Bono's high notes, Edge's iconic guitar made U2's Mumbai concert memorable

It’s been almost a month, and the controversy about including Union Minister Smriti Irani in a gallery of ‘Sheroes’ (that sounds vaguely like an Anglo-Indian biryani outlet) should have died down. It couldn’t have helped either that while Messrs Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen were enthralling a largely middle-aged, cassette-buying-age woowhoo crowd in Mumbai’s outskirts, police were happily, brutally beating up students of Jamia Millia Ismalia in Delhi, unknowingly providing contemporary video feed to ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, the 1983 U2 song commemorating November 21, 1920, when in a clash between Irish protestors and British police and soldiers, 32 people were killed during the Irish War of Independence. And the song with which the band kicked off their first India concert, and ended their ‘2019 Joshua Tree’ world tour.

Which leaves us with the concert and the performance. The first thing that shocked me was Bono’s voice. Looking like Harvey Keitel’s sun-tanned, crocodile farmer brother, the 59-year-old U2 frontman’s voice — whether belting out ‘I Will Follow’ from the 1980 album Boy, or ‘New Year’s Day’ from their 1983 War, or ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ from 1984’s Unforgettable Fire – has remained taut as ever, not dipping a semitone, never mind an octave.

The special lights and backdrops wrapped across the DY Patil Stadium’s makeshift Cinemascope-wide stage were truly immersive. The long road ribboning out in the middle of a vast black and white dusty land and skyscape behind the band playing ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ gave me an old country buzzard-like goosebumps.

But it was Bono not just hitting the high notes in classics like [a real, brassy version of] ‘Red Hill Mining Town’ and ‘In God’s Country’ from their epic 1987 album The Joshua Tree, or ‘Vertigo’ from their 2004 How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and ‘Beautiful Day’ from their 2000 All That You Can’t Leave Behind, that made my otherwise firm mandible drop, but also the sheer range of notes he was hitting and holding.

He was singing ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ — that delirious track from that delirious 1991 album Achtung Baby — like he was riding a bronco bull. The Edge’s trademark git-gittering half-harp, half-itch guitars were the pegs on which Bono and the angel white-haired Clayton wrapped voice and bass respectively, while Mullen kept the beat of a December 15 night.

As an exceedingly pleasant surprise, we found ourselves introduced to Noel Gallagher — with atrocious puns by Bono, who referred to an ‘oasis’ in the desert and a ‘high flyer’, referring to the former Oasis singer-songwriter’s current band Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds — who joined the band on the stage on ‘Desire’, that joyous love song to love from U2’s 1988 Rattle and Hum. Gallagher-bhai, with an acoustic guitar, looked monastic and didn’t do much except join in the harmonies in the chorus. But it was so worth seeing a jhalak of Noel on U2tide a week before Christmas in Mumbai.

U2’s Mumbai concert was a glittering, senses-dripping tutorial of why a legendary band is a legend. My high point? ‘Bullet in Blue Sky’, performed like a dirge as well as a reverb-ed, feedback-ed warning before a Beautiful People in troubled times.