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Lovetown Tour
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The Lovetown Tour was a concert tour by the Irish rock band U2, which took place in late 1989 and early 1990.
Lovetown Tour was not in support of any album, beginning as it did almost a year after the release of their most recent work Rattle and Hum. It was limited in scope, but did try to reach places that their 1987 Joshua Tree Tour had missed, all the while avoiding the United States entirely.
The tour's opening night was on September 21, 1989 at the Entertainment Centre in Perth, Australia.
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Encyclopedia
The Lovetown Tour was a concert tour by the Irish rock band U2, which took place in late 1989 and early 1990.
Itinerary
The Lovetown Tour was not in support of any album, beginning as it did almost a year after the release of their most recent work Rattle and Hum. It was limited in scope, but did try to reach places that their 1987 Joshua Tree Tour had missed, all the while avoiding the United States entirely.
The tour's opening night was on September 21, 1989 at the Entertainment Centre in Perth, Australia. The first leg took place over the next 10 weeks in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. A brief second leg hit four countries in Europe for four weeks, ending on January 10, 1990 at the Sport Paleis Ahoy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Of the tour's 47 concerts, 23 were played in Australia.
The show
The Lovetown Tour is famed among fans as it had the greatest set list variety of any U2 tour, including the use of six separate songs to open concerts, which is still U2's record amount of concert openers for one tour. The tour featured the most different original U2 songs of any tour in the 1980s, though it did not have as many total different songs as the Joshua Tree Tour, which featured a large number of cover songs.
B. B. King toured with the band and played the first set each night. At the end of U2's set, King and his band joined them for a short encore.
The tour was plagued by troubles with Bono's voice due to both excessive use and illness - he stated in concert that he caught "some pretty psychedelic germs" in Australia and that they were "having their Annual General Meeting" in his throat. These vocal troubles meant three Sydney concerts had to be postponed. Later, severe troubles meant a concert in Amsterdam had to prematurely conclude; two other Amsterdam shows were cancelled and replaced by four shows in Rotterdam, causing the tour to spill over into 1990 instead of ending on New Year's Eve at Dublin's Point Depot as planned. However, when Bono's voice was not troubling him, he had an impressive singing range, with the falsetto later mastered starting to seriously appear, but without sacrificing the powerful depth of his lower singing range.
As with all U2 tours from 1983 on, the stage and lighting design was done by Willie Williams. The tour name, possibly a contraction of the Rattle and Hum song "When Love Comes to Town", was the first not to be named for the band's then-current album; , all of their subsequent tours have also had different names from any album.
"Dream it all up again"
The December 31, 1989, Dublin concert was broadcast on RTE and BBC radio around the world, giving many fans their only taste of the tour; it was widely bootlegged and ultimately officially released in digital form in 2004 as Live from the Point Depot. It was during the December 30 Dublin show the night before, however, that Bono, apparently dissatisfied with the band's stagnation, famously said:
- "I was explaining to people the other night, but I might've got it a bit wrong – this is just the end of something for U2. And that's what we're playing these concerts – and we're throwing a party for ourselves and you. It's no big deal, it's just – we have to go away and ... and dream it all up again."
This foreshadowed the abrupt directional changes the band would take in the 1990s, beginning with Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV Tour.
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