Watch U2 Play ‘Dirty Day’ for First Time In 25 Years
U2 are just days away from wrapping up their Experience + Innocence world tour, but they’re still experimenting with the setlist as they build to the grand finale in Berlin, Germany on November 13th. Friday night at Dublin, Ireland’s 3Arena, they broke out the Zooropa deep cut “Dirty Day,” a tune they hadn’t touched since the final leg of the ZOO TV tour 25 years ago.
Before kicking into the song, Bono told the hometown crowd about the band’s childhood in Northern Dublin and the influence their fathers had on them as teenagers. “U2 was our way of getting out of their shadow,” Bono said. “Our way of telling our fathers, ‘I’m not like you.'” He then showed images of all four dads on the screens. “My father Bob didn’t take me too seriously,” Bono added. “He could see I was doing a good job of that myself. He did give me a lot of advice. I can still hear his voice when I sing.”
The Experience + Innocent setlist stayed relatively static throughout the early legs, but when the show came to Europe for the final push, the band abandoned the mid-show suite of Songs of Innocence tunes in favor of 1990s favorites like “Zoo Station,” “The Fly” and “Stay (Faraway, So Close!).” They haven’t played a single song from The Joshua Tree at any point since they performed the album straight through on a stadium tour last year and figured that material deserved a break.
The tour was originally scheduled to conclude November 11th in Dublin, but Bono’s voice gave out a few songs into a September concert in Berlin and the band are making up that show on Tuesday. Their future plans are completely unknown at the moment, though the Edge has said the group will likely take an extended break.
“There’s been three tours that have been on each other’s heels pretty quickly,” he told Rolling Stone in May. “I would say that we’ll probably take a little bit of a break at the end of this tour and regroup. There’s lots of ideas for the next records, but I think a bit of time off just to listen to music and to really feed our creative instincts is in order.”