U2‘s Bono and The Edge have become the latest stars to perform for NPR‘s Tiny Desk concert series – check out their concert below.
The pair performed stripped down versions of four of their hits: ‘Beautiful Day’, ‘In A Little While’, ‘Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ and ‘Walk On’. They were accompanied by the Duke Ellington School of the Arts choir.
Before playing ‘In A Little While’, The Edge joked: “All of these years trying to avoid a desk job. I’m getting into it.”
“This song’s actually a song about friendship sort of. Edge and myself were discussing earlier how we’ve gotten a little maybe more intolerant as we’ve gotten older of our friends. I’ve made the mistake of putting my friends into categories,” Bono added.
“You should never do this. The really difficult ones, you have to be careful what you say around them kind of.”
Meanwhile, the Irish duo dedicated ‘Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ to the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, a longtime friend of the group.
Yesterday (March 17) U2 released ‘Songs Of Surrender’, a collection of reimagined versions of 40 of the group’s hits.
In a three-star review of ‘Songs Of Surrender’, NME wrote: “Thankfully, ‘Songs Of Surrender’ isn’t quite the disaster it initially threatened to be. Sure, some of the Irish four-piece’s biggest songs (‘Pride’, ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, ‘The Fly’) have been stripped of their epic brilliance, but a number of U2’s early tracks and deep cuts have been thoughtfully reworked here through older and wiser eyes.
“There is disappointment that a number of U2’s big-hitters don’t translate well on ‘Stories For Surrender’, but this revision hasn’t been a totally fruitless endeavour: you just have to dig a little bit deeper to find the reimagined material that’s truly worth savouring.”
U2 also appeared in BBC Radio 2’s Piano Room this week where they performed orchestral versions of ‘Vertigo’, ‘One’ and a cover of ABBA‘s ‘S.O.S’.
