Irish Invasion

U2

Snow Patrol

You’d be forgiven if you thought it was St. Patrick’s as two Irish bands landed in NYC this past week: U2 played Giants Stadium on September 23 and 24; Snow Patrol played the Beacon Theatre September 22 and 23.

U2 needs no introduction – they’ve been around a long time, since 1976 to be precise when they formed the band under the name Feedback. The first U2 song I ever heard was the live version of Sunday Bloody Sunday, and it just blew me away – it was passionate, desperate, visceral. It was love at first sound. At the time, no company distributed them in Brazil, and I could only get their records (yes…it was that long ago, when CDs weren’t even commercialized) in one of only 2 stores in Rio that sold imported records. I thought at the time that I’d probably never ever have the chance to see them live.

And there I was last Thursday at Giants Stadium for my 6th U2 concert remembering all this. I have to be honest, though: I didn’t care for their latest album “No Line On The Horizon”. It sounds like they wanted to take their music in a new direction but didn’t quite get there so the album feels vague at best. I can even say that U2 haven’t written any song that blew me away in the past decade or so, but their success is undeniable: on Thursday, U2 broke the Giants Stadium attendance record, bringing in 84,472 fans (the previous record was held by Pope John Paul II with 82,948 people in 1995). It sure felt like a crowd: it took me over one hour to get from the NJ Turnpike exit to the parking lot, a distance of less than 2 miles (~3.2 km)!

This is their 360° Tour, so called because the stage set-up allows viewing from any angle. The stage was nicknamed The Claw by the band and crew, and to me, it looked like a giant alien insect when I first laid eyes on it. It’s a gigantic production: the stage is 164 ft (50m) tall and requires 120 trucks to transport. The video screen is circular, made up of over 1 million pieces that allow it to move up and down and also spread apart vertically so it becomes more than just a screen – it’s a crucial part of the visual effects. It’s hard to explain in words how the screen works, but you’ll understand when you see the photos.

But as impressive and innovative as the setup was, for me the best moment of the show had nothing to do with the production: it was during “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” when the audience started singing along. And those tens of thousands of voices singing in unison just sent chills down my spine.

Snow Patrol was the other Irish band of the week, although they’re no longer totally Irish since the lineup now includes 2 Scotsmen. Snow Patrol started life as Shrug in 1994 but only became popular in the US in May 2006 when “Chasing Cars” was played in the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy”. I first saw them on a freezing night in late March 2006 at the Bowery Ballroom, a minuscule venue for 550 people in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The venue is so small that when you stand on the first row, you can actually rest your arms on the stage. I got there 20 minutes before the start of the show thinking I’d end up in the back of the venue, but somehow I managed to squeeze my way to the second row and to this day I want to kill myself for not taking my camera…

This time, I caught them at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side, a 2,800-seat venue. The great thing about a small place is that you can really see the musicians, how they interact with the audience and with each other. And Snow Patrol is a fun act to watch: they create a great rapport with the audience, and their songs are contagious without being clichéd, with strong melodies that have earned them the admiration of musicians as diverse as Bono of U2, Michael Stipe of REM and Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe (!?…go figure this one out…). Plus, there’s Gary Lightbody, the most charming frontman I’ve ever seen in a rock band. He’s witty, he’s funny, and has one of the 3 most beautiful voices I’ve heard in the past 5 years (the others are Tom Chaplin of Keane, the most accomplished singer of the three, and Paul Banks of Interpol, the least accomplished of the three, but who has a powerful baritone voice that can stop you in your tracks). When Lightbody starts to sing, I melt like a chocolate bar in the summer sun…

For me, the highlight of their show was something totally unexpected. There’s a song I love from their latest album “A Hundred Million Suns”, but the song is 16+ minutes long and every time I listened to it, I lamented that I’d never listen to it live because no band would ever play a song that long on a live show. They did, and I was on cloud 9. Snow Patrol are entertaining, surprising, they can make you sing and can make you laugh. And sometimes that is just priceless.