Video: U2 Dust Off ‘Love Rescue Me’ After Twenty Years

U2, who wrapped up the Australia and New Zealand leg of their 360 tour yesterday, gave fans in Perth and Sydney a special treat on the band’s last few dates: a mini set of songs from 1988’s Rattle and Hum that included the first live version of “Love Rescue Me” since January 1990. Bono wrote the song in the late Eighties while staying in the Beverly Hills mansion where, strangely, the Menendez brothers would later kill their parents. The song apparently came to him in a dream, with Bob Dylan singing it. When Bono met Dylan shortly afterward, he asked Dylan if it was one of his songs. “No,” Dylan said. “But maybe it could be.” They wound up finishing the track together, and Dylan even sang background vocals.

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The version played in Sydney was clearly under-rehearsed. “It was a broken version,” Bono wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. “But it made a strong case for continuing with our new practice of rehearsing songs in real time … Perhaps with a show of the scale of 360 you actually have to make yourself vulnerable, or else it will get too grand.” Bono also included snippets of INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” and “Need You Tonight” in the show as a tribute to the late Michael Hutchence, an Australia native and close friend of the U2 frontman.

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