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"It's a record about looking for some kind of transcendence as well as trash." -- Bono, on Pop |
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"It's a record about looking for some kind of transcendence as well as trash." -- Bono, on Pop |
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Column: off the record..., vol. 9-365
@U2,
July 05, 2009
One guess which day was the start of the U2 360 Tour:
Pretty easy one, eh? :-) Those are the page views for the main site and the forum over the past week. Between @U2, the forum, and our blog, we had about 270,000 page views last Tuesday. We actually had more visits (but fewer page views) on the day that No Line on the Horizon was released. But we had more page views last Tuesday because people were sitting on the home page and hitting refresh for the latest news and updates. All of this is pretty much an excuse to say a public THANK YOU to my old friends and former co-workers at OWT, where this site is hosted. I e-mailed them last weekend to warn them that the tour was about to start, and told them that making matters worse was that the tour would be starting in Barcelona; in other words, traffic to @U2 (and U2tours.com, for that matter, which is still currently on the same server as @U2) would spike right in the middle of the business day here in Washington. They had it all under control. The forum went down for a few moments due to a database error, and that was the only issue we had last week with the traffic surge. Back in 2005, we posted the setlist live right on @U2's home page -- in the "Bits & Bytes" section. Traffic was HUGE! At one point, @U2 went down and OWT had to raise the maximum number of simultaneous connections allowed. I'm glad we were more prepared this time. And I hope you got all the information you were looking for from Barcelona. By almost all accounts, the tour is off to a good start. There were lots of people -- longtime fans -- saying on Twitter last week that the two Barcelona shows were some of the best they've ever seen. Here's what Aaron from U2Wanderer said after opening night:
One thing I noticed in the photos that no one has seemed to mention is that Edge is wearing a headset mic. That leaves him free to roam, and I'm assuming he's been doing that. On the Vertigo Tour, I remember seeing and hearing a lot of comments from fans who felt that Edge was too stationary on the main stage. One thing almost everyone is talking about is The Claw. A few things: I take back what I said before about the stage being more like Judas Priest than U2. I should've never doubted what Willie Williams was up to. That thing is stunning, and even though I've seen a couple hundred photos of it already, I'm certain it'll still be a jaw-dropper when I see it in person this September. For all the talk about the claw, our friend Beth M. seems to be about the only person I've seen talking about the son et lumiere and finial-like elements of the show, and bringing in previous examples where Willie W. has used churches and buildings as a canvas. Good stuff at both links. And if you haven't checked out LiveDesign magazine's U2 360 mini-site, do so now. There are a lot of videos, photos, and stories about the construction of the claw and the entire staging/lighting, for that matter. Maybe the coolest stuff is a series of sketches showing early versions of what became the claw. (And if you like those, you might also like the early Vertigo Tour designs on the Mark Fisher web site.) Tassoula shares the news that "Bad" plays throughout the trailer for the upcoming Jim Sheridan film, Brothers. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, and Natalie Portman, and is due out this December. Though "Bad" is in the trailer, there are reports that both "White As Snow" and "Winter" will both feature in the film. U2: The Hype & The Feedback is now less than three months away and I need to tell the conference organizers what I'm going to speak about in my presentation. I've narrowed my options down to two:
I've started a discussion in our forum inviting you and other fans to help me decide -- and I'd like your feedback whether you're attending the conference or not. You can visit the thread to get some more details about each idea, too. And finally ... CD/Album cover art search tool. For when you need the cover art for iTunes or whatever music player you use.
© @U2, 2009.
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