U2 Between Hamlet and Lear

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Musicians who have stormed up the charts often face the dilemma of the DSA – the Difficult Second Album.

Just as New Labour knew they could no longer play their 1997 campaign anthem Things Can Only get Better in 2001, artists risk being thrown off their pedestal unless they can dream up another album with the power to enthral.

This Saturday, thousands of U2 fans will cram into the Millennium Stadium to watch an Irish quartet wrestle with just as mighty a challenge; can a rock band enter middle age without becoming a pastiche of their younger selves?

Lyricist Bono has regularly spoken of his admiration for filmmakers and novelists who produce great work late in life. Where is pop’s Martin Scorsese?

Are the themes of fatherhood, ageing and other adult experiences not as valid inspiration for a three-minute song as the agonies of an adolescent at a Saturday night disco?

The difficulty is that rock music is about much more than writing poetry.
Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet, wrote:

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Poets and novelists spend their lives working in the dark, just as grandfather directors stay behind the lens as actors are illuminated.

But musicians are both creators and performers. They need to stand on a stage where light does cascade and fuse lyrical insight with the athleticism and theatricality of showmanship.

Plenty of young rock stars have bared youthful indecision with the poignancy and power of neo-Hamlets, but too many have burned out long before they have had the chance to play Lear.

As a mid-career band, U2 are in a position to do neither. But if they look at their own traumatic second album they will find the tensions which have sustained their career this far and can guarantee a relevance in the future.

The album October is the sound of a band in which three members were deeply engaged in charismatic Christianity and wrestling with the question of how the demands of faith, the desire for fame, and the love of music could be reconciled.

With the honesty of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, this wrestling – a potent display of joy and fury – continued over subsequent albums.

This was not religious art as kitsch propaganda, but it was an engagement with some of life’s deepest questions which chimed with the experiences of a colossal audience.

Just as politicians on Labour’s left counsel that the only way to renew the party is not by aping the competition but by returning to core values in the current day, U2 do not need to pretend to be the Killers or Coldplay.

Instead, they should grow old in a confident pursuit of grace. And under the aurora glow of stadium lights, they might paint that masterpiece.