Bono and The Edge have been talking to Billboard magazine about Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, their much-delayed $60 million Broadway musical which finally premieres on Sunday.
“Easier than we ever could have imagined, harder than we ever thought,” the former reflects. “I mean, easier in the sense that the music came to us effortlessly. Dreaming up the show, the scale of it, the flying sequence, the pop art opera that it is – that was all pure joy. What we didn’t realise was how difficult it is to stage this stuff, both technically and financially.”
Adds The Edge: "We would always defer to the needs of the story and characters. It was a fun project and it was in that spirit of fun and just letting your imagination go off that a lot of this stuff came together. As much as we've used our experiences with U2 to inform the way that we approach writing for this, we think that the opposite will happen, and when we come back to U2 Land, it'll be with a certain knowledge and sense of new thoughts and new ideas."
Meanwhile, U2 collectors will want to get their paws on the three-track Wide Awake In Europe EP that’s being released on Friday in support of American Record Store Day. Featuring ‘Mercy’, ‘Moment Of Surrender’ and ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’, it’s limited to 5,000 vinyl copies, a few of which are expected to wing their way to Ireland and the UK.