The Vertigo Tour had plenty of flaws. It was the nadir of Bono's speechifying. He did like 10 minutes of speeches cumulatively at most shows. The Love and Peace / Sunday / Bullet sections were interminable, if you look up boredom in the dictionary there's a video of Bono singing snippets of Hands that Built America and Johnny Comes Marching Home. It's definitely the worst Streets has ever been, and the performances of WOWY were often uninspiring with Bono sounding half asleep until he'd maybe inject a bit of life with the Joy Division snippet.
But the 18th of November 2006 was, and probably remains, the best night of my life. It was my first time seeing them, Dad had gotten us tickets, and U2 was pretty much my entire life at that point. We were up on level three at an awful stadium, so the sound wasn't amazing and the crowd was a bit flat (and the following night, which I begged Dad to allow me to attend to no avail, they played Until the End of the World, The First Time, Party Girl and Bad with Ruby Tuesday and 40 snippets) but for two and a half hours I transcended. I played air guitar and air drums standing in my seat belting out all the lyrics the entire show.
But the best part about our leg of that tour was what we got that no one else outside of the Pacific got: Kite. They closed with Kite, extended it out to eight minutes, and featured local Indigenous artist Tim Moriarty on didgeridoo. Not only was the performance utterly spellbinding — if you haven't heard it, track it down, there's an official release on the Window in the Skies single from Sydney — but it came about a month after my grandfather had passed away, and a year after my other grandfather had passed away. The latter was my first experience with grief, and Kite was there for me, and I read the lyrics of the song when we spread his ashes.
