HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
By Kenneth Maclellan
2006.10
We put out that album, "Zooropa," because we were so maddened by this concept of European unity. It seemed meaningless in light of the war in Bosnia, because [the rest of] Europe was just arguing about what to do, and there was fighting between the British, Germans and French about who should do what."—Bono, 1997
"Zooropa," U2's ninth album, arrived on July 5, 1993 and was met with an enthusiastic critical reception. Originally conceived as an EP, the speed of its creation is as remarkable as its contents: like its predecessor, "Achtung Baby," it was a musically daring record that moved the band forward while continuing U2's return to relevance after "Rattle & Hum." And like its predecessor, it was an album very much informed by happenings in Europe at that time. But while the band may have been "maddened" by events in Bosnia, it wasn't until U2 met Bill Carter backstage at Zooropa Verona, two days before the release of "Zooropa," that it began to actively and explicitly raise awareness for those in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, an involvement that would culminate in a concert there in 1997. But before Sarajevo, there was Berlin.
The scenes of Berliners scaling the graffiti-smeared Berlin Wall in November 1989, chipping at it with chisels, felling whole segments with whatever came to hand, were beamed around the world. It was not just the first steps towards reunification of Berlin or Germany that was being witnessed but the reunification of an entire continent—or so was hoped. In reality, Europe entered the final decade of the 20th century with tremors of uncertainty rippling through the Soviet Union and the Balkans. For many, things were going to get far worse before they improved.
U2 came to Berlin in 1990 to begin work on what became "Achtung Baby" at the city's Hansa Studios. Though one of the main motivations for recording there was to capture the city's atmosphere of expectation and fear, it would be fair to say that much of "Achtung Baby's" tone came from the mood within the U2 camp. The Edge was in the process of splitting up with his first wife and there was even talk of U2 going its separate ways. Indeed, the initial sessions for the album were difficult, the band unsure what musical direction to take. Famously, "One" was the turning point in the recording process. A song of compassion and unity, it restored the band members' confidence in themselves and the music they were making.
One of the great misconceptions of this era, though, is that the band had suddenly become experimental. It hadn't. Tinkering with its own rock 'n' roll had been a characteristic of U2 as far back as "The Unforgettable Fire." "Rattle & Hum" may have sounded in places like a pastiche of traditional American music but it was merely a by-product of the band's mixed abilities with the genres it was exploring. Indeed, "Achtung Baby" owes Bowie and the UK music scene of the early '90s as much as "Rattle & Hum" does Dylan and '50s American blues. Though very different, both albums are examples of U2 explicitly incorporating it's current listening into composition. Unfortunately general opinion does the more successful experiments of "Rattle & Hum" a disservice: this period is associated with every wrong U2 are ever accused of; the movie usually exhibit A for any U2-hater's case against the band. While the charges would be too lengthy to list but might include the following words: egotistical, self-important, preachy, pompous and humorless. Therefore it was just as important for U2 to address these accusations as it was for the band to progress musically. The solution U2 dreamed up was ingenious, the true experiment of the era, not only pushing U2 into unexplored territory but rock performance itself. That solution was ZooTV.
Even before a chord was strummed, the ironic tone of ZooTV was set by the stage-dressing. Trabants, the cheap, mass-produced, East German cars, hung suspended, spray-painted in brash colours, messaged with truisms or buzzwords, their headlamps replaced by stage lights. They flanked banks of the television screens that projected words and images and live satellite TV feeds via expensive, specialist technology. The U2 that took the stage was a markedly different beast to the one who wrapped up Lovetown in Rotterdam in 1990. Gone were the cowboy hats and tasselled waistcoats. The Edge now sported a goatee, beanie hat and spangled pants. Larry and Adam looked like cyber-slackers. But the biggest change was with Bono. In his black leather suit and bug-eyed shades, The Fly, Bono's signature alter-ego for the era, looked like he could have taught Jim Morrison a thing or two about rock 'n' roll decadence. Instead of being restricted by the traps of being a rich rock-star with a social conscious, Bono, in the guise of The Fly, embraced the trappings of his position, happily highlighting and flaunting its contradictions. For the encore, Bono would come on stage as the Mirrorball Man, in glimmering silver lame, kissing a mirror. This persona was part Elvis, part TV evangelist and a wholly successful send up of Bono's own supposed messiah complex. If "Achtung Baby" had been the sound of four men chopping down "The Joshua Tree," then the antics of The Fly and Mirrorball Man were like watching late-'80s Bono being sealed inside his own soapbox live on pay-per-view.
Artistically liberated, U2 began to explore the possibilities that these props and masks afforded them:
The show continued to grow and expand beyond the confines of the venue. Bono flicked through satellite TV channels with his own remote control to show world news, soft porn or home shopping. There were live TV links to MTV, phone calls from the stage to the White House or to the local pizza delivery service. We let luck play a part and took our chances as to what might appear from night to night. As new technology became available, it was incorporated into the show. When ZooTV entered the stadiums to become the ZooTV Outside Broadcast, giant projection screens were added. The projection screens became video walls as the Outside Broadcast went to Europe and became Zooropa. Bono's silver-suited preacher mutated into Mr MacPhisto, a demented thespian in gold platform soles who gave European politicians a hard time on the phone.—Willie Williams in "U2 Show" by Diana Scrimgeour
Another key evolution of ZooTV was in its visual content. There had never been a concert experience utilizing such sophisticated technology and it took time for both the band and the artists who contributed to the imagery to realise ZooTV's potential: not only could it embody and satirise satellite television as it had been its original intention but it could make effective comment on any topic. And just as the alter-egos had offered Bono a way out of the straight-jacket of his public perception, so the giant screens began to offer means to make statements without resorting to proclamation. The first real example of it was the new intro to the show used during the Outside Broadcast tour of the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. Footage of the First Gulf War was spliced with that of a George Bush Sr. speech edited to look as though he was rapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You."
The buzz of this leg of the tour gave U2 not only the creative energy to for the "Zooropa" album but plenty of fresh screen ideas for the 1993 European stadium leg of ZooTV. The events of the previous few years in Europe were not short of issues that these ideas could be applied to. Indeed, Europe was a continent undergoing a traumatic realignment of political and geographical boundaries:
The Cold War and the false division of Europe were over. A different, more historically grounded division of Europe was about to open up, I knew. Instead of democratic Western Europe and a Communist Eastern Europe, there would now be Europe and the Balkans. But who cared? I was definitely not where The Story was. It struck me just how far away from The Story, in both time and space, the Balkans were.Robert D. Kaplan from his book "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
Kaplan, an American journalist and author, was correct and Europe did develop this new duality. The member states of the European community had just signed the Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union, an organization designed to bring about closer monetary and political ties for the participant countries. The chief concern of Euro-sceptics, those who opposed the EU, was that it would lead to diminished powers for each individual country, ultimately reducing nations to regions. Eastern Europe, however, had moved in the opposite direction. The reunification of Germany had proved to be an exception. Gorbachev's perestroika had culminated in the collapse of the USSR, its constituent states recognized as independent republics by the close of 1991. This process had been far from easy. As early as 1988 Gorbachev himself had warned of "the dark forces of nationalism" and an unfortunate consequence of the quest for new sovereignty had been the inter-ethnic unrest in Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Yugoslavia, a nation with a freer take on Communism, the conditions and will for change mirrored those of the Soviet Union. The "dark forces" in this Balkan state when they came were particularly ardent and brutal, having simmered for decades. Civil war began in 1991 yet it wasn't until February 1992 that the European Community began to get aid and support to the worst affected state of the former Yugoslavia—Bosnia.
While there had been no direct reference to the Bosnian conflict in the ZooTV show, the rise of fascism, in particular the rise of the neo-Nazis in Central Europe, were targeted by the band. The George Bush "We Will Rock You" rap was replaced by a lengthy collage of film and music that included, amongst other things, images from Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi-propaganda film "Triumph of the Will." As that ended, and where there had been the ZooTV color bars previously, there was now the 12-star blue logo of the European Union, with one star, then other, then all of the stars falling off as "Zoo Station" began. But perhaps the most controversial use of the video walls came during "Bullet the Blue Sky." As there had been throughout the tour, the screens had shown burning crosses but, for European audiences, those crosses would morph into flaming swastikas, as Bono urged, "Don't let it happen again." U2 was literally playing with fire: not only did the band perform this in stadiums that had been used in the 1930s for Hitler rallies but, as an image, the swastika was illegal in Germany.
Around this time, MTV Europe's coverage of U2's new album and tour was seen by American Bill Carter, who at the time was an aid worker with The Serious Road Trip, a volunteer group that prided itself on getting aid to areas that "other agencies could not or would not go." The group was one of the first to bring aid to the former Yugoslavia. After becoming involved with the organisation Carter found himself in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, a city that was soon to be subjected to a terrible siege.
Sarajevo in the '80s was a city of prosperity and development, benefiting from hosting the Olympic Games of 1984. It was also a model for inter-ethnic relations, being home to Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim communities. However, the events of Eastern Europe were to have dire consequences for the city. Nationalism in Yugoslavia had been on the rise since the death of its premier Josip Broz "Marshall" Tito in 1980. Led by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian Nationalists moved for changes in state structure that would benefit the Serbs. As they stepped up their endeavours so too did the other nationalist parties and tensions began to rise. Fearing Serb domination, both Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Bosnia-Herzegovina embarked on a similar path but before the European Community was able to recognize it as an independent nation, war broke out. Sarajevo was surrounded: in its hills was an army, under Milosevic's order, camped with artillery and other military equipment. Major roads out of the city were blocked off; electricity and water cut off. From there, life in the city began to degenerate and Sarajevo became synonymous with atrocity and desolation.
As well as the peril of sniper fire and mortar bombs, inhabitants would have to scavenge for food if aid supplies couldn't get through. It was a desperate situation and one that the western media did not cover as thoroughly as it could have. After seeing U2 on MTV, Carter had the idea of raising awareness for the people of the city: a U2 concert in the city itself. After sending a fax to the band's management, he set off with a small film crew to interview them for a documentary he was working on. On July 3, 1993, Carter met Bono backstage at Zooropa Verona.
In 1997, Bono recalled the meeting:
They told us people in [bomb] shelters were playing our music—and other people's music—at deafening volume, to drown out the sounds of shells and mortars overhead. We very nearly made it [the concert] happen in '93, but then things got too dangerous. There was a market bombing, the snipers were [shooting] at everybody, and it was thought it would be unsafe for crowds queuing up to get into the concert.
The market bombing Bono was referring to was the Markale Massacre, where 68 civilians were killed and a further 200 injured. It was obvious to all in the U2 camp that the band should do or say something. Eventually it was decided to use the ZooTV video walls to give the people of Sarajevo a voice, one free of spin or slant or editorial interference – direct access to the U2 audience of 50,000 to 100,000 people per night. Those on screen could talk about whatever they wished to.
The first attempt at this, in Marseilles, France, didn't go well. Instead of native Bosnians, it was Carter on the telephone, and, as an American, his talk of the "situation here" confused and even angered the French crowd. Bologna, Italy, was where the first proper Sarajevo link up occurred with Carter appearing on the video walls to describe the situation in the city, saying that two bombs exploded within the hour and this was happening so near to northern Italy that if he left Sarajevo by plane he could be at the stadium in time for the end of the concert. After this show it was willing native residents of Sarajevo, found by Carter, who came before the camera. In Glasgow, a Bosnian woman spoke to her son who was attending the concert, telling him not to worry as she was alive. At Wembley Stadium, one of the final Sarajevo link-ups, a woman told the audience, "Nobody cares. You're going to let us die. Why not let them get it over with?"
Clearly, the Sarajevo link-ups sat awkwardly amid the irony that comprised the rest of U2's set. This was not what many in the audience would have been expecting to follow the belly dance that accompanied "Mysterious Ways." The link-ups could either energize the band and its audience or dampen the whole mood of the show, depending on what was said by those in Sarajevo: the risk of live, unedited broadcasting was that they were live, unedited broadcasts.
It wasn't long before the music press began to criticize the band. Ironic use of fascist imagery was one thing, but link-ups to people in a war-zone were something else and so many music journalists began to question the broadcasts, damning the link-ups for being inappropriate, trivial, even exploitative. Involvement with U2 made things difficult for Carter in Sarajevo also, some mistakenly thought he was working on behalf of the rich, western rock band, and this made him more isolated from the community.
After 10 shows, the Sarajevo link-ups came to an end. However, the band didn't forget about those in the besieged city. "One" was often dedicated to them and the city began to be mentioned in the lyrics of the "Zooropa" track "Stay."
The legacy of what began at Zooropa Verona lasted with the band throughout the '90s. The same is true for Carter. Partly financed by Bono, Carter's documentary "Miss Sarajevo" was released in the same year as the ceasefire in the city, 1995. About a beauty pageant held in the Sarajevo, where contests paraded wearing banners reading "Please don't let them kill us," it inspired the song of the same name that U2 recorded as Passengers with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti. At the close of that year, Bono and wife Ali enjoyed the New Year's festivities in Sarajevo, with the singer reiterating his promise to play a concert there with U2. Famously, in September 1997, U2 kept that promise. For two hours, the inhabitants of Sarajevo joined together to enjoy the rock 'n' roll concert, the first major event in the city since the Olympics, bringing back the multi-ethnic spirit that existed before the conflict—if only briefly. During its performance, U2 played the song "Miss Sarajevo" as a band for the first time.
Almost exactly 12 years on from the first meeting with Carter at Zooropa Verona, "Miss Sarajevo" returned to the U2 live set in Amsterdam, becoming a tour regular as Vertigo '05 progressed. While its resurrection may have come as surprise, the inclusion of the quiet, questioning "Miss Sarajevo" is entirely fitting, coming as it does after the aggression of "Bullet the Blue Sky" and before the declaration of Human Rights. As the song comes to its conclusion, Bono has been known to change the lyrics to, "Is there a time for human rights?" Though the city is no longer under siege, the song retains its relevance.
In 2006, there are still parts of the world where there is yet no rights answer.
2006.10
We put out that album, "Zooropa," because we were so maddened by this concept of European unity. It seemed meaningless in light of the war in Bosnia, because [the rest of] Europe was just arguing about what to do, and there was fighting between the British, Germans and French about who should do what."—Bono, 1997
"Zooropa," U2's ninth album, arrived on July 5, 1993 and was met with an enthusiastic critical reception. Originally conceived as an EP, the speed of its creation is as remarkable as its contents: like its predecessor, "Achtung Baby," it was a musically daring record that moved the band forward while continuing U2's return to relevance after "Rattle & Hum." And like its predecessor, it was an album very much informed by happenings in Europe at that time. But while the band may have been "maddened" by events in Bosnia, it wasn't until U2 met Bill Carter backstage at Zooropa Verona, two days before the release of "Zooropa," that it began to actively and explicitly raise awareness for those in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, an involvement that would culminate in a concert there in 1997. But before Sarajevo, there was Berlin.
The scenes of Berliners scaling the graffiti-smeared Berlin Wall in November 1989, chipping at it with chisels, felling whole segments with whatever came to hand, were beamed around the world. It was not just the first steps towards reunification of Berlin or Germany that was being witnessed but the reunification of an entire continent—or so was hoped. In reality, Europe entered the final decade of the 20th century with tremors of uncertainty rippling through the Soviet Union and the Balkans. For many, things were going to get far worse before they improved.
U2 came to Berlin in 1990 to begin work on what became "Achtung Baby" at the city's Hansa Studios. Though one of the main motivations for recording there was to capture the city's atmosphere of expectation and fear, it would be fair to say that much of "Achtung Baby's" tone came from the mood within the U2 camp. The Edge was in the process of splitting up with his first wife and there was even talk of U2 going its separate ways. Indeed, the initial sessions for the album were difficult, the band unsure what musical direction to take. Famously, "One" was the turning point in the recording process. A song of compassion and unity, it restored the band members' confidence in themselves and the music they were making.
One of the great misconceptions of this era, though, is that the band had suddenly become experimental. It hadn't. Tinkering with its own rock 'n' roll had been a characteristic of U2 as far back as "The Unforgettable Fire." "Rattle & Hum" may have sounded in places like a pastiche of traditional American music but it was merely a by-product of the band's mixed abilities with the genres it was exploring. Indeed, "Achtung Baby" owes Bowie and the UK music scene of the early '90s as much as "Rattle & Hum" does Dylan and '50s American blues. Though very different, both albums are examples of U2 explicitly incorporating it's current listening into composition. Unfortunately general opinion does the more successful experiments of "Rattle & Hum" a disservice: this period is associated with every wrong U2 are ever accused of; the movie usually exhibit A for any U2-hater's case against the band. While the charges would be too lengthy to list but might include the following words: egotistical, self-important, preachy, pompous and humorless. Therefore it was just as important for U2 to address these accusations as it was for the band to progress musically. The solution U2 dreamed up was ingenious, the true experiment of the era, not only pushing U2 into unexplored territory but rock performance itself. That solution was ZooTV.
Even before a chord was strummed, the ironic tone of ZooTV was set by the stage-dressing. Trabants, the cheap, mass-produced, East German cars, hung suspended, spray-painted in brash colours, messaged with truisms or buzzwords, their headlamps replaced by stage lights. They flanked banks of the television screens that projected words and images and live satellite TV feeds via expensive, specialist technology. The U2 that took the stage was a markedly different beast to the one who wrapped up Lovetown in Rotterdam in 1990. Gone were the cowboy hats and tasselled waistcoats. The Edge now sported a goatee, beanie hat and spangled pants. Larry and Adam looked like cyber-slackers. But the biggest change was with Bono. In his black leather suit and bug-eyed shades, The Fly, Bono's signature alter-ego for the era, looked like he could have taught Jim Morrison a thing or two about rock 'n' roll decadence. Instead of being restricted by the traps of being a rich rock-star with a social conscious, Bono, in the guise of The Fly, embraced the trappings of his position, happily highlighting and flaunting its contradictions. For the encore, Bono would come on stage as the Mirrorball Man, in glimmering silver lame, kissing a mirror. This persona was part Elvis, part TV evangelist and a wholly successful send up of Bono's own supposed messiah complex. If "Achtung Baby" had been the sound of four men chopping down "The Joshua Tree," then the antics of The Fly and Mirrorball Man were like watching late-'80s Bono being sealed inside his own soapbox live on pay-per-view.
Artistically liberated, U2 began to explore the possibilities that these props and masks afforded them:
The show continued to grow and expand beyond the confines of the venue. Bono flicked through satellite TV channels with his own remote control to show world news, soft porn or home shopping. There were live TV links to MTV, phone calls from the stage to the White House or to the local pizza delivery service. We let luck play a part and took our chances as to what might appear from night to night. As new technology became available, it was incorporated into the show. When ZooTV entered the stadiums to become the ZooTV Outside Broadcast, giant projection screens were added. The projection screens became video walls as the Outside Broadcast went to Europe and became Zooropa. Bono's silver-suited preacher mutated into Mr MacPhisto, a demented thespian in gold platform soles who gave European politicians a hard time on the phone.—Willie Williams in "U2 Show" by Diana Scrimgeour
Another key evolution of ZooTV was in its visual content. There had never been a concert experience utilizing such sophisticated technology and it took time for both the band and the artists who contributed to the imagery to realise ZooTV's potential: not only could it embody and satirise satellite television as it had been its original intention but it could make effective comment on any topic. And just as the alter-egos had offered Bono a way out of the straight-jacket of his public perception, so the giant screens began to offer means to make statements without resorting to proclamation. The first real example of it was the new intro to the show used during the Outside Broadcast tour of the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. Footage of the First Gulf War was spliced with that of a George Bush Sr. speech edited to look as though he was rapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You."
The buzz of this leg of the tour gave U2 not only the creative energy to for the "Zooropa" album but plenty of fresh screen ideas for the 1993 European stadium leg of ZooTV. The events of the previous few years in Europe were not short of issues that these ideas could be applied to. Indeed, Europe was a continent undergoing a traumatic realignment of political and geographical boundaries:
The Cold War and the false division of Europe were over. A different, more historically grounded division of Europe was about to open up, I knew. Instead of democratic Western Europe and a Communist Eastern Europe, there would now be Europe and the Balkans. But who cared? I was definitely not where The Story was. It struck me just how far away from The Story, in both time and space, the Balkans were.Robert D. Kaplan from his book "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
Kaplan, an American journalist and author, was correct and Europe did develop this new duality. The member states of the European community had just signed the Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union, an organization designed to bring about closer monetary and political ties for the participant countries. The chief concern of Euro-sceptics, those who opposed the EU, was that it would lead to diminished powers for each individual country, ultimately reducing nations to regions. Eastern Europe, however, had moved in the opposite direction. The reunification of Germany had proved to be an exception. Gorbachev's perestroika had culminated in the collapse of the USSR, its constituent states recognized as independent republics by the close of 1991. This process had been far from easy. As early as 1988 Gorbachev himself had warned of "the dark forces of nationalism" and an unfortunate consequence of the quest for new sovereignty had been the inter-ethnic unrest in Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Yugoslavia, a nation with a freer take on Communism, the conditions and will for change mirrored those of the Soviet Union. The "dark forces" in this Balkan state when they came were particularly ardent and brutal, having simmered for decades. Civil war began in 1991 yet it wasn't until February 1992 that the European Community began to get aid and support to the worst affected state of the former Yugoslavia—Bosnia.
While there had been no direct reference to the Bosnian conflict in the ZooTV show, the rise of fascism, in particular the rise of the neo-Nazis in Central Europe, were targeted by the band. The George Bush "We Will Rock You" rap was replaced by a lengthy collage of film and music that included, amongst other things, images from Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi-propaganda film "Triumph of the Will." As that ended, and where there had been the ZooTV color bars previously, there was now the 12-star blue logo of the European Union, with one star, then other, then all of the stars falling off as "Zoo Station" began. But perhaps the most controversial use of the video walls came during "Bullet the Blue Sky." As there had been throughout the tour, the screens had shown burning crosses but, for European audiences, those crosses would morph into flaming swastikas, as Bono urged, "Don't let it happen again." U2 was literally playing with fire: not only did the band perform this in stadiums that had been used in the 1930s for Hitler rallies but, as an image, the swastika was illegal in Germany.
Around this time, MTV Europe's coverage of U2's new album and tour was seen by American Bill Carter, who at the time was an aid worker with The Serious Road Trip, a volunteer group that prided itself on getting aid to areas that "other agencies could not or would not go." The group was one of the first to bring aid to the former Yugoslavia. After becoming involved with the organisation Carter found himself in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, a city that was soon to be subjected to a terrible siege.
Sarajevo in the '80s was a city of prosperity and development, benefiting from hosting the Olympic Games of 1984. It was also a model for inter-ethnic relations, being home to Orthodox Christian, Catholic and Muslim communities. However, the events of Eastern Europe were to have dire consequences for the city. Nationalism in Yugoslavia had been on the rise since the death of its premier Josip Broz "Marshall" Tito in 1980. Led by Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian Nationalists moved for changes in state structure that would benefit the Serbs. As they stepped up their endeavours so too did the other nationalist parties and tensions began to rise. Fearing Serb domination, both Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Bosnia-Herzegovina embarked on a similar path but before the European Community was able to recognize it as an independent nation, war broke out. Sarajevo was surrounded: in its hills was an army, under Milosevic's order, camped with artillery and other military equipment. Major roads out of the city were blocked off; electricity and water cut off. From there, life in the city began to degenerate and Sarajevo became synonymous with atrocity and desolation.
As well as the peril of sniper fire and mortar bombs, inhabitants would have to scavenge for food if aid supplies couldn't get through. It was a desperate situation and one that the western media did not cover as thoroughly as it could have. After seeing U2 on MTV, Carter had the idea of raising awareness for the people of the city: a U2 concert in the city itself. After sending a fax to the band's management, he set off with a small film crew to interview them for a documentary he was working on. On July 3, 1993, Carter met Bono backstage at Zooropa Verona.
In 1997, Bono recalled the meeting:
They told us people in [bomb] shelters were playing our music—and other people's music—at deafening volume, to drown out the sounds of shells and mortars overhead. We very nearly made it [the concert] happen in '93, but then things got too dangerous. There was a market bombing, the snipers were [shooting] at everybody, and it was thought it would be unsafe for crowds queuing up to get into the concert.
The market bombing Bono was referring to was the Markale Massacre, where 68 civilians were killed and a further 200 injured. It was obvious to all in the U2 camp that the band should do or say something. Eventually it was decided to use the ZooTV video walls to give the people of Sarajevo a voice, one free of spin or slant or editorial interference – direct access to the U2 audience of 50,000 to 100,000 people per night. Those on screen could talk about whatever they wished to.
The first attempt at this, in Marseilles, France, didn't go well. Instead of native Bosnians, it was Carter on the telephone, and, as an American, his talk of the "situation here" confused and even angered the French crowd. Bologna, Italy, was where the first proper Sarajevo link up occurred with Carter appearing on the video walls to describe the situation in the city, saying that two bombs exploded within the hour and this was happening so near to northern Italy that if he left Sarajevo by plane he could be at the stadium in time for the end of the concert. After this show it was willing native residents of Sarajevo, found by Carter, who came before the camera. In Glasgow, a Bosnian woman spoke to her son who was attending the concert, telling him not to worry as she was alive. At Wembley Stadium, one of the final Sarajevo link-ups, a woman told the audience, "Nobody cares. You're going to let us die. Why not let them get it over with?"
Clearly, the Sarajevo link-ups sat awkwardly amid the irony that comprised the rest of U2's set. This was not what many in the audience would have been expecting to follow the belly dance that accompanied "Mysterious Ways." The link-ups could either energize the band and its audience or dampen the whole mood of the show, depending on what was said by those in Sarajevo: the risk of live, unedited broadcasting was that they were live, unedited broadcasts.
It wasn't long before the music press began to criticize the band. Ironic use of fascist imagery was one thing, but link-ups to people in a war-zone were something else and so many music journalists began to question the broadcasts, damning the link-ups for being inappropriate, trivial, even exploitative. Involvement with U2 made things difficult for Carter in Sarajevo also, some mistakenly thought he was working on behalf of the rich, western rock band, and this made him more isolated from the community.
After 10 shows, the Sarajevo link-ups came to an end. However, the band didn't forget about those in the besieged city. "One" was often dedicated to them and the city began to be mentioned in the lyrics of the "Zooropa" track "Stay."
The legacy of what began at Zooropa Verona lasted with the band throughout the '90s. The same is true for Carter. Partly financed by Bono, Carter's documentary "Miss Sarajevo" was released in the same year as the ceasefire in the city, 1995. About a beauty pageant held in the Sarajevo, where contests paraded wearing banners reading "Please don't let them kill us," it inspired the song of the same name that U2 recorded as Passengers with Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti. At the close of that year, Bono and wife Ali enjoyed the New Year's festivities in Sarajevo, with the singer reiterating his promise to play a concert there with U2. Famously, in September 1997, U2 kept that promise. For two hours, the inhabitants of Sarajevo joined together to enjoy the rock 'n' roll concert, the first major event in the city since the Olympics, bringing back the multi-ethnic spirit that existed before the conflict—if only briefly. During its performance, U2 played the song "Miss Sarajevo" as a band for the first time.
Almost exactly 12 years on from the first meeting with Carter at Zooropa Verona, "Miss Sarajevo" returned to the U2 live set in Amsterdam, becoming a tour regular as Vertigo '05 progressed. While its resurrection may have come as surprise, the inclusion of the quiet, questioning "Miss Sarajevo" is entirely fitting, coming as it does after the aggression of "Bullet the Blue Sky" and before the declaration of Human Rights. As the song comes to its conclusion, Bono has been known to change the lyrics to, "Is there a time for human rights?" Though the city is no longer under siege, the song retains its relevance.
In 2006, there are still parts of the world where there is yet no rights answer.
