And it's not just confined to arena/big outdoor gigs. I've also experienced this numerous times at small gigs in recent years (everything from Richmond Fontaine to Beirut via Andrew Crowley) when people just want to chat at the bar, etc, rather than listen - and it's infuriating if you've paid money for your ticket and want to listen to the music!
This is true. It's not just U2 or big/small venues, and nowadays with cell phones, people are even more distracted when they're going to shows. But as Last Unicorn said, there's not one definition on who "(a) fan" is. Some people are going to go and enjoy themselves, some are going to drink a lot or smoke pot, some will be busy recording the show or taking lots of pictures, some will be dragged there against their will, etc. etc. It's impossible to cater just to one group, especially when everyone's in varying states of attention or what they want to get out of it.
That's a problem with every act as big as U2 and playing for such huge audiences. Most people going to a stadium or huge arena shows are casual fans or general music lovers, most of them are mostly familiar with U2's legendary work of the 1980s. Many don't want to hear new stuff they don't know, they want to hear the classics or at least stuff they hear on the radio. People tend to get bored easily in concerts nowadays. I have experienced it many many times. Not only at U2 shows but at big concerts generally. If people don't know a song (because it's new or rare), they walk out or start to talk or call someone on their mobile phone or go for a drink. It's different at small gigs, the atmosphere is different and there are mostly hard core fans in the audience who are familiar with an artist's work, no matter how rare or obscure it might be. I go to small shows a lot. In fact, I go to see more small gigs than big ones. It's also a question of the whole atmosphere of the place. People walking out if they don't get to hear what they expect to hear in a stadium show. The "hard core fans" making up a small percentage of the audience isn't representative for the audience.
I wish it weren't that way and I wish U2 wouldn't care about it, but they want to have that huge appeal and play to as many people as possible. The downside is that they get so insecure about their material. I still think that most of the NLOTH songs were great live and they should have just kept on playing them. If people are complaining and walking out, it's their fault and their loss. I talked a lot to people who were just casual fans and didn't really own many U2 albums and most of them were complaining about the band not playing enough classic hits that were better known than the new and rare ones. It used to make me angry. BUT I've heard the very same after Springsteen shows.
We live in the ivory tower right here. Everyone (me included) gets super excited if the band pulls out rare, obscure and unexpected songs on tour. There were many precious moments during the 360 tour where U2 played stuff none of us would have expected before the tour. But the majority of the U2 audience wasn't so delighted about it and simply didn't want to hear U2 doing some strange song, instead they go there for the classics. That's the way it is. There's simply no solution to this problem. Saying "fans" don't like a record is an argument that simply doesn't work, because "fans" can't be defined. There's no such thing as "the fan".
The one thing I always put into perspective is how I feel when I go to shows for artists I barely know or don't own every album for. It's obviously nice to know every song and sing along. But for myself, I can still enjoy the songs I don't know and if I like something I hear, I'll make a note of a lyric or looking up the set list so I can find it later on. Not everyone's like that though, and as you said, it's not an easy solution. And at the same time, "those" people are the ones that we are for other artists too.
I was talking to a fan on another forum who said they were willing to
not attend a show if it meant "keeping respect for the band" - which basically meant play small theaters and not play any popular singles over the past 20 years. I brought up things that could be legitimately wrong with that, such as these places selling out and tickets being priced ridiculously high by scalpers, and he kept thinking there was a way to keep ticket prices low and people happy. Somehow, I doubt only 4000 people in New York or Chicago would want to go to a U2 concert though. What I also should have brought up was why he would even care about what they played if he didn't want to attend a show! Oh well... I said that I could see them doing a smaller tour to build up press over a new album, perhaps with the entire new material and more rarities thrown in for the sake of a smaller venue. But a 40-city thing and that's that? I can't see too many people being happy over that. All of a sudden, the band would be "inaccessible" and the word would be that U2 "doesn't care" about its fans. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In terms of NLOTH songs, Magnificent did get played into 2011 (I'll forget about the crappy Tutu version though!), and perhaps Unknown Caller, Breathe, and the title track could've been played a bit more at the 2010 dates. By the summer of 2011, the album was 2.5 years old though, and the talk would have been about how they weren't changing it up if they were still playing the same things by that point. Plus, some people on here would say how "Breathe didn't work as an opener," or "UC has a dumb chorus," or... well, I don't recall too many complaining about the title track live myself!
But the point is that there wasn't a consensus on the new material with "hard core" fans either, much less anything else.
The bad thing about U2 being such a huge act with such an enormous history is that people have all sorts of expectations and the band simply cannot live up to all of them. IMO they should stop trying and do their thing.
The question is "What is
their thing?" then? If it's playing to large audiences and getting people excited over old singles, a few fans will get mad just because. And if they do something different from that, I'm sure some people will get mad too. Again, it's not an easy solution.
