U2 – The Longest Day – 1985

June 22nd 1985 – Milton Keynes Bowl

This……….was exciting!!! In the mid eighties there were quite a few bands making the headlines as BIG bands, after all, we didn’t have many TV channels to watch, Leicester City weren’t all that good hovering around the lower end of Division 1.

I’d waited a long time to see U2, missing their previous Pre-War tour and that was it for Leicester gigs, I looked back to see how many times they played Leicester (we missed out on band tours quite a bit) and it was twice! The afore mentions and back in 1981, the October Tour came to Leicester Polytechnic. I was still in the secondary school playground then!

There was no online ticket sales, no Viagogo, no refreshing browsers, in fact no proper computers at this point in time!!!

No, various venues around the country were allocated a batch of tickets to sell on a first come, first serve basis.

Most gigs you could phone up and get tickets that way, but for this one, you had to go and queue at the box office to get your ticket. This was a big event, so to guarantee a ticket, you also had to be there at the crack of dawn and queue until the 9am opening time…..brutal, but fun because everyone was there for the same reason and no one ever pushed in!

I got there at about 6 to 6:30am and was really excited and very much expecting to be in the first 20 or so in the queue. I’d heard on the radio in the morning that a few had camped out overnight, so I had no false hope of being first there………but to be around the block came as a big surprise!!

I would say there was around 120 people queuing. This was unheard of, you may have waited on the phone for a little while to get through, but to actually be in a queue hours before the Box Office opened, well, I’m not aware it had happened before! I don’t remember what the exact day was when ticket sales took place, but it was nice and warm even at that time of the morning, I suspect it was late May.

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As I mentioned before, everyone there was there for the same reason, a love of the band, so the time passed quickly and within half an hour of the Box Office opening, the Willy Wonka’esque golden tickers were in our hands…….now how to get there!

Luckily my Grandparents lived in Bedford, not far from Milton Keynes so we stayed there and Grandad gave us a lift there and back.

This was the first all day concert I went to and would start a whole new range of music enjoyment for me….The Festivals!! The full band line up was U2, Ramones, Billy Bragg, Spear of Destiny, REM and The Faith Brothers

I wasn’t a fan of The Faith Brothers, so they pretty much passed me by, same with REM who were starting out but just about to become equally as big as U2. Billy Bragg was funny, but there’s something about his singing voice doesn’t work for me…..he did, however come out with the funniest line of the day. He wasn’t going down well with most of the audience anyway and was subjected to the weird phenomenon of being bottled! A quaint tradition, but Billy would get hit square on the head with a bottle bouncing off his forehead. “I’d just like to thank the inventor of the plastic bottle as I think he just saved my life!”

Spear of Destiny were superb and rolled out the hits. I knew I’d try and get a small venue gig in to see Kirk Brandon and the boys again. The Ramones were just legends, a bit past their best years but an iconic band to see live and didn’t disappoint.

Then as the sun was starting to go down, a day after the Longest Day, but who was counting 😉 A great setlist ploughing through songs on all the albums Boy, October, War and Unforgettable Fire. Still my favourite 3 U2 albums…..I guess the stuff that starts you down a musical line stays with you forever.

U2 were leading the way in outgrowing standard concert venues and this venture into a large field called the Milton Keynes Bowl would set them on a path of stadium rock. It would also mean it was highly unlikely I wouldn’t now get to see them in a small venue (as at date of writing Dec 5th 2019……this still holds true!)

Weather was pretty poor for the first few bands, but got better in time for U2. We got soaked in fact! the Bowl as it suggests, was a field surrounded by a large bowl like bank, some guys took great pleasure in sliding front first into a muddy pool at the bottom, which kept us entertained!

A great first experience of an outside gig and something that would cement U2 in my gig going future.

Set List

• 4th of July
• 11 O’Clock Tick Tock
• I Will Follow
• Seconds
• MLK
• The Unforgettable Fire
• Wire
• (with “Gimme Some Truth” (John Lennon) snippet)
• Sunday Bloody Sunday
• The Cry
• The Electric Co.
• (with “Wooden Heart” (Elvis Presley), “Amazing Grace”, and “Ziggy Stardust” (David Bowie) snippets)
• A Sort of Homecoming
• Rain
• (The Beatles cover) (with “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (Bob Dylan) snippet)
• Bad (with “Ruby Tuesday” and ” Sympathy for the Devil” (The Rolling Stones) snippet)
• October
• New Year’s Day
• Pride (In the Name of Love)
• Encore: Trash, Trampoline and the Party Girl
• Gloria
• 40 (with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and “We Are the World” snippets)