ALSO, PLEASE DO NOT USE CELLULAR PHONES OR YOUR WALKIE-TALKIES AROUND THE STAGE.

Out at the mixing board Joe O'Herlihy is struggling to compensate for a strong wind that is blowing away the balance he spent the after­noon achieving. The soundman looks up with sad resignation and says, "I work so hard to get the sound right and then God comes along and blows it all away."

God has mercy on Joe that evening. During the concert that follows everything goes as right as it went wrong last night. The general dy­namic of the show is as it's been since the beginning of the tour: the concert opens with the full barrage of Zoo TV effects and a string of songs from Achtung Baby. But where those songs were brand-new and somewhat unfamiliar in the spring of '92, by the fall of '93 they are U2's greatest hits. "Numb," another hit, now comes during that high-tech part of the set, before U2 walks out to the B stage to perform acoustic songs, including "Stay." Upon returning to the main stage for the U2 classic rock climax, they perform "Dirty Day" from the new album.

It's the encore, Macphisto's part of the show, that has changed the most since the band had a chance to stop, think, and figure out how to play the Zooropa songs in Dublin. After the audience has been treated to clips from the Video Confessional, Adam, Edge, and Larry return to the stage wearing their blue "Lemon" uniforms. They look either like Sgt. Pepper's military honor guard or bellhops at some posh Indian hotel. They begin playing "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" and the video screens fill up with Bono in a devilish red dressing room backstage, applying the last bits of Macphisto's lipstick and preening in

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The mirror. Helen and Nassim, the wardrobe assistants, are in black Zoo gear behind him, helping to dust him off and slip on his gold jacket. As he dresses, Macphisto picks up a hand mike and begins singing the song. He brushes his attendants aside and strolls toward the stage, singing to the camera as he goes. He walks out of the video screens onto the stage during the last verse, as fireworks explode, the Trabants above shiver, and cannons shoot Zoo dollars (with Macphisto's face on them) into the cheering crowd.

As the ovation subsides Bono begins Macphisto's farewell address. He is somewhat hunched over so he can read off a video monitor on the floor—which plays okay to the people watching on TV but is confus­ing for the audience here in the stadium. He delivers the line about Sarajevo, but when he gets to Salman Rushdie he gets spooked and says, "Salman Rushdie, I give you"—Bono looks around—"decibals!" No one knows what the hell that means. He talks on, delivering his solilo­quy in Macphisto's upper-class British voice: "Good-bye, Squidgy, I hope they give you Wales." Applause from the crowd. "Good-bye, Mi­chael . . ." Bono looks at the lines on the video monitor: I hope you get your new penis. He suddenly has a vision of Michael Jackson committing suicide. He freezes. He does not finish the thought. He skips ahead to, "Good-bye, all you neo-Nazis, I hope they give you Auschwitz," and the audience cheers.

Then Macphisto calls a Sydney cab company and asks for a taxi to take him home. The woman on the other end of the line hangs up on him and he looks heartbroken. He begins singing "Show me the way to go home" and the audience sings along. U2 kicks into "Lemon" and Macphisto slinks across the stage in the cloven-hoofed lurch that Bono and Edge worked out in their Dublin rehearsal room. It looks great. Bono's twisted ankle may torture him tomorrow, but tonight he is walking on two shots of showbiz, the greatest anesthetic of all.

Backstage afterward everyone feels great. Finals are over. U2 has a lot of friends in Sydney, including Edge's sister and her husband and Bono's brother-in-law (All's brother) and his family. There is a billiards tent set up near the band's dressing room, and it is there that they are chatting with their relations and playing pool when Eileen Long's walkie-talkie buzzes. Sheila Roche is calling from McGuinness's jam-packed hospitality room. "Eileen, would the band let Kennedy come in and say hello?"

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"Who is Kennedy and why would the band want to meet him?" "She's an MTV veejay. She came all the way from America." Eileen approaches Edge, who is in the middle of a life-and-death pool tournament. He says sure, send her in. Kennedy appears wearing men's pajamas and says to Edge, "Hi, would you like to go on a date with me?" Edge is not sure what to say. She adds, "These are my real breasts!"

Kennedy explains that she wants to write a book about dates with famous men. Edge says, "If I take you out, you can't write about it."

Kennedy decides to try Larry. She tells him her dream would be to go on a date with both Larry Mullen, Jr., and Larry Mullen, Sr. Larry says Kennedy will have to call his girlfriend and explain it to her. I suggest Kennedy call her book "Dates with Greats." She says no, she has a catchier title: "Date Rape."

There is a rumor going around that McGuinness told Kennedy that Lou Reed has to sit in a film studio every single night waiting to broadcast his half of the "Satellite of Love" duet with Bono. The story is that she believed it, but it's pretty hard to tell around here who's leg is being pulled by whom.

Skin Diving

bono swipes a boat/ adam's hidden gifts/ a conga line forms at the gay bar/ a wager over underpants/ acquiring a postsexual perspective/ bono swipes a waitress/ bond! beach party

On sunday afternoon Polygram Australia has hired a small yacht to take U2 and forty guests on a four-hour tour of Sydney Harbor. All's brother's family. Edge's sister Jill and her husband, Tim, and many of the Principles pile onto the boat. Bono stops to sign autographs for kids on the dock. Adam heads straight below, finds a sleeping cabin, and goes to bed.

The rest of us chow down on a fancy buffet while the Sydney Opera House floats by the window and the radio playing in the background takes phone calls about last night's U2 pay-per-view. A caller from Carolina says he watched it on TV in the USA and the sound wasn't good enough—but he liked it when U2 "went out to the little stage and did an 'MTV Unplugged' thing." Bono and Larry, their plates in their laps, groan. The disk jockey asks the caller how he'd rate the concert on a scale of one to ten. "Seven and a half." Bono and Larry both flip him the V, the Irish bird.

Unfortunately the kid from Carolina may have had reason to com­plain. Word arrives of a major glitch in last night's broadcast—the first half hour of the concert was broadcast in mono rather than stereo in the USA. It probably did sound awful. Bono is stunned, and says evenly, 'We gotta sue over that one."

Now, there's one thing you have to watch out for when you sail with Bono. He likes to steal boats. It's an eccentricity the roots of which I would not like to imagine, but when the urge overtakes him it can get anyone around him in hot water. He's been joyriding in swiped vessels

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since he was a kid, and as his prominence has grown so has his nautical kleptomania. Once he was drinking in the south of France with his friend Rene Castro (the artist who helped design U2's 1989 Love Town tour and painted some of the onstage Trabants, a former member of Allende's government and subsequent Chilean political prisoner) when they ran out of whiskey and wanted more. Bono, his caution compro­mised by drink, spotted a destroyer out in the harbor and said, "The U.S. Marines'll know me! They'll be glad to give us whiskey!" So he put on his pirate face, led Castro to the shore, and stole a rowboat.

They paddled out about a mile—even in their inebriated state the project was beginning to feel a little dubious—and came up against the side of the huge ship. Bono grabbed an oar and started banging on the hull, screaming, "Come on! We want whiskey!" They must have made some impression, because infrared lights flashed on and there was all kinds of shouting way up on the deck. Bono forced himself to focus enough to figure out that the shouting was not in English. They were banging on a French warship. The French have no sense of humor about stuff like that. Bono looked at his companion. Castro was wearing a P.L.O. T-shirt. Bono panicked. No telling what they'd be accused of. He told Castro to start rowing. Over his shoulder he could see the French lowering what looked like some kind of pursuit craft into the water.

This was not an isolated incident. Another time Bono convinced the English workers fixing up his house in France that it would be a blast if they hot-wired a motorboat and took it for a spin. A police boat pursued them, and though they hit the shore and split up, two of Bono's cohorts were caught and arrested. Bono had to go to the police station the next day and make a formal apology.

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