Conveniently I arrived just as the lighting crew had finished their set up and focus, so all was ready for me to don my smock and beret and get creative. Despite the inconvenience and lateness of the hour, it was undeniably exciting to sit in the quiet and dark of the stadium, programming lighting for such a killer sounding song. Even Better Than the Real Thing was an absolute staple of the ZooTV and PopMart tours, then kind of fell off the map. Songs do that periodically. For reasons it's hard to put a finger on, a once-great song just goes cold, or at least just stops working quite as well as it used to. I've learned to go with this and not to try too hard to push against it - songs have a life of their own somehow, and it's probably wise to follow their flow rather than impose your own inappropriate will onto them. It was truly wonderful to have The Unforgettable Fire as a nightly regular for the first year of this tour but then again, for no readily discernable reason, it just lost that loving feeling Real Thing was in the Elevation show briefly, and I seem to remember us all being quite surprised that it just didn’t sit right. Ten years later, however, it is back, reworked and reborn in rip-snorting form.
