U2 kick off their world tour down Mexico way

A Hispanic man in a Roy Keane T-shirt wants to know why Bono is singing a song called An Cat Dubh.

A Hispanic man in a Roy Keane T-shirt wants to know why Bono is singing a song called An Cat Dubh.

U2 kicked off their world tour in San Diego on Monday night in front of a predominantly Spanish-speaking crowd.

The green, white and red flags of Mexico substantially outnumbered the amount of Irish Tricolours in the audience - with San Diego being just 20 minutes away from the Mexican border.

The band struggled through some difficult moments before eventually wrestling the set to the ground.

READ MORE

"We screw up sometimes," Bono acknowledged, "but at least we're among friends tonight."

Still, probably beats having to go to work at the World Bank every day.

The band were anxious about this show. Up until a few hours before stage time they still hadn't decided on a set list and not all the songs they played had been rehearsed.

Perhaps because they've hit a new commercial and critical high with their current album, and having just been inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame, this was a retrospective, nostalgic affair.

Second song in and Bono was singing "Hello, hello, we're in a place called San Diego" from Vertigo which segued, to everyone's surprise, into one of their earliest ever recordings, Stories for Boys.

They were joining the dots on a 25-year recording career - both songs feature the same "Hello, hello" lyric. It's something that is also evident in the intro to Vertigo when Bono sings "Uno, dos, tres, catorce" ("one, two, three, 14").

The first U2 album, the 1980 Boy, opened with the lines "one, two, three, four"; the 14 in Vertigo refers to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, being the band's 14th album.

The first quarter of the show could have doubled as one of their Dandelion Market gigs from the 1970s, as they ran through songs that hadn't been aired in over two decades: Electric Co, An Cat Dubh and Into the Heart.

They performed on a set which was very similar to that used during their last Elevation tour - a sparse stage surrounded by an oval runway - and it wasn't until midway through that they reached for songs from the current album.

Miracle Drug, a song inspired by Christopher Nolan; Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own and Love or Peace or Else were all delivered with a snap, crackle and pop - the latter song even saw Bono making a cameo appearance on drums.

A lacklustre version of Bullet the Blue Sky - a song that details the US government's support for death squads in Central America in the 1980s - gave way to the entire United Nations Declaration of Human Rights being rolled out on a large video screen above the stage.

Both Elevation and The Fly misfired on the night, but the band ended with a virtual greatest hits of Pride, Where the Streets Have No Name, and One. Before the latter song, Bono urged the audience to support the African continent in its continuing battle against the Aids pandemic.

Keeping with the nostalgic feel of the evening, the band's last song was 40 from the War album, which featured them walking off stage one by one, just as they had done on the Unforgettable Fire tour of the mid 1980s.

This set list will be more or less the same for the band's two Croke Park shows in Dublin in June. Doubts remain over whether a third date will be added. Nowhere else on this tour are the band scheduled to play three shows in a row - a precaution taken to protect Bono's singing voice.

Backstage after the show, the band's dressing room remained locked.

"The jury is still out," said one of their team.

Outside on the steps of the stadium, a Mexican television presenter doing a live broadcast had made his mind up: "Excelente, estupendo . . ."