Sweat
'I want to see them sweat', I said, talking on the mobile, queuing up for U2 in Cologne yesterday.
We had been texting each other:
'U R 2 OLD 2 B QN 4 U2, TRYIN 2 GET INTO D HEART?'
I was. Queued up from 10 AM till 6 PM to get that front row spot. The area around U2's stage is secluded, heartshaped, and only the first 340 people get in.
I'm bored, so I ring. He says: 'I've never understood why people want to see a band up close, I always stay in the back, even when I was young.'
We got in. Myself and three friends, U2 fans for ever, friends for life. We all met through a U2 magazine we used to do, and then our lives entwined. We're too old for it. Our bones and muscles ache from sitting on the stoney floor, it takes us days to recover. But we can't do this any differently. It's up close, or not at all. We get off on it. The band gets off on it.
'I've seen them sweat,' he says and I go: 'but you see them all the bloody time! We only get them once every four, five years or so.'
Last night, after a couple of minutes of disorientation, thinking 'How am I gonna get into this? I don't fancy Bono, what's my focus here?' I proceeded to lose myself in the music and then completely went off my head. U2 say 'elevation', I call it 'lift off'. When a band and an audience merge and become something greater than the sum of their parts.
'Have a good one!' he says.
We did. I don't know how many shows we've seen, the four of us together. I think I'm up to 23, and P's seen 50+. But unlike a lot of 'die hard' fans we can still lose ourselves. We don't complain. We don't moan about what songs they play. We just go off our heads and afterwards we thrive on the adrenaline and sing songs and crack jokes and ENJOY. The whole thing sometimes is more about us, than it is about U2.
At the end of the show, I watched Bono shake a drop of sweat of his finger, with which he was about to strum his guitar to play 'One'. It fell to the ground, slowly, as if in slow motion.
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