Salt Lake City.  Show day.

Today turned into a bit of a slog maybe because it was a little tough to come back to reality after yesterday’s mini-vacation.  My morning was consumed by Glastonbury correspondence.  We go to play this festival one month from today so it is time to get into the details.  Regular readers will know that U2 has hardly been a festival regular over the years so it will be challenging to find a way of marrying the precision and quality of their world with the turn-up-and-do-it mentality of a festival.  Add to this the fact of our commuting to Glastonbury from the U.S. and you’ll appreciate that there’s a lot to sort out.  Oh, and it all goes out on live television too, so no pressure.  Despite all of this, it is a show that I am looking forward to more than I can say.  I’ve done Glastonbury a couple of times with R.E.M. so know the lie of the land and much as you have to let go of a lot of things in order to get through it without shredding your mind, it is a unique and fantastic show to play.
 
On arrival at the stadium I spotted a very familiar object standing out front - the Olympic arch from the Salt Lake winter Olympics of a few years back.  It’s a  remarkable piece of engineering – a solid half-disc that stands upright, then breaks apart and folds into itself to leave the empty arch.  I know it because it was designed by Chuck Hoberman in NY, who is also the conceptual godfather of the U2360 expanding video screen.  Realising  this  I spent a while hiking about with a camera to find the best vantage point to capture them both.  Two very clever pieces of over-scale kinetic engineering, standing making eyes at each other.

The band party eventually arrived from their various scattered locations, some on a day-trip from L.A. where Spiderman things are happening.  They all jetted back there after the show but my team and I opted for another night in Salt Lake City before heading to Canada tomorrow.