Still Out Of Control: Last Night Of 360° Tour
(Godfather Records GR683/684/685)
Magnetic Hill, Mocton, NB, Canada – July 30th, 2011
Disc 1 (77:43): Intro Space Oddity, Even Better Than The Real Thing, The Fly, Mysterious Ways, Until the End of the World, I Will Follow, Get On Your Boots, band introduction, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / Ballad of Springhill, Stay, Beautiful Day / Space Oddity, Elevation, Pride, Miss Sarajevo, Zooropa, City of Blinding Lights
Disc 2 (76:02): Vertigo, I’ll Go Crazy – Discotheque, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Scarlet, Walk On, One, Hallelujah / Where the Streets Have No Name, Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me, With or Without You, Moment of Surrender, Out of Control, 40
Disc 3 (76:36): Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow / Where The Streets Have No Name, Magnificent (Seattle, June 4th), I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For / The Wanderer, All I Want Is You (Nashville, July 2nd), One Tree Hill (Chicago, July 5th), Ultraviolet (Light My Way), Moment Of Surrender / Jungleland (Anaheim, June 18th), Bad / In The Garden / Walk On The Wild Side / 40 (Pittsburgh, July 26th), Mysterious Ways / Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World (East Rutherford, NJ, July 20th), All I Want Is You / Love Rescue Me, Blowin’ In The Wind / Where The Streets Have No Name (Salt Lake City, May 24th). Bonus track: Rise Above (American Idol, May 25th), Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of (David Letterman, July 18th)
U2 wrapped up the two year long 360° tour with an appearance at the Magnetic Hill Music Festival in Mocton, Canada along with opening acts Carney and Arcade Fire. Still Out Of Control: Last Night Of 360° Tour on Godfather has a very good to excellent audience recording of the event. Along with tour highlights and other bonus tracks, it is a fitting end to what was one of rock’s longest tours. With the band grossing $736 million on sales of 7.2 million tickets, it is also the most lucrative.
In addition to the financial success, the band also achieved an artistic success as well. They mixed newer, unreleased songs with older tunes which hadn’t been played for twenty-five years and oddball covers.
In an article titled “U2 digs deep for final 360 Tour setlists,” the writers claimed: “U2 wrapped on their record-setting tour on Saturday night (7/30), closing the door on a two-year worldwide jaunt that set a new high-water mark for tickets and ticket dollars.
“Fans at the final leg of the tour saw the band reach deep into their catalog for rarities that didn’t make their way into most setlists on the 110-show run.
“In Moncton, New Brunswick on Saturday night, the band closed out the night with ‘Out of Control’ and ’40, the latter performed as they did in the 80’s, with each member of the band leaving the stage one by one.
“At their last show in the U.S. earlier in the week, the band pulled out ‘Bad,’ a song rarely pulled into their modern sets.
“In the final weeks of the tour, gems like ‘All I Want Is You’ (Nashville), the Live Aid-style pairing of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Bad’ (Glastonbury Festival), ‘The Fly’ (Anaheim) tumbled into the relatively standard setlist, along with a new song that debuted earlier in the tour, ‘North Star’ (Miami).”
And in a review on Max 104, Robert Long described the action as: “So a review of a U2 concert from a self proclaimed U2 fanatic may seem a little biased but here’s my impressions of the July 30th Magnetic Hill show just the same: We start with openers Carney from Los Angeles. They hit the stage at 6 pm with a 45 minute set that definitely got the crowd in a good mood.
“I admit I knew very little about this band other than the fact that the’re very talented singer is involved with Bono & Edge in the Spiderman Musical production in New York. They played some tunes from their debut album Mr Green: Volume 1 and also won the crowd over with a couple of stellar covers which included Queen’s Bohenian Rhapsody & The Beatles I Want You (She’s So Heavy) My general impression was the band was real tight and their singer Reeve Carney is a fantastic singer.
“The second band of the evening was Montreal’s Arcade Fire. As a fan of the group I had a pretty good idea of what to expect but I have to say they exceeded my expectations. Running onto the stage and kicking into Ready To Start from their Grammy Award winning album The Suburbs, they never looked back and rocked a scorching set with a good balance of tunes from all 3 of their albums including the always spine tingling Wake Up from their debut cd Funeral.
“Their stage energy is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and you can tell that every member of the band is buying into the plan of world domination set out by front man Win Butler. Their killer performance certainly set the bar high for U2, a band at this point I would think would be the only one Arcade Fire would open for.
“After 5 hours of standing near the front of the stage to catch a glimpse of my musical heroes, it was finally time to see the U2 machine put to work. Just seeing Bono, Edge, Larry & Adam walking out on the giant video screen was almost surreal to me since they almost seemed like fictional people when I was young. The band started their set with 4 tunes off their 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby including the opener Even Better Than The Real Thing.
“Their live sound is massive and stage presence is larger than any band in the world. The set list was varied from many of the groups past albums but not all were covered. Rattle & Hum & the Pop album had no representation although Bono did sing a line or two from Discotheque from Pop. New Years Day, Desire & Ultra Violet (a few of my personal faves) were also missing in action.
“Having said that many of the staples made it : Pride, Where The Streets Have No Name, With Or Without You, I Still Haven:t Found What I’m Looking For, an absolute mesmerizing performance of Vertigo and many more along with a few surprise performances. Zooropa was one of those which I didn’t think the crowd really got however the transition following with City Of Blinding Lights more than made up for it.
“Walk On set an emotional tone for the evening when Bono explained the story of Aung San Suu Kyi, an activist from Burma who was sentenced to many years of house arrest for fighting for democratic elections in Burma. She has since been released but many more in that country still suffer from her same fate. Bono also paid tribute to the Springhill Mining disaster with a line from the song U2 hasn’t performed since 1988.
“Scarlet, an extremely rare track off their very little talked about October album made the set list as did a rockin Out Of Control, a song Bono wrote on his 18th Birthday. He introduced it as he did many years ago announcing to the crowd that U2 was a band from Dublin and this was their first single. Moment Of Surrender from the latest No Line On The Horizon was a beautiful moment when Bono asked the crowd to turn the grounds into the milky way with cell phones & lighters.
“The band ended with their 1983 track 40 leaving the stage one by one before drummer Larry Mullen telling the huge crowd on behalf of the band they would miss Moncton. Probably not near as much as Moncton will miss them. An incredible night of music indeed. Let’s do it again sometime!”
The third disc contains great rarities from the final leg of the tour, all in excellent sound quality. This is an excellent release by Godfather, an excellent way to end the 360° coverage.
