'If we come to Glasgow and play a crap gig that's the end of U2...'
The headlines the morning after, in the Scottish press, captured the occassion: We Love U2 (Daily Mirror); U2 Rock Without Rigmarole (Daily Mail); U2 Take Scots To The Edge (Daily Record)
Tonight there are no introductions to the first three songs but with Discotheque, which segues into Staring At The Sun, Bono adds a snatch of Promised You A Miracle from Simple Minds and Why Does It Always Rain On Me from Travis - both bands who hail from Scotland.
Remembering that this was a show announced about half an hour before it took place, Bono says, 'Sorry that this was a last minute kind of a deal, if any of you had planned to go out or there was something on the telly that you were watching, they have those video recorders now, they're computerized you know, you can just tell them to like tape it... 'They said they couldn't fit the Elevation tour in here, its fits pretty good I'd say - that was very Elvis of me right there...' And, then, the song. 'This is a song that the lyric was about when you had kids and you had to let go of them but I think my old man wrote this song for me, this is Kite...'
As is becoming an Elevation 2001 tradition, he shouts 'Hutch' before U2 open up Gone, which appears to be a reference to the late Michael Hutchence, and, with I Will Follow, come more memories.
'Barrowlands,' he raps half way through the song,'Twenty years walking down these streets, 20 years same melodies, same beats, all the way from Barrowlands to here, Barrowlands to here...'
For Sunday Bloody Sunday, the singer has left centre stage and headed out along the catwalk to elaborate a little on comments he has been making during this song of late. 'Get Up Stand Up, stand up for your rights but never take a life... never take a life... ...'cos people are more valuable than ideas, that's the message that we're sending back across the little channel of water to friends north and south of that little line drawn on that little island across the way. We're saying we're not going back there, 'cos with the small island comes the small minds and the small ideas, this evening we're playing the big music, with big ideas like compromise, big ideas like tolerance, big ideas like joy...'
Wake Up Dead Man gives way to Stuck In A Moment, and In A Little While, when Bono walks down the catwalk and slaps hands with fans in heart. 'What an amazing feeling, thank you so much, just an amazing feeling,' explains the singer, before admitting, 'If we come to Glasgow and played a crap gig that's the end of U2, this is an amazing night, thank you, soul music, it's all soul music...'
When Bono remarks that Edge is in fine singing voice, spontaneous chanting of 'Edge, Edge, Edge' follows.
'Walk out into the SECC, lights go down, whole scene changes,' says the singer introducing The Fly. 'With light and motion, light and motion, turn your light on emotion...'
'Thank you for being so patient and coming to a rock show, thank you for giving us a great life. 'I also want to thank any of you that went out on the streets for the Drop The Debt campaign, Jubilee 2000 stuff, thank you for that...' at which point Adam whispers in Bono's ear. 'Adam wants to know if there is a girl out there called Zuka, I don't know, it's a bass player thing.'
'We'll be ready to go out on the next G8 summit despite the police brutality, despite what you saw on the TV,' he continues, explaining again the irrefutable logic of the argument that African human rights are the same as European or American human rights. 'We're going to look for pharmaceutical drugs at zero cost not just cheap but zero cost, it's the least we can do in the wealthy north.'
One features a verse of When Will I See You Again and, with thanks to support act Cosmic Rough Riders, Walk On closes the show.
