According to Variety, U2 has announced a 2027 global stadium tour called "Carnaval De Luz presents: The Greatest Show On Earth," kicking off Feb. 23 in Mexico City with Beck opening the first six Latin America dates, and a subscriber presale that starts before the new record even ships.
A band formed in Dublin in 1976 by four teenagers who thought they had found a new way to play rock and roll has just named its next tour The Greatest Show On Earth. That was the name of an 1894 circus. It was the name of a 1952 Hollywood epic about an 1894 circus. It has been the name of about a dozen television specials that never got syndicated. U2 looked at fifty years of stadium tours, the most overused phrase in the history of live entertainment, and decided what the band needed was more confidence. The circus called. It had already sold.
The press release is better than the title, because Bono's description of the new single is a genuine paragraph: "It's a dare, to ourselves as much as anyone, to try and have the best night of anybody's life. A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of color, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums." "A bit of shaman" is doing work in there. In the Anton Corbijn video for the single, the band is cast as a religious cult, four stoic men wading through black water in a California desert, and Bono's own words describe the album the same way. For once the art department and the PR department agree on the bit, and the bit is that the show is a religion. The stadium is the church, the presale is the tithe, and the front row is the congregation that was told it was chosen.
Then there is the machine. Beck opens the first six dates, which is a sentence about the state of rock that needs no commentary: a fifty-year-old band about to do the greatest show on earth requires a warm-up act, and the warm-up act is a man who has been a bigger artist than all four of them for two decades. The other detail: the subscriber presale opens Monday at 10 a.m., general sale is Oct. 22, and the new record, Carnaval De Luz, does not arrive until Nov. 13. The machine sells the seats before it ships the product. That is not a band announcing a tour. That is a company announcing a product, and the four men are in the ad.
A stadium tour is not a crime. Stadiums are where rock and roll goes to be safe, and U2 has been safe since about 1997. The problem is the name. A show is either the greatest show on earth or it is a show. Naming it the greatest show on earth does not raise the ceiling, it just makes the ceiling a liability. The greatest show on earth does not need an opening act. It does not need a subscriber presale. And it definitely does not need the word "presents" in the title, the way a company announces a commercial break.
YOUR TURN: The greatest show on earth needs a warm-up act. What is the biggest name a tour has carried that turned out smaller than the title?
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