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 The band, led by 57-year-old singer Bono, is
playing the entire record to 2.4 million fans on their 2017
tour, including hits "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't
Found What I'm looking For".
But they started the London show with early songs "Sunday Bloody
Sunday", "New Year's Day", "Bad", and the Martin Luther King Jr-inspired
"Pride (In the Name of Love)", which Bono dedicated to the
"Rainbow people of London" who took part in the annual Pride
LGBT march in the city earlier on Saturday.
"The Joshua Tree" was played in sequence against a backdrop of
video of U.S. landscapes such as Death Valley, and Americans
standing in front of the Stars and the Stripes, shot by Dutch
photographer Anton Corbijn who created the imagery on the
original record.
The group's best-selling album was released in 1987 when Ronald
Reagan was U.S. President and his ideological soul mate Margaret
Thatcher was in power in Britain.
The tracks "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Mothers of the
Disappeared" were inspired by trips Bono made to Nicaragua and
El Salvador, where he saw the impact of U.S. foreign policy,
while "Red Hill Mining Town" was about the impact of the
socially divisive miners' strike in Britain in the 1980s.
Lead guitarist The Edge said in an interview with Rolling Stone
in January that politically "things have kind of come full
circle".
"It just felt like, 'Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a
new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four
years ago'," he told the magazine.
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Bono largely let the music speak for itself on Saturday, although a
character called "Trump" was called a liar by the "good guy cowboy"
in a Western movie-style clip.
"The Joshua Tree", which sold more than 25 million copies, marked
the pinnacle of the band tackling social and political issues
through rock music.
Their next album, "Rattle and Hum", did not match its success
critically or commercially, and the band reinvented themselves in
the 1990s by incorporating electronic and alternative rock into
their sound.
Seven of their later songs, including "Ultraviolet" and "One", were
played as an encore, before Bono invited support act Noel Gallagher
back on stage to sing "Don't Look Back in Anger", a song he wrote
for his band Oasis.
The track became an anthem for Manchester after 22 people were
killed by a suicide bomber in the city in May, and Gallagher also
dedicated it to the victims of further attacks and a devastating
tower block fire in London in June.
U2, Gallagher and thousands of fans united in singing the anthem,
ending a show that proved the enduring relevance and appeal of 1980s
and 1990s rock music.
"The Joshua Tree" tour plays seven other European cities before
returning to the United States in September.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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