U2MoLog – The blog for U2MoL

I had some problems with my web hotel during July and August (2009), if you sent a contribution during that time using the contact forms, then I probably have not received it and would like to recommend you to try to send it again.

This was out of my control, but I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. It took some time before I realised there was a problem but it as corrected as soon I notified the web hotel.

It is a bit hard, but at the same time easy, to state that I am disappointed with U2. I am disappointed with their last three albums and the last 360° tour.

Their last album, No Line on the Horizon, contained energy and some quite rocky tunes, but where were the spark that made you want to change to world after listening? I’m sorry, but No Line on the Horizon will be the last U2 album I buy and I doubt that I will listen to it any more then the twenty-odd times I’ve listened to it so far. The same goes for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but not as much for All that you can’t leave behind as the latter has grown since it was released. But it takes months between each listening.

As for the tour, lets just say that everything was against a good experience. I attended the 31^st August concert in Gothenburg and the high wind prevented quite a bit of the party it could become, but that is no excuse because I also attended the 1993 Zooropa concert in Stockholm and then it was raining without anyone really noticing. I’ve read a review that stated that the second concert in Gothenburg where pure magic, and I don’t doubt it, but I wasn’t there and I doubt that my impressions would have changed. I was standing in the inner circle, the one inside the cat walk, slightly to the right of The Edge, and something that struck me was that people around me was standing most of the time. There where very little singing and jumping.

There where a group of younger fans that really enjoyed With or Without You and some of the other songs but it felt like I was the only one of about 30 that stood closest to me that actually sang during Ultra Violet (Light my Way). I can understand if most haven’t listened to more then the last three albums and the Best of, but Achtung Baby is one of their more iconic albums and more then that should know about Ultra Violet, IMHO. Especially in the inner circle!

Or am I just being old?

When it came to U2′s performance it was without the igniting spark more or less throughout. The first three songs, all from No Line on the Horizon, all proved that the new tracks are not arena rock, they cannot ignite tens of thousands of people.

I know that one bad concert shouldn’t make me shun the band, but it was the last drop. I am, as I said above, disappointed with the last three albums and this didn’t help. If nothing changes very soon, then this concert will be the last concert with U2 and I won’t buy the next album.

But what makes this of U2MoL? Well, U2MoL is simply too famous to kill off – I get about 800 page visits per day, this is not the same as unique visitors as one single visitor might theoretically read one page 800 times, and it has been around for far too long time. It will turn fifteen years this autumn! So I will continue to maintain it for the foreseeable future…

Ever since U2MoL went live during the autumn of ’94 has the main and only way of contributing to the U2MoL been through email.

This has now changed.

I have had a plan to add a contribution form for quite some years but it was not until I moved the website from my ISP to a web hotel that I had the option of using PHP and when I moved to my own domain in 2007 the planning could take off. I’ve had quite some difficulties to decide how to set it up, I am, among other things, paranoid when it comes to spam bots and contact forms.

After having wrestled these issues for about a year and learned some PHP I can now announce that the contact form has now gone live! You can either go to the form and enter name, email (please note that there are two fields for email, one for each side of the @-sign — I hope this will confuse a spam bot or two but not put up a hassle for human contributors), song and the contribution. You can also use the links to the right on each song’s page and the song field will be filled in for you.

Did I mention I am paranoid when it comes to spam bots? I’ve added a question you have to answer correctly to make sure the contribution is sent to me — it is still sent as an email to me but some of the rules that people historically gets wrong are taken care of automatically (i.e. subject and credit line). I hope the question is not hard to answer, anyone that knows a bit about U2 should be able to answer the questions without having to look them up. I hope new fans that doesn’t know much about U2 isn’t put off, but I’ve supplied my email address as well in case something goes wrong. If you have some issues or comments with the new contact form, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Neither the song’s title nor the answer to the question needs to be written literally, the song’s name is not parsed by the form and case is not important in the answer, so if the answer is New York then ”new york”, ”New York” and ” neW yoRK ” will all be accepted — but not ”London” or ”newyork”.