You could say that U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr hates the limelight so much that he's spent most of his life sitting at the back hitting things.
So, we can safely assume that he does not like being in the news this week following the not so shock announcement that he won't be joining his bandmates on their Las Vegas residency later this year.
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at The Sphere: Coming Fall 2023. Register at https://t.co/GvWdke6OZr #U2SPHERE pic.twitter.com/n1kOTs54lk
— U2 (@U2) February 14, 2023
U2 plan to play the $1.8 billion state-of-the-art MSG Sphere venue with a new show called U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere, which will focus on their acclaimed 1991 album Achtung Baby, and Larry will not be taking the drum seat.
His stand-in (not replacement) will be Dutch drummer Bram Van Den Berg of Tilburg-based band Krezip.
Larry’s reasons for missing the shows are plain to see. The warhorse sticks man has spent the last half-century attacking his drumkit in a decidedly muscular, decidedly loud, and decidedly idiosyncratic style and it has left him dogged by musculoskeletal issues.
He’s about to undergo surgery so he can climb back onto the drum riser with renewed vigour. Put simply, he needs a lot of time to recover and hitting things very hard is not the way to go about it.
Last year he told the Washington Post: "I have lots of bits falling off, elbows, knees, necks, and so during Covid when we weren’t playing, I got a chance to have a look at some of these things. So, there’s some damage along the way. So, I’d like to take some time, which I will do to get myself healed."
However, this will be the first time Larry will miss a U2 show since 1978, when he broke his foot in a motorcycle accident (what else?) and in U2 lore, this is indeed big news.
After all, as even the most casual U2 fans are always reminding us, it’s Larry’s band. He was the one who stuck that famous note up on the schoolboard at Mount Temple School (on the advice of his late father Larry Mullen Snr) back in the Pliocene era.
He is also the man who has kept the rock-solid beat, the one who drops anchor when the singer goes wayward and the guitarist kicks open his box of pyrotechnic tricks.
In a statement, the band said: "It’s going to take all we’ve got to approach the Sphere without our bandmate in the drum seat, but Larry has joined us in welcoming Bram van den Berg, who is a force in his own right.
"U2 hasn’t played live since December 2019, and we need to get back on stage and see the faces of our fans again. And what a unique stage they’re building for us out there in the desert.
"We’re the right band, Achtung Baby the right album, and the Sphere the right venue to take the live experience of music to the next level."
And that should pretty much be it, but this is U2 we are talking about and news of Larry’s no-show in Sin City has naturally sent U2 watchers, fans, and detractors (a coterie of people who seem to wait for white smoke anytime the band announce anything) into a tizzy of speculation.
Twitter has done what it always does - snapped into a frenzy of rumours and theories. It seems that after over 45 years, the wheels are coming off one of the most well-oiled music machines in history and that the drummer is downing sticks for good.
"U2 without Larry is not U2," declared hordes of unhappy fans, perhaps unaware that when The Beatles toured Australia in 1964 without Ringo, they were still The Beatles. Or that when drummer Bill Berry left R.E.M. in 1997 to become a farmer, R.E.M. were still R.E.M. (as the band’s singer Michael Stipe pointed out at the time, "a three-legged dog is still a dog").
Besides, there is a long history of bands going through temporary or permanent line-up changes. Just ask The Fall (you probably know an ex-member). Then again, such is the power of "the greater than the sum of its parts" legend of U2 that one member absent from the line-up just doesn’t feel right.
Could it be that Larry, the man who as a nine-year-old was told by his music teacher to "stop hitting the piano," had refused point blank to play Vegas and that his wariness of U2’s embrace of glitz and showbiz and his tensions with Bono had finally come to a head?
The idea of playing a lucrative residency amid the jackpots and fleshpots of the desert city just isn’t what the hugely private drummer signed up for all those years ago. Maybe Larry was unhappy with being stuck inside that giant lemon on the PopMart Tour back in the nineties?
There have also been bitter recriminations that U2 are "greedy", that - as Frank Zappa once snarked - they’re only in it for the money and are more than willing to sacrifice their founding father on the slagheap of mammon. To which we can only say, welcome to the wonderful world of showbiz, folks!
One particularly charming observer even wondered what U2 would sound like with "a real drummer."
As one of the band’s main representatives here on earth, Neil McCormick, a schooldays friend of the band, who now writes about music for The Daily Telegraph and oversaw the tome-like U2 by U2, coolly noted: "There's a lot of comment (pro & con), aspersions being cast & conclusions being jumped to. U2 fans surely know U2 never do anything (just) for the $$$, & their loyalty to one another has never been in doubt. This is how you keep the show on the road for 45+ years."
In U2 At The End of The World (one of the best books ever written about the band), author Bill Flanagan relates the story of how Larry has bull’s blood injected into his spine.
Whether this was just mischievous rock 'n' roll mythmaking or a curious medical fact, who knows but if bionic Bono, the dynamo with "the eccentric heart", can rock on like a stadium lounge lizard in Vegas, then Larry is more than entitled to watch on in wry amusement. Sitting at the back and hitting things can wait.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
