PopMart in Prague? That's something Lenin never bargained for, but when U2 brought their extravagant stage show to the Czech capital last week, 80,000 eastern European fans put it right on top of their shopping list. During the height of communism in Czechoslovakia, gymnastic displays were staged at the Strahov stadium in honour of the glorious revolution, and Russian tanks regularly paraded up and down its sand-strewn grounds; now, in the new age of the Czech Republic, the good burghers of Prague can't find much use for this vast 100,000-plus capacity venue, so they welcome the arrival of Western acts like U2 and Michael Jackson, both of whom brought pomp and spectacle back to this vast dustbowl on the outskirts of the city, if only for a day.
"The Russians brought their tanks - the Irish bring a lemon," Bono told the crowd during the concert. "Hope you like it - you paid for it!" They liked it a lot. From the moment the big screen was switched on, and the giant golden arch was lit up (biggest screen in the world, 120 feet high, etc), PopMart was a sight to behold, and U2 gave a towering, masterful performance which wiped away all doubts about the band's power to create real magic among the giant pixels and fairy lights. Don't believe the gripes - PopMart is a bargain, and in the historic city of Prague, the concert shone like a gem among the Gothic and Renaissance buildings. It was a stunning show, and a measure of how well the band have mastered the daunting technology of PopMart and re-established their own indomitable identity. The tanks didn't stand a chance.
"The show to me is a reaction to the brown-ness of rock," says a tired but ecstatic Bono after the show. "It's not drawing from rock traditions at all, it's coming much more from a black music perspective. And the joy of it, that's actually at the core of it. To me it's like a sci-fi Garth Brooks show - it's like the Jetsons baptised by fire."
PopMart has come in for so much stick since it opened in Las Vegas last April, that most observers have tagged it a "noble failure": overblown, overreaching, over-priced and under-subscribed. But it might be argued that the media has overreached itself in attempting to paint PopMart as an enormous rock folly. Stories about poor ticket sales in the US spread like wildfire through the world's press, changing subtly like Chinese whispers with each retelling, until some of the reports became distinctly distorted.
True, PopMart's US attendance figures, especially in the early stages of the tour, didn't always match up to the band's ZOO-TV outing of 1992-1993, and some dates were downright disappointing; but many of the later shows, in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, exceeded expectations, and by the time their European jaunt kicked off in Rotterdam on July 18th, PopMart had sold its two millionth ticket.
But all this is just numbers and standing in the middle of the Strahov stadium in Prague, surrounded by those 80,000 ecstatic Czech fans, the whole thing becomes a bit academic in the face of the awesome turnout. "Part of the thing we're trying to pull off with the show," says Bono, "is to show people that you don't have to wear it on your sleeve for it to be seen and heard. The songs - they have the stuff. You know, we can still have our 40-foot lemon, and it'll still be a soul show, it'll still make sense on a few levels."
Reality receded into the Prague night as U2 came on stage, and PopMart's surreal shopping mall took over, a tongue-in-Czech celebration of society's glorious quest for ultimate purchase power. The opening song, Mofo, might have pretentions towards the techno style of The Prodigy, but it made a good intro to the confusing conglomeration of sounds and images which makes up PopMart. I Will Follow brought U2 back to the beginning, while Even Better Than The Real Thing encapsulated U2's sense of the abstract as something solid and substantial.
The onscreen barrage of animated product logos culminated in an image of an upturned pop can disgorging its sea of soda, a kitsch symbol of the all-permeating power of advertising. A woman with a shopping basket is seen removing an unseen product from a shelf, repeating the motion in an endless, fruitless loop - groundhog shopping day. Cut to a cartoon kitchen where hubby tells his dishwashing wife: "I'm just popping down to the shop", and the band go straight into the dual apocalyptic visions of Last Night On Earth and Till The End Of The World, Bono and The Edge ending with a climactic sparring match on the catwalk. Up and running, and not about to stand still.
"I think a lot of people expected high-concept, white-hot perspective, smart-arse . . ." observes Bono. "but it's wide open. You know, joy is the hardest thing of all, whether you're a painter or a writer. Anger is an energy but it's also an easy thing to pull off. This word joy is the hardest thing of all to pull off."
What strikes most about the show is the way U2's older songs subtly change their meaning in the PopMart context, becoming more resonant to the 1990s experience. New Year's Day becomes almost a release of pre-millennium tension, a fresh start to a new century, and Where The Streets Have No Name rearranged the mind's map with new lines like "I want to break through/ into a new frame".
"The songs, of course, have a different spin when put in certain contexts," Bono agrees. "And Bullet The Blue Sky, instead of being a sort of political diatribe, goes into your head. A whole section of the show tonight rewrote itself for the people who were listening. I've always had a theory that you hear music through the ears of the people who are listening. When you're in a crowd of 60,000, 70,000 people, you see how they see things. Or hear how they hear things. For New Year's Day we had some footage from Warsaw and Lech Walesa and Solidarity, but tonight it was still about beginning again, about regeneration."
The past always seems to come back to U2, not to haunt them, but to remind them how things have changed utterly. When the band played in Warsaw just a couple of days earlier, Lech Walesa invited them up to Gdansk; and in Prague, President Vaclav Havel wrote the band a letter explaining that he couldn't make it to the gig because of the recent flooding disaster in Moravia, in the southern reaches of the Czech Republic. For their part, the band bussed 3,500 Moravians to the gig, providing their own brand of light relief for the survivors. And once again, a U2 song took on a new meaning - this time it was Last Night On Earth.
"Someone once described me as the Michael Fish of lyricists," says Bono. "But my God, was I making sense tonight!"
Everything fell into place in Prague: the American flag umbrella, the velvet dress, the Bat-MacPhisto suit, transvestite Leigh Bowery dancing onscreen to Mysterious Ways, the 6,000 extra punters who stormed the gates in time to see U2 emerge from the lemon . . .
When the lights finally went down after the emotional high of One, U2 had been giving their all to the people of Prague for nearly two-and-a-half hours. In the dressing room afterwards, Bono confesses to be on a high, and says he could talk for the next 48 hours. We settle for 30 minutes. He also reveals that his post-gig high is often followed by an extreme mental darkness "like a black dog constantly barking at me".
DJ Howie B, whose job it is to warm up the crowd before the big spectacle, is also in the dressing room, along with bassist Adam Clayton, manager Paul McGuinness and U2's sometime producer and creative foil, Brian Eno. Eno has come over from his base in St Petersburg to witness his first PopMart show, and has declared it "the best U2 concert I've ever seen". A tired but ecstatic Bono sits back in the couch and attempts to answer the question which hangs on every sneering lip: just what are U2 trying to say with all this PopMart malarkey?
"Of course we're a rock group," says Bono, "and we're not even trying to be black, we're very conscious that we're not black - we're white, and not even that, we're Irish, so we're pink. But still we can draw from some of those other traditions, from hip-hop, and that's what the philosophy of the show is."
U2 have long been reviled as the ultimate stadium band, but there are signs that the tide of opinion might be turning. Where the band were routinely loathed by the "indie" bands of the day, they are now being praised and looked up to by a new generation of would-be superstars. Noel Gallagher of Oasis has made no secret of his admiration for U2, and the Manchester band jumped at the chance to support U2 in Oakland and Los Angeles last June. Also Radiohead, another megaband-in-waiting, and whose integrity is central to their appeal, have let U2 into their insular world. Public opinion at home also seems to be turning, and this was amply demonstrated by the support which the band got for its Supreme Court appeal to hold two concerts in Lansdowne Road next weekend.
"I think we were so taken aback," says Bono. "We were kind of getting used to the griping and that's what we thought it was gonna be. But there seems to be a lot of support, and that was a real lift for us. Because after a while you just think, the people who buy your records, they're your people, and you forget about everyone else. But I didn't think there was a feeling for us outside of them. And that was really nice."
U2's harshest critics have traditionally been the UK music press, some sections of which have seen the Irish band as having become too big for their brogues. Last April, the band brought a contingent of British journalists to Las Vegas for the opening of the PopMart tour, sort of like Little Red Riding Hood bringing the Big Bad Wolf home to meet her granny.
"It seems like the UK press are starting to open up now," opines Bono, "When you remember in the 1980s, it was against the law to be in a big band! But we got the best reviews for the album in the UK, and I think some people came along in Las Vegas and just felt, well, this is an expensive ticket, and these people haven't got their shit together, and so they gave us a bit of a kicking."
The PopMart which arrived in London's Wembley Stadium yesterday, and which will come to Belfast and Dublin in the coming week, is a different kettle of fish to the first, faltering date in Las Vegas four months ago. Back then, U2 seemed lost in a crazy cartoon world, reduced to two dimensions by the sheer scale and ambition of the show. You could see and hear the band onstage, but you couldn't discern their essence, that intangible quality which puts U2 among the most creative and original bands in the world. The real U2 remained invisible, but they were definitely in there somewhere, cowering behind their irony tower of plastic and neon.
In Prague, however, U2 came boldly forward and reached deep into the collective consciousness; instead of trawling for inspiration, as they have often done of late, they deftly pulled out some shiny nuggets of insight and empathy. It has taken a long sojourn in the recording studio, where the band went over schedule in the making of Pop, and it took a long, arduous trek across the US; but somewhere in Europe U2 have finally found their centre again, and suddenly anything seems possible.
"That's the thing," says Bono. "It's about your own self. When you know what you've got, there's a strength there that's much bigger than the drive-in movie screen behind us. But on an off night, it dwarfs us, and then we're left under the flying pig. And we don't want the pig - we want the lemon."
Bono admits that he suffers from nerves every time he steps out under the giant arch.
"It's scary out there - I could vomit from nerves. I just don't make any sense for a few hours before the show. Some nights it's so easy, and you're amazed, but a lot of the time I can't hear people when they talk, I just completely . . . You go out and you meet all kinds of stuff out there, not just technical shit that can go down, but you're meeting bits of yourself that you left down the road in songs, you're meeting all kinds of stuff that goes on out there. You can't imagine what it's like. And there's very little written about the psychology of being a performer, what it does to you, what it does to your ego, how it implodes, how it fucks it around. You think it blows your ego up, but the opposite happens. It turns you on yourself."
In PopMart, Bono is regularly plunged deep inside himself, then flung far outside his body, and every time he sees himself, it's always from a different perspective. Most of us only get to see ourselves from one angle, but Bono the pop star is constantly confronted with layer upon layer of self-image.
"It's a big mirror to fix your hair in, that's for sure!" Bono laughs. "It's like a hall of mirrors, you do see all kinds of distortions of yourself, sometimes ugly, sometimes transparent. It is a madness. I had a recurring dream that I was Kenny Rogers, and I was singing Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town, and I was holding the microphone, and there was just this baritone coming out, and I was thinking: `This is fantastic, I've just died and gone to heaven and become Kenny Rogers'."
`It's scary out there - I could vomit from nerves . . . You go out and you meet all kinds of stuff out there, not just technical shit that can go down, but you're meeting bits of yourself that you left down the road in songs, you're meeting all kinds of stuff that goes on out there'