READING BETWEEN THE LINES

The weekend began agreeably enough, with an amble down through Herbert Park to the RDS for the penultimate ZOOROPA presentation. A festive atmosphere prevailed in Dublin 4. The sweet smell of barbecue smoke hung in the air. Out of town cars were tidily parked, thanks to the vigilance of the local cappies. Only the unwary were at risk from human detritus on the pavements. There was a lot of smiling, and very little of the cider-fuelled aggression seen around Croke Park on U2's last visit there. The moon was on the rise. Hunky hunky dory.

It was party time all weekend, especially in the bedsit bohemias that ring the embassy and barrister belt on the city side. Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Leeson Street, Baggot Street and Sandymount were alight, as residents barbecued and listened to the ground shaking, with their teevee sets in the gardens, madly fooling with the remote controls to replicate the arena experience . . .

VASTNESS

You'll read real reviews elsewhere, I'm sure. Personally, I was impressed. The balance between the various elements seemed right: there was challenge there for those who wanted to be challenged, but there was also the band's wonderful, always-exhilarating surge.

Hype might have led one to expect a more claustrophobic televisual experience, what with all this talk of technology and cyberspace and all. But not outdoors. The very vastness of the skies defies claustrophobia. Instead we had a giant set, which the band, as seen from the slightly detaching perspective of the stand, inhabited with great comfort.

Others may disagree: I have met punters who were at the back, for whom the screen and dodgy sound were the dominant factors. It depends on your angle. I also thought that they were aware of the irony of juxtaposing an anti-fascist message with a mass spectacle, and a compliant crowd.

Incidentally, on the subject of irony, I have always assumed that U2's espousal was rooted in their experience of America, a land where there is great comedy and very many funny people, but where there is virtually no sense of irony, particularly on the scale found in Ireland.

You know the way. An American friend says something really innocent and unwise.

"Brilliant", you reply sarcastically ...

What does s/he say in return?

"Thanks", that's what.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the band's flight from sincerity and seriousness, their move to Europe, seems to me to be the natural reaction of four intelligent and good-humoured men to being treated like gods.

And make no mistake about it, in person and in private, the members of U2 are very human. They may be very shrewd and careful about their money and their merchandising, but they are also very likeable.

Bono, who draws a lot of the flak over postures, is both a very serious and a very funny person. One can be both, and he is. Very very Irish, and, like a lot of Irish people, he has an irresistible urge to pull the legs of the gullible. Well-read, well-versed, inquisitive. Good company.

But how do you converge these aspects of a collective identity?

On a giant stage, in front of a giant crowd, the complex and the personal are obliterated and the simplistic and the emblematic are exaggerated. The scale is mythic. But myths conceal extraordinary levels of complexity.

Put it this way: how can you bring the crowd into your personal and collegial sense of humour, when every aspect of the experience that you and they are undergoing shrinks the personal, undermines the questioner and promotes acquiescence in the very vastness . . .

One answer is to elevate the joking (and how very Irish to have thousands of puns and wordplays flashing up on the screens) to the level of spectacle. Another is to establish a small busking stage in the middle of the crowd and get as close to the Dandelion Market as a very big band can get. Another is to invent characters to play out your subversions on stage, to separate your private and public in the way an actor can.

It is a tough tightrope to walk, and it can't always work. I don't envy their troubles in wrestling with expectations and phenomenon-hungry media. But from where I was watching, the boys done well.

IDIOCIES

Part of their problem, of course, is that the media through which the message is massaged is preoccupied with the ephemeral and the transient. That's not particularly a criticism. The deadline is an absolute.

But the ambitions of the national media to be taken seriously on the subject of U2 were vigourously undermined by a series of faux-pas and idiocies over the weekend.

There was Barry Lang's appalling blunder on 2FM, when he commented on the opening of Zooropa, telling the listeners that there had been some controversy over U2's use of Lennie Rosenthal's film . . .

Jeyses Fluid! Ronnie Rosenthal is an Israeli soccer player. I'm sure there's a Lennie among his extended family. I'm equally sure that he's Jewish.

Leni Riefenstahl, on the other hand, was a German film maker. A great one too, and a pioneer of methods that are still in use today. The controversy arises from her close association with Adolf Hitler, among other Nazis, and the Aryan overtones of much of her work. Not a Rosenthal, in other words!

Throughout, one got a sense that many commentators came to U2 with the script already written. And they didn't particularly bother to look or listen to hear if it had been re-arranged.

One also feels that there is a peculiar and not very attractive begrudgery involved: many of those who are most cynical and critical of U2 are also those who feel most affronted if their arses aren't kissed by the band or their management.

FAWNING

The most unpleasant example of peevish scurrility was written by a Barry Egan in the Sunday Independent.

I don't know this gent. I won't rush to either. It was a bitter diatribe, telling the band they were boring and listless and surrounded by fawning sycophants, pouring scorn on the entourage angle and slagging off the difficulties of getting a backstage pass and an invitation to the "strictly-no-plebs" party afterwards.

Well, guess who wasn't on the guest list!! Had he been, I doubt that we'd have been treated to this spleen. Not by the man who could write such a fawning feature of Tristan Gribbin (!?!?) in the same issue. No way.

But that seems par for the course for the Sunday Independent. It was the first copy I'd read in a year, and will be the last.

Actually, I found I'd already read most of the interesting articles in The Observer. In general, pieces like John Sweeney's on Bosnia or Patrick Barclay's interview with Swiss football manager Roy Hodgson, are credited. The William Cash piece on British call-girls in Hollywood is used `courtesy of The Spectator'.

No such favours for The Observer editor who scripted their profile of Michael Jackson, though. Whole chunks of it were lifted verbatim into an article featuring the by-line and photograph of one Orla Healy.

I counted six separate chunks, artfully rearranged amongst other stuff. And no attribution of source. The casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that Ms Healy had written the whole thing herself.

It is possible, of course. Or perhaps The Observer editor ripped her off. But I have my doubts. Very dodgy practice, very dodgy indeed. Quite how these people expect to be treated seriously by U2, or anyone else, is beyond me. The media!!

No, a far better appreciation of what went on in Cork and Dublin the week before last, was to be had from Tony Clayton-Lea in the Sunday Tribune, or Ben Thompson in the Independent on Sunday, two intelligent and thoughtful writers who took time out to inform themselves first hand and to reach their own conclusions.

Which were, on the whole, positive.

Weekends are part of what we are, and Sunday papers are part of the weekend. But a little discrimination helps. Like knowing which paper to use to light the barbecue.