Useful.................

U2.................................................Lights of Home

 

     As we do before every show, we pray.

     Sometimes it can feel as if we're strangers, praying to find the intimacy of a band that could be useful to our audience this evening.  Useful? To music.  To some higher purpose.  In some strangely familiar way we are changed.  We begin our prayers as comrades; we end them as friends finding a different image of ourselves, as well as the audience we're about to meet, who will change us again.

     To be useful is a curious prayer.  Unromantic.  A little dull even. but it's at the heart of who we are and why we're still here as a band.  Men who met as boys.  Men who have broken the promise that's at the very heart of rock 'n' roll, which is that you can have the world but in return the world will have you.  You can have your messiah complex, but you must die on a cross aged thirty-three, or everyone has the right to ask for their money back.  We've turned them down so far.

     We are men who bear some scar tissue from our various struggles with the world but whose eyes are remarkably clear considering the vicissitudes and surreality of a life playing stadiums for thirty-five years.

-Bono, Surrender: 40 songs, one story