Tree ends with a quiet cry for help. “Mothers of the Disappeared” takes its time getting going, as the band slowly comes in. Even Bono practically speaks out the verses before jumping into a falsetto-filled chorus.

A perfect desert landscape

What The Joshua Tree represents is a country as filled with limitless possibilities as America. It helps that U2’s members grew up in Dublin during the Troubles. Surely America seemed like the golden land as it still does today.

That’s why songs like “In God’s Country” — which features the ever-present line “Every day dreamers die to see what’s on the other side” — hit so hard. It captures what America looks like from the outside.

Several interpretations

The songs also have several meanings. Using the desert as a primary metaphor was a smart move employed by Bono. The desert is an open landscape. However, it’s also filled with dry spots that aren’t as beautiful as the open ones.

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is another prime example of a song that can be interpreted in several ways. On the surface, it seems to describe a love relationship. Bono is yearning to find the love he has yet to find. However, it’s also interpreted as a gospel song of sorts, as perhaps the relationship Bono is talking about is his with God.

As mentioned, “With or Without You” is always thought of as a love song. Fair enough, but it’s one of the most twisted ones ever. For yours truly, the song seems to be about Bono, who’s adjusting to his newfound fame, and his relationship with Ali, his wife. As he becomes more famous, he’s further giving himself away on stage and on his albums.

That’s a new dynamic introduced into their relationship. And it goes a lot deeper than the obvious reading that one love can’t live “with or without” their significant other.

U2’s performance at the Super Bowl in 2002 also gave new meaning to “Where the Streets Have No Name.” The song describes a desert. As The Joshua Tree’s opening track, the song sets the precedent with the ongoing metaphor. But what if the place with nameless streets is Heaven? After all, at the Super Bowl, Bono sang, “I’ll show you a place with no sorrow or pain” instead of “I’ll show you a place high on a desert plane” in the wake of 9/11.

Even more relevant in 2017

In 2017 (and 2019), U2 brought The Joshua Tree on tour. The initial 2017 tour was in conjunction with the album’s thirtieth anniversary.

While the move could have been viewed as a lazy nostalgia cash grab, the album proved its relevance even 30 years later. “In God’s Country” especially stood out as a track that felt relevant thanks to what was going on in politics at the time.

It was a dazzling show. U2 always shows out whether they are selling out stadiums or arenas. Being in MetLife Stadium with 70,000 others as the gigantic 4K-resolution screen brought the audience through the desert was special.

The Joshua Tree’s lasting impact 37 years later

The Joshua Tree made U2 “ Rock’s Hottest Ticket ” in 1987. They haven’t looked back since.

It’s an album largely about America, but the subtext suggests it’s about a whole lot more. Without The Joshua Tree, would U2 still be around? It’s a fair question, but thank goodness they still are.

Most musicians these days seem happy with inconsequential music that blabbers on about love and sex. U2 reached for the stars and made one of themselves with the album. Without it, the band wouldn’t have had to reinvent themselves with Achtung Baby or once again with All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

So, even if Gen Z chooses to ignore it, U2’s Joshua Tree will be here long after the likes of Taylor Swift.

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The post U2’s Joshua Tree changed everything and Gen Z doesn’t know it appeared first on ClutchPoints .

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The Joshua Tree Tour 2017

'Like a river to the sea…' One Tree Hill in Santiago, Chile.

'And in the world, a heart of darkness, a fire-zone  Where poets speak their heart then bleed for it

Jara sang, his song a weapon in the hands of love. You know his blood still cries from the ground.

It runs like a river runs to the sea. It runs like a river to the sea….'

Rene Castro among the friends in the house as OneTree Hill remembers those whose fought for freedom  and human rights in Chile. 

More coming soon

Were you at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago ? Tell us all about it. Add your own review and photos below .

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On This Day, April 25, 1987: U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’ hit number one

On This Day, April 25, 1987…

Three weeks after its release,  U2 ’s  The Joshua Tree  hit number one on the  Billboard  200 album chart.

The album, the band’s fifth studio release, was U2’s first U.S. chart-topper, and it remained at number one for nine weeks.

The record included future U2 classics “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which remain U2’s only number-one singles in the U.S., as well as “Where the Streets Have No Name.”  

The Irish rockers went on to have seven more number one albums: 1988’s  Rattle and Hum , 1991’s  Achtung Baby , 1993’s  Zooropa , 1997’s  Pop , 2004’s  How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb , 2009’s  No Line on the Horizon  and 2017’s  Songs of Experience.

U2 celebrated the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree with tours in 2017 and 2019, during which they played the album in its entirety. The tour hit North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

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U2gigs.com - U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere 2023/2024

All locations U2 ever played

Order by: Country | State/Province | City | Venue

Please note that the above option to order locations by state/province displays exclusively Australian, Canadian, and US states/provinces. No other countries are grouped in subnational units: for example, all Irish concerts are grouped together without separate categorisation for counties.

Select a location for details:

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On The Radio: 'Live At Sphere'

On The Radio... 'Live At Sphere'

The band's final and fortieth show from U2:UV at Sphere in Las Vegas is set for radio broadcast in a dozen countries worldwide beginning tomorrow, Friday and Saturday in the UK, Spain, Netherlands, Japan and Italy.

Further free-to-air broadcasts take place in Japan, Italy, Ireland, Australia, France, Brazil, Mexico and Germany.

The performance from the March 2 show will be joined with an extended  interview with Bram, Edge, Adam and Bono, recorded at Zoo Station in Vegas 

Here's the run-down of countries, radio stations, dates and air times.

U2:UV ACHTUNG BABY LIVE AT SPHERE – CONFIRMED BROADCASTS

Netherlands – Radio Veronica -  Saturday 20 April – 10pm CEST Spain – RockFM  - Friday 19th April – 10.00pm CEST (Coverage from 9:00pm CEST) Netherlands – Radio Veronica -  Saturday 20 April – 10pm CEST Japan – Fm Yokohama “Radio HITS Radio” – Saturday 20th April – 26:00 JP Italy – Virgin Radio – Saturday 20th April – 9pm CEST  Ireland – Today FM – Sunday 21st April – 10pm IST Australia – Triple M  - Monday 22nd April - 7pm AEST France – RTL2 – Wednesday 24th April – 6pm CEST  Brazil - 89FM – Sunday 28th April  - 2pm BR  Mexico – Alfa Radio 91.3   Germany - hr1 – Sunday 5th May – 8pm CEST Germany - NRW Lokalradios – Friday 10th May  Germany - WDR2 – Saturday 25th May – 8pm CEST   UK – Absolute Radio & Absolute Classic Rock: Thursday 18th April at 21:00pm UK and then again on Sat 20th April (21:00 pm UK) UK - Planet Rock – tracks across the weekend of Sat 20th/Sun 21st of April. UK - Greatest Hits Radio: Sunday April 21st at 16:00pm UK (also app & online

(Expecting news in the next few days on a special airing for U2.com subscribers.)

RECENT NEWS

Beautiful Day provides the soundtrack for a new campaign by the World Wildlife Fund.

Second in the series of digital Deep Dives and B-Sides. (Plus Atomic City for Record Store Day.)

On Friday, Adam is a guest on BBC's Gardeners World.

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