HelloAngel

‘This Is Our Moment"

More from the band and manager Paul McGuinness on the eve of the first show.

Inside the cavernous Los Angeles Sports Arena, U2 and their production team have been putting the finishing touches to ‘Vertigo//2005’.

This weekend a crowd of competition winners invited into a rehearsal performance picked up plenty of clues, about what songs are under consideration. But everything could change.

After the rehearsal on Saturday night,for example, the band got their breath back and, deciding that they needed more rehearsal, went back out on stage for another extended performance. This time they played four or five songs that had not featured in the earlier performance. With Gavin Friday and Steve Lillywhite taking notes and making suggestions as new material was performed, the band didn’t leave the building until the small hours of Sunday morning.

‘I’m baffled by how they do it,’ says Paul McGuinness, their manager since the beginning. ‘They are very ambitious. They don’t just want to be the best band with the most relevant record, they also want to be the best live act.’

But some things, he tells us, are reasonably safe to predict.

‘The tour set list will definitely be about half of the new album. We’re not about cabaret or greatest hits. People are expecting the new songs because they are on the radio and at the top of the charts.’

To read the remainder of the article, please visit U2.com: http://www.u2.com/news/index.php?mode=full&news_id=1477

Mullen4Prez

Nice read