As a red I never thought I would hear myself saying that the City of Manchester stadium was the perfect venue.'
Wow! Must have been a pretty hot show if one of our fan reviewers (the imaginatively titled 'Feck me') admits that he had a wonderful two and a half hours on the home turf of bitter soccer rivals Manchester City.
'It was great to see the achtung baby back, U2 brought the laughing gas and we let go of the steering wheel,' adds Henderson, another reviewer.
For the first time on the tour I Will Follow was in the set list, ramping up the energy levels still further after Vertigo. Edge headed down to the tip of one of the b-stages to remind us with a blistering guitar solo what it takes for a song to sound fresh a quarter of a century after composition.
The big surprise tonight was just how light it was when the band came on stage: the skies still blue above, it felt like a summers day. 'Sunshine, blue skies, summer's coming,' shouted Bono at the close of New Years Day. 'A Manchester kind of summer, a Dublin kind of summer...summer's coming.'
Which is what must have given him the idea of a gentle stroll with a young lady plucked from the elipse, with whom he sauntered back along the catwalk before inviting her to take a seat on stage next to Larry while the band played City of Blinding Lights. That'll be the memory of a lifetime!
Larry and Adam were centre stage and front to drive the band through a fierce trilogy of Love and Peace, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Bullet The Blue Sky before Running to Standstill introduced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to cheers and applause.
If the band were hitting their stride and the light beginning to fade, British politicians Tony Blair and Gordon Brown also got a bit of an ovation when Bono thanked them for their successful work in canceling the debts of the poorest countries. The sequence of Pride, Streets and One ended with a couple of Make Poverty History campaigners invited up onto the b-stage to hold their banner aloft. A lot of the audience didn't seem to realize that the band had left the stage after One, but there was no mistaking their return - a strutting Bono, marching military style and silhouetted high above one of the main speaker stacks, one of the visual masterstrokes of the stadium show.
'The biggest surprise was not the re-emergence of With or Without You or Zoo Station but in the sheer energy that Where the Streets Have No Name created and how the band fed off the crowd,' writes Steve Bentham, another of our early fan reviewers from last night. 'How many times have we heard it? But never so good! Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, Love and Peace or Else, City of Blinding Lights, Yahweh and a flawless version of All Because Of You completed the seven tracks from the new album that were played this evening.'
Thanks Steve, that about covers it for today. If you were there, don't forget to send us your reviews
