"U2" at the End of the World

by Bill Flanagan (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.37

  U2 at the end of the world is the strange, intimate, and very funny story of the biggest rock band's biggest tour, a two-year extravaganza that took U2 around the planet and dropped them at a cultural intersection where the most powerful people in art, politics, film, fashion, business and rock & roll all throw their arms around each other and pose for photographs. Here is U2 conferring with Bill Clinton and Bill Burroughs, recording with Frank Sinatra and Sinead O'Connor, partying with Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington, counselling Axl Rose and Eddie Vedder, philosophising with Salman Rushdie and Wim Wanders, jamming with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, collaborating with William Gibson and Mel Gibson. Here is U2 trying to get a Red Cross flight into Sarajevo, visiting Tokyo strip clubs, joining a Greenpeace action on the Irish Sea, being mobbed in Mexico, bar-hopping in Australia, making movie deals in Hollywood, attacking neo-Nazis in Berlin, and attending the inauguration of the US President. Here is U2 at home writing songs, in the studio recording, and on the set making movies. Here is the most honest portrait ever of the most popular rock band of the 1980s and 1990s, by the author to whom U2 have given complete access with no restrictions or controls. And here is a story about a strange moment at the end of the twentieth century when all the old worlds - cultural, political, technological were disappearing and no-one knew what the new world would be, a moment when heroes, con men and saints were thrown together in a global celebrity culture that made no distinction between the trivial and the profound. Here is how the end of history looks from inside the private jet of the biggest rock group on the planet. Here is U2 at the end of the world.