I’d had a recurring waking nightmare of technical catastrophe that would leave me standing next to Damien Hirst, watching U2 arrive on stage and playing in front of an array of blank screens. Little did I know how extremely close we came to having this vision become reality. Finally, finally, after eighteen months of pontificating, we are all at Glastonbury with the intro tape of Bowie’s Space Oddity playing. This led into the siren sequence at the top of Real Thing and the video screens bursting into life with images of hatching flies in extreme close up (go Damien!) I noticed, however, that the two festival screens which were supposed to be carrying the camera pictures of the performers were black, and remained so as the song kicked in and the crowd went nuts. I’d expected the Hirst visual to appear enigmatic, but seeing it in isolation with no images of the band amid this tremendous sound was bordering on performance art. And was kind of fantastic.
I was to learn later that, almost simultaneously, two massive gig-threatening events had come to pass. Back stage, the BBC have their whole live broadcast set up and also, in a separate trailer, Smasher (our touring video director) had his whole set up to switch the screen cameras and control all the video playback material. Literally at the moment that Larry first started beating the hell out of his drums at the top of Real Thing, the generator powering Smasher’s truck died, dumping his entire system into darkness. Later he told me that he actually thought he was going to have a heart attack (no doubt, like me, having fantasised about worst-case-scenarios). He genuinely thought that U2 were now on stage playing in front of seven giant video screens showing diddly-squat, but then he noticed that the little back-up system he’d brought with him had kicked in and was happily running on its own battery. He stuck his head out of the trailer and could see that there was light blaring from the screens and that all was well. Smasher’s MacBook was running the Damien Hirst piece all by itself, and the day was saved.
Meanwhile on stage, catastrophe of similar magnitude was simultaneously being avoided by the narrowest of margins. Terry, who on the 360 tour plays keyboards and runs the computer click-tracks from ‘underworld’ beneath the stage, was set up on stage right. There’s no ‘underworld’ at Glastonbury and earlier in the day I’d joked with Terry that he would finally see U2 play live, rather than via the complex CCTV set up we have on the 360 tour. He was set up on Edge’s side of the stage, tucked behind one of the video screens that we’d brought. Between Terry and the front edge of the stage, the Glastonbury DJ had a little set up, to entertain the crowd during the changeover periods. Said DJ had decided to stay there to watch U2 and, going with the festival spirit, nobody objected him being there. Not, that is, until U2 kicked into Real Thing and this guy started dancing and jumping about like a lunatic, knocking over Terry’s computer rack in the process. Many songs are played in a manner we call “off the grid”, i.e. it’s just the four of them playing at whatever tempo Larry is beating out, but songs that play over loops or effects (e.g. With or Without You or I’ll Go Crazy), or that have synchronised video content, need to stay exactly in sync and so are played over a click track (that the audience don’t hear). All of this comes from Terry’s computer set up, and so do all of the video triggers that launch the visual images at exactly the right moment. You can imagine that this is not an uncomplicated set-up, and I’m sure poor Terry saw the whole thing in slow motion, as his central nervous system crashed to the floor.
Thank the universe that, just prior to hitting the deck, Terry’s machine had sent the trigger to Smasher’s video playback system so the Damien Hirst video sequence had launched. Literally seconds later, both Terry and Smasher’s set-ups had both been rendered useless but by then the gig had started, the band was playing and the visuals were running themselves from the back-up laptop. If you listen back to the BBC broadcast you can hear that during the first verse of Real Thing Terry’s “weedly-weedly” keyboard runs are missing because he wasn’t able to play them at the same time as scraping his computer off the floor.
On stage, of course, the band had no idea that any of this was happening but were facing challenges of their own, not least that the persistent rain had turned the stage surface into an ice-rink. Not only were the musicians finding themselves in entirely unknown physical territory but also in a situation where they had no idea what might happen if they attempted sudden movement. All of us then found ourselves in extremely challenging circumstances but by this time the rocket was launched and the energy of the moment carried everything. It turned into a great gig and the audience, gawd bless ‘em each and every one, managed to remain energetic and rowdy throughout even though I’m sure they were in considerable discomfort. I did have to laugh at one point. 'Elevation' is a useful gauge of crowd energy and I looked out of the mixer tower at this point to survey the field and see how they were doing. There was lots of hand-waving but I was surprised that there wasn’t more jumping up and down. I realised then of course that the reason they weren’t jumping up and down was because they couldn’t… 80,000 pair of wellied feet, sucked into the mud, so hand waving would have to suffice.
We made it through to Moment of Surrender and the last little treat of Out of Control (oddly my favourite two songs of the night), before retiring to the backstage compound to fall in a heap. I looked at my phone and saw I’d had texts from twenty-one people during the show, all raving about what they’d seen on TV, so at this point I finally gave myself permission to relax. Mission accomplished, captain. For once we didn’t do a runner but stayed at the gig to join the party. There was a hog roast (in a large tent, as it was still raining) where we ate drank and were merry. We laughed because, surveying the room, from the waist up it looked like the most A-list celebrity hang-out you can imagine, but from the waist down it looked like a farming convention.
It seems almost miraculous that it worked out at all.
Lookin good, if I might add 
, but way too many layers for this time of year!
