If you're a fan of U2, or even if you're not, there's a new U2 documentary on Disney+ that looks like it'll be equal parts enchanting and enraging. A Sort of Homecoming, which is available to stream from 17 March, features Bono and The Edge showing David Letterman around their Dublin hometown and playing some of their best-known songs in some new and interesting ways.
It's a marketing exercise, of course – the band have a new album of "reimagined" old songs coming out – and there's an element of artifice here, because the band spend much more time in LA or the South of France than they do hanging around old man's pubs down by the Dublin docks. But streamers' big-budget music documentaries usually deliver lots of entertainment, and as someone with a love/hate relationship with U2 I'll definitely be streaming it when it goes live – if only to marvel at Bono's increasingly unlikely, gravity-defying hair.
What to expect from A Sort of Homecoming
This is clearly a backwards-looking occasion: the title comes from one of my favourite songs, which was on the The Unforgettable Fire album way back in 1984. I've embedded the video below, and it still gives me chills.
But rock nostalgia is no bad thing. I've just finished Bono's autobiography on Audible, read by the man himself, and it's charming and fascinating and annoying and pompous – exactly what you'd expect from one of the world's biggest rock stars. I'd have loved it even more if The Edge were in it, because Bono and Edge have one of the great musical partnerships, a connection and friendship that dates back to the 1970s and that's survived some pretty rocky parts. I've always thought that Edge was the brake on Bono's worst excesses,
According to Disney+, this is "a concert movie, a travel adventure, and the story of one of the most remarkable friendships and creative relationships in the history of rock and roll."
