TV review: Bono & the Edge get to Dublin's heart with Dave Letterman
Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman
I was scratching around looking for something to watch when the app on my telly told me I’d like (Disney+). I clicked play in a moment of weakness/desperation.
If I had time to consider, I would have passed, not least because the title is longer than the running time of the show. And that’s well over an hour.
Cramming in three stars and a U2 song into the title suggested that the makers weren’t sure it was going to work.
And the premise sounds awful. Dave Letterman comes to Dublin to hang out with Bono and the Edge, as they prepare for a stripped-down concert of their best-known songs. I thought it was going to be Patrick’s Day crossed with mass.
It wasn’t. Mainly because Bono is far more interesting than we ever gave him credit for and The Edge is like some kind of chilled-out druid, telling us that everything is going to be alright.
I was coming around to Bono after reading his recent autobiography, but this show makes it clear why people outside of Ireland are inclined to listen to him. He’s an optimist. While the rest of us were wallowing in cynicism and chunky jumpers in the 1980s, he put on a cowboy hat and pissed off to America. The pinnacle of this, as he explained to Letterman in a well-appointed mahogany Georgian library in Dublin, was the U2 song, 'Where The Streets Have No Name'.
Bono pointed out that it doesn’t have an explicit message, but in there somewhere is the notion that there is a better world within reach and we should all head there together. No wonder the Yanks loved him — that’s their history in one song.
And now that we’ve shed our cynicism and chunky jumpers, I think we’re ready to praise Bono as we should. There was no waffle here, just an explanation of how a gang of outsiders from the northside of Dublin decided to swim against the tide.
And then we have the songs, performed to a small adoring audience in the Ambassador Cinema in Dublin. These songs should never have been left near a stadium — they connect cleanly when it’s just a singer and bloke with a guitar. Mind you, The Edge can sing Bono off the stage, as he shows here with 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday'.
There is a bit of begorrah, not least the orchestrated sing-along in McDaids pub which looked like it was organised by Fáilte Ireland. But most of this felt right.
Even Letterman, who can be an acquired taste, will grow on you by the end. He is sent out to the Forty Foot swimming spot, where a swimmer tells him that you come out of the water a different person to the one who went in.
The show ends with Dave taking a dip in the Irish Sea — it’s strangely moving. I felt like a different person at the end of this show. I was left with a strange optimism about the future.
