By Clare BruceTuesday 12 May 2015MusicReading Time: 3 minutes
A video of U2 treating New York subway commuters to a surprise performance last week, has gone viral on YouTube.
The rock music greats perform undercover at first, disguising themselves as local street buskers, with late night show host Jimmy Fallon in disguise as their MC.
After performing half of All I Want Is You, the band and Fallon tear off their disguises and Bono and co break into a rendition of Desire, as the gathering crowd erupts into cheering and applause. A sea of phone cameras emerge as onlookers take up-close-and-personal videos and selfies with Bono.
The performance was part of U2’s publicity for their upcoming Innocence + Experience tour. They had been scheduled to perform on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show in November last year but the appearance was cancelled when Bono had a cycling accident at New York’s Central Park, seriously injuring his face and arm.
He described the incident on The Tonight Show in the video below.
Bono has said on his “A TO Z OF 2014” blog post, that he may not be able to play guitar again.
However he writes about incident with humour and downplays it as a somewhat first-world problem, calling it “a massive injury I can’t blame on anyone but myself, mainly because I blanked out on impact and have no memory of how I ended up in New York Presbyterian with my humerus bone sticking through my leather jacket. Very punk rock as injuries go.
“As I write this, it is not clear that I will ever play guitar again. The band have reminded me that neither they nor Western civilization are depending on this. I personally would very much miss fingering the frets of my green Irish falcon or my (RED) Gretsch. Just for the pleasure, aside from writing tunes. But then does the Edge, or Jimmy Page, or any guitarist you know have a titanium elbow, as I do now?”
Bono Reminds Fans: ‘J Is For Jesus’
In the same blog post, which consists of an ‘A to Z’ report on the highlights of his year, Bono declares that “J Is For Jesus” and reminds fans of his Christian faith. The Irish rock star was involved in another ‘first-world’ style, but far more life threatening incident also in November last year. His private Learjet’s rear door fell off en-route from Dublin to Berlin, according to The Daily Mail, while Bono was on the way to meet Germany’s development minister Gerd Mueller to discuss overseas aid projects.
Reports say that when the flight reached the German coast, a large piece of the tailgate of the plane became detached and Bono and his crew members’ luggage fell out, 8000 feet above ground level. The Daily Mail says that according to a source close to the singer, the crew heard a thud an hour into the flight but were unaffected in the pressurised cabin, and didn’t realise what had happened until they landed.
“He was extremely lucky, the plane could have gone down,” the source said.