POPMART Leg 4: 1998, South America

Edmonton.  Show day.

It’s a commute day today – a round-trip from Vancouver to Edmonton with a show  – which always makes for a long old day, with a few police escorts thrown in.  The band wanted to sound check as there are still some new elements that we’re working on, so it was an early start and a late finish.

Having made it to the venue, I was in the dressing room for my usual ‘director's happy hour’ and, not having seen him for a couple of days, Bono was telling me what he’d been up to. Three things came up in conversation.  The first was his telling me a story of how he’d been hitchhiking in West Vancouver and was picked up by a woman and her partner who turned out to be a well-known ice hockey player.  Next he asked if I had seen the UFO that had been hovering above the gig during the show at the previous venue, before rounding off the conversation by asking if I thought it would possible to make a musical segue between Zooropa and City of Blinding Lights using the theme tune to the Tellytubbies.

I sat there wondering if I’d fallen through a hole in reality but, out of curiosity, pulled up some Tellytubbies on YouTube. The Edge had arrived by this time and the pair of them sat watching the Tellytubbies romping through TellytubbyLand, occasionally muttering comments like 'this is fantastic'.  Deciding that the likelihood of my having disappeared down a rabbit-hole appeared to be increasing by the minute, I left them to it and went to have my tea.

Curiously, it turned out that the majority of the events described in the above conversation were solidly based in fact. This hockey player did exist and was currently in the building and there had, apparently, been some LED-illuminated radio-controlled blimp-device floating about whilst the show was happening in Winnipeg.  On the strength of these two revelations I decided to just go with the Tellytubbies thing and got editing forthwith.

It was another great show and happily a very great deal warmer an evening than we’ve had of late.  Also, (and this is just an observation with no disrespect implied), the Edmonton audience seemed to be united in a smorgasbord of, shall we say, ‘unique’ styles of dancing.  I can only assume that arhythmic jazz is very popular here. It was quite a fascinating study, though Ethan had to look away as it was making it hard for him to hit his lighting cues.

Runner back to Vancouver.