Who needs bathrooms? ([email protected])
Sun, 06 Sep 1998 10:09:55 -0600
Under this, theres a row of different rectangles which are yellow, dark
blue, orange, light blue, pink, and white.
below, there's the following text in blue on the grey background:
During the 12 month period on the road, U2 performed over 100 shows,
visited 80 cities and were seen by an incredible 4 million people.
U2 were named 'Best Live band' at the most recent MTV Europe Awards.
The current album 'Pop' reached No. 1 in 28 countries.
PopMart is the first video release from U2 in over 4 years.
Over 75 million audio sales worldwide.
and on the bottom of the page, there's the POLYGRAM VIDEO logo.
This is all I can tell about the artwork (I assume that the artwork
will be very similar to this press info sheet). If I find someone
who can scan it for me, I will make this available to everyone on
Wire.
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>From Oli G:
I called my connection at PolyGram Switzerland today to get
some details about the Mexico video and the "Best Of" album. He is
responsible for all Video and DVD releases and their promotion.
He faxed me the tracklist and told me the rest on the phone. Please do
not mention the information written above in your U2 news page, as he
asked that it wouldn't be known who exactly leaked the info. I just
wrote it so that you would know that my source is reliable. Here we go:
The official tracklist of the video is:
1. Mofo
2. I will follow
3. Gone
4. Even better than the real thing
5. Last night on Earth
6. Until the end of the world
7. New Year's Day
8. Pride (in the name of love)
9. I still haven't found what I'm looking for
10. All I want is you
11. Staring at the sun
12. Sunday bloody Sunday
13. Bullet the blue sky
14. Please
15. Where the streets have no name
16. Discotheque
17. If you wear that velvet dress
18. With or without you
19. Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me
20. Mysterious ways
21. One
22. Wake up dead man
NOTE: there's no mention of Pop Muzik and the Lemon remix, but it
wouldn't make sense if they had cut them out. This official tracklist
probably only lists songs that are actually performed live by U2.
AND: Desire/La Bamba is left out.
The new official release date for EUROPE is November 2nd 1998.
The artwork is not finished yet.
On the fax that I got from Polygram, the title is:
"U2 PopMart - Live From Mexico"
I also got a confirmation that a "Best Of" album will be released
before the end of the year, but no release date has been set yet. The
tracklist and the title have not been decided yet, but there
will NOT be any new tracks.
(Prarit's note: I checked with one of my sources at PM, and they
told me that U2 will release a Greatest Hits this year. However,
as Oli says in his email to me, no date has been set. The
Hits package WILL NOT contain any new tracks/songs :(. )
------------
Negativeland's CD problems result in about-face by RIAA.
In a stunning turn of events, the RIAA has issued a statement indicating a relaxing
of their policy on "fair-use" of samples. Part of the release follows:
"Unfortunately, Negativland, and many of you, believe that our CD Plant Good
Business Practices -- formalized earlier this year into specific guidelines for CD
plants to recognize pirated product -- has had the unintended effect of prejudicing
the group's ability to get their album pressed."
"As an organization that has worked tirelessly to protect freedom of expression,
we are gravely concerned about this perception. Our objective in issuing the CD
Plant Guidelines has been to stop piracy, not artistic expression. Accordingly, the
RIAA has amended its CD Plant Guidelines in response to your concerns."
Read the full story at:
http://www.addict.com/MNOTW/lofi/
------------
Headline: Back catalogue keeps the wolf from U2's door
from the Sunday Independent, August 9, 1998
Intro: Recent reports claim U2 are in the financial mire. Stephen Dodd
takes a look at U2's bank balance
There are those who take Bono's boys very seriously indeed. On the
Internet, where U2 sites are predictably legion, superfan Michael Reiter
painstakingly pursues a Quixotic mission: each concert performance, each U2
song and breathy utterance, is transcribed and made public for all to read.
"No one would be questioning my my motives if I were encouraging serious
study of the work of Brahms, Robert Johnson - or even Bob Dylan," asserts
Reiter, justifying an endeavour that appears to fall somewhere in the
thorny no man's land between academic study and a wantonly wasted life.
In its quirky thoroughness, though, Reiter's Herculean labour of love does
perform one invaluable service for those who are outside the enthusiastic
confines of the U2 Zoo. His carefully detailed archive reveals that on
December 12 last year, in front of a 30,000 crowd in the Kingdome in
Seattle, Bono issued his most open financial statement yet.
U2, ever tight-lipped about their earnings, are perhaps most infamous for
the Edge's idea of financial disclosure, when he told a reporter from the
New Musical Express: "It's none of your f***ing business." Last year in
Seattle, however, Bono seems to have been in a more confessional mood.
"Thank you for paying for PopMart," Bono called to the crowd halfway
through the set. "I'm happy to be in this city and if we're through here
next time, I think it'll be very different. I don't think we'll ever be
able to afford to do this again."
Will there be no more walls of video screens; no more towering stage sets
and gaudy McDonald's arches? Are U2 now too skint to rock?
Just a few weeks ago, a London-based newspaper quoted an unnamed source
close to the band as saying: "They're not as rich as they might be -- if
you look back at their earnings over the past 20 years and ask what they
have to show for being the world's leading band, you have to conclude that
they have nice houses and that is about it."
For all such dramatic but anonymous comment, reports of U2's financial
situation, most likely spinning out of a claimed shake-up of their
management structure, appear to be overstated. The band has lost money in
non-music investments, but a series of extra-curricular disasters in the
leisure and property investment games has not really done that much to eat
into the bank balance.
Money, for rock and rollers, comes from three separate areas -- the sale of
tours, of tunes, and t-shirts. And U2 have repeatedly proved themselves to
be masters of all three.
In the business U2 know best -- packing punters into stadia to hear
anthemic rock -- touring has produced impressive figures. The Zoo TV tour
was the fourth highest grossing live act ever in America, and the Joshua
Tree concert tour of some 11 years ago took the all-time 13th spot. The
band also notched up the top yearly takings in 1992.
Wealth, of course, is relative, and the intriguing issue surrounding U2 is
not their present financial well-being, but their future expectations. The
British rock magazine Q recently listed U2, with manager Paul McGuinness
included in a five-way split, in seventh place in its list of rock's
wealthiest earners (Paul McCartney topped the charts).
The magazine, totting up from estimates based on sales and tours, arrived
at a personal fortune of 90 million pounds per band member. Album sales,
not property deals, have remained U2's most faithful money-spinner, and it
is in this area, rather than in the quick-fix world of the big investor,
that U2's fortunes will rise or fall.
"I think only a fool would write them off," says Q magazine's editor, David
Davies. "They're not on their uppers, I would have thought. Sure, the POP
album was probably a disappointment in tersm of sales but I also think that
it meant U2 are able to continue as a contemporary act. They did
successfully show they were a band that was of its time, even at the
possible expense of alienating some of their original audience."
What David Davies says suggests U2 are in a period of artistic and
commercial transition, though not so much eschewing their image as stadium
rockers as fussing it with a new credibility. Dance music, perhaps against
the odds, has dominated pop in recent years, and while bands such as The
Verve and Radiohead are undoubtedly toppling U2 and REM from their
long-running domination of credibly articulate rock music, the Irish band
has opted to side-step the competition and take on the new genres.
"I think POP probably did switch on a new generation of fans," says David
Davies. "I think all those Paul Oakenfold remixes that were hits were
probably quite canny."
Money, of course, has ever been an uneasy subject, and has sometimes
appeared to be almost an embarassment for a band of professed ethical
leanings. Bono talked in 1992 about the donations U2 make to charity, and
about the decision to keep their finances hidden from prying eyes.
"Both we keep secret," said the singer, "and while that doesn't absolve us
from all the guilt of having a lot of money in a society that doesn't have
much, at least it makes us feel we're doing somethign worthwhile with that
money."
Cash is the allure that pulls musicians into rock music, bu inevitably
serves as the stain that blackens early ethical protestations. The notion
of wealth has been an uneasy one for U2 to reconcile; Paul McGuinness named
one company, Principle Management, as a declaration that U2 intended to
pursue a more enlightened business approach than other bands, and the Edge
told a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that "financial things" were a
distraction.
"Once you have money, it has to be taken care of," complained the
guitarist. "As much as you try and forget about it and let someone else
deal with it, there are times when it just has to be faced up to. I think
it was Brian Eno who said that possessions are a way of turning money into
problems."
Such slick philosophy, delivered in a 1988 interview, pre-dated the genesis
of U2's alleged present financial position by half a decade. Current gossip
has been the public fall-out of an alleged "rift" between U2 and manager
Pal McGuinness, and longtime accountant Ossie Kilkenny, who also handles
The Verve, Oasis, Van Morrison, and Bjork.
Other stories relate to past rather than current difficulties, and one
newspaper has claimed U2 has lost 10 million pounds in leisure schemes that
failed to make money.
The worst example reported was a plan to set-up a chain of ten-pin bowling
alleys, alongside a laser shooting game called Quasar, which U2's
LeisureCorp company had bought at the end of the 1980s. The band bought six
Quasar sites in Germany for 8 million pounds, it was claimed, only to
discover that strict German laws banning war games made the replica
firearms device illegal.
The alleged Quasar fiasco is one of several schemes into which U2 sank
money. Property investment before the recent Dublin property boom was not a
spectacular success: LeisureCorp sold off the Pavilion cinema site in Dun
Laoghaire before prices rose, along with the Habitat building on Dublin's
St. Stephen's Green, offloaded in 1995 for 6 million pounds amid claims of
lost money due to interest and running costs.
Stories of financial decline appear to be grossly exaggerated, however, and
make little reference to U2's main source of income in pop music. Shrewd
royalty deals engineered by Paul McGuinness mean the group enjoy an
enviably high personal return on each album sold -- estimated to be around
3 pounds per disc.
Though such a figure is revealing, it has usually been applied to vague
estimates of the band's album sales in an effort to work out how much money
the musicians are making. Global returns are difficult to gauge, but it is
now possible to discover exactly how many albums U2 sell in America, the
principal marketplace for rock music.
Since 1991, an American company named Soundscan has been keeping detailed
records of album sales throughout the country. Each time a disc is bought,
electronic marking at the point-of-sale passes the information back to
Soundscan's central register. The results -- the first accurate reading of
U2's fortunes -- provide intriguing comparisons.
So far this year the Dublin band has sold a total of 2.2 million albums in
America. The figure is impressive, but the detailed listing for individual
albums shows how dependant the band has become on a lucrative back
catalogue. This year their latest release, POP, has sold only 45,000 copies
in America, compared to roughly equal sales for far older albums such as
Rattle & Hum (43,000), War (44,000), and Achtung Baby (40,000).
-- Prarit....[email protected] U2 news: http://www.cableregina.com/users/u2news/u2.html
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