Thanks for being patient with me whilst the page undergoes some changes. Although it might not seem like it at times, there is someone working behind the scenes here and yes, just like you I am also a U2 fan and I never lose sight of that fact and I do try and keep the page relevant, and hopefully it meets with your approval.

Regards all,

Declan

www.u2.com

10:09pm UK, Tuesday April 12, 2011

Technology firms are not doing enough to help the music industry, the manager of U2 has told Sky News, hours after his band smashed a concert tour world record.

Speaking on Jeff Randall Live, Paul McGuinness said that while record sales had not disappeared, there had been little progress in making money from online music sources.

“I really wish those geniuses who bring us Google, Facebook, Amazon and Spotify would get their act together,” he said.

“It’s not the downloading that’s the problem. It’s a bit of ingenuity and generosity that’s required from the people who are making money from the internet.”

Mr McGuinness was speaking after learning that U2′s 360 tour, which began in Barcelona in June 2009, has now become the highest grossing of all time.

U2 had no problem filling huge arenas such as that in Cape Town

A sell-out show at Morumbi Stadium in Sao Paulo on Sunday night helped the band take the record held by the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang tour, which took over £340m in ticket sales between 2005 and 2007.

U2 still have 26 more gigs left to play before their final show in Canada on July 30, and the total ticket sales for the 360 tour are due to be over £430m.

“It’s about having something people all over the world want to see,” Mr McGuinness said.

“It’s a satisfying record to set, but the record that goes alongside is even more significant – the number of people we’re playing to.

“By the end of the tour we’ll have played to seven million people in Europe, North America, South America, South Africa and Australia.”

The U2 manager said the format of the tour, which has a 360-degree stage, plus a high proportion of tickets priced as low as £18, had helped fill stadiums to capacity.

While the figures look staggering, Guardian correspondent Alexandra Topping cautioned that the expense of producing the ambitious shows had to be taken into account.

“It doesn’t come cheap – we’re hearing huge sums for how much this tour is making, but it costs $100m just to put that act on. It’s not all profit,” she said.

http://news.sky.com

Bob Geldof Likens Lady Gaga to Bono, Sting

“Gaga is really interesting. It’s good art. [Gaga is] reflecting an idea of a part of her personality. You create avatars. That is something society can gravitate toward. She is referencing an idea of an idea. It’s only part of the person before she was Mary O’Dwire or whatever the f— [her name is]. Paul Hewson would never be the lead singer of U2 and Gordon Sumner would never be the singer of the Police. You needed to have Bono, and you needed Sting.” – Bob Geldof

Help me out here. Does anyone actually know what Sir Bob is on about. Ok, we’ve always known Bono as Bono and Sting as Sting. But seriously, without their stage names U2 would still exist as would the Police. Em, Bob, there’s that little thing called talent you’ve omitted.

Any thoughts on this one guys?

Op-Ed Guest Columnist

By BONO

Published: January 19, 2011

The Irish are still mesmerized by the mythical place that is America, but in the ’60s our fascination got out of hand. I was not old enough to remember the sacrifices of the great generation who saved Europe in the Second World War, or to quite comprehend what was going on in Vietnam. But what I do remember, and cannot forget, is watching a man walk on the moon in 1969 and thinking here is a nation that finds joy in the impossible.

The Irish saw the Kennedys as our own royal family out on loan to America. A million of them turned out on J.F.K.’s homecoming to see these patrician public servants who, despite their station, had no patience for the status quo. (They also loved that the Kennedys looked more WASP than any “Prod,” our familiar term for Protestant.)

I remember Bobby’s rolled-up sleeves, Jack’s jutted jaw and the message — a call to action — that the world didn’t have to be the way it was. Science and faith had found a perfect rhyme.

In the background, but hardly in the shadows, was Robert Sargent Shriver. A diamond intelligence, too bright to keep in the darkness. He was not Robert or Bob, he was Sarge, and for all the love in him, he knew that love was a tough word. Easy to say, tough to see it through. Love, yes, and peace, too, in no small measure; this was the ’60s but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at him. No long hair in the Shriver house, or rock ’n’ roll. He and his beautiful bride, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, would go to Mass every day — as much an act of rebellion against brutal modernity as it was an act of worship. Love, yes, but love as a brave act, a bold act, requiring toughness and sacrifice.

His faith demanded action, from him, from all of us. For the Word to become flesh, we had to become the eyes, the ears, the hands of a just God. Injustice could, in the words of the old spiritual, “Be Overcome.” Robert Sargent sang, “Make me a channel of your peace,” and became the song.

Make me a channel of your peace:

Where there is hatred let me bring your love.

Where there is injury, your pardon, Lord,

And where there’s doubt, true faith in you.

Oh, Master grant that I may never seek,

So much to be consoled as to console.

To be understood as to understand,

To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Make me a channel of your peace,

Where there’s despair in life, let me bring hope.

Where there is darkness, only light,

And where there’s sadness, ever joy.

The Peace Corps was Jack Kennedy’s creation but embodied Sargent Shriver’s spirit. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty but Sarge led the charge. These, and the Special Olympics, were as dramatic an incarnation of the ideas at the heart of America as the space program.

Robert Sargent Shriver changed the world more than a few times and, I am happy to say, changed my world forever. In the late ’90s, when the Jubilee 2000 campaign — which aimed to cancel the debts that the poorest nations owed to the richest — asked me to help in the United States, I called on the Shriver clan for help and advice. What I got were those things in spades, and a call to arms like a thump in the back.

In the years since, Bobby Shriver — Sarge’s oldest son — and I co-founded three fighting units in the war against global poverty: DATA, ONE and (RED). We may not yet know what it will take to finish the fight and silence suffering in our time, but we are flat out trying to live up to Sarge’s drill.

I have beautiful memories of Bobby and me sitting with his father and mother at the Shrivers’ kitchen table — the same team that gazed over J.F.K.’s shoulder — looking over our paltry attempts at speechifying, prodding and pushing us toward comprehensibility and credibility, a challenge when your son starts hanging round with a bleeding-heart Irish rock star.

Toward the end, when I visited Sarge as a frailer man, I was astonished by his good spirits and good humor. He had the room around him laughing out loud. I thought it a fitting final victory in a life that embodied service and transcended, so often, grave duty, that he had a certain weightlessness about him. Even then, his job nearly done, his light shone undiminished, and brightened us all.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 20, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com