- Halftime at Super Bowl XXXVI. Being the first Super Bowl to take place after 9/11, it featured a memorial to those lost on that day, with U2 singing "MLK" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" while the list of names scrolled upwards against a stark black background. The capper occurred right as Bono sang the final chorus of "and when I go there, I go there with you..." — revealing a US Flag sewn into the lining of his jacket, pictured here. As if to say, "It's all right, America. We got your back."
- Whenever a soft song suddenly cuts into the Edge beginning the guitar riff to kick off "Where the Streets Have No Name," a live crowd goes insane. Better is how as the song kicks up, the lights of the stadium will often light up enough to be seen for miles.
- The original music video for the song, shot in 1987, had the band performing on the roof of a downtown Los Angeles building in front of a wild and growing crowd. The video openly shows how the police and city officials were telling them to shut down as there were people coming from outside the city to watch but the band went ahead with the performance.
- Bono's rant during the performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the Rattle and Hum film in Denver condemning the Remembrance Day Bombing that had occurred earlier that day.And let me tell you somethin'. I've had enough of Irish Americans who haven't been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home...and the glory of the revolution...and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What's the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and his children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where's the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don't want. No more!
- The performance was so memorable that U2 didn't play "Sunday Bloody Sunday" live for several years afterwards, because Bono didn't think that he could ever top that.
- Also worth noting that, when Bono leads the audience in a sing-sing back of "No More!", he actually generates audio feedback on the mic note because he's that enraged.
- Pride and City of Blinding Lights
, played at the inauguration concert of Barack Obama. Just, yes. - How about a plane taking off right above them while they're playing in the "Beautiful Day" music video? Still one of the most impressive shots in a music video, 21 years later.
- The U2 360 tour had to be delayed due to Bono's back injury. Fortunately, he was able to recover in time for the European leg, but there was speculation among fans that he wouldn't be as athletic as he was at recent shows, and that the (awesome) "wheel mic" might even be cut because a large part of its appeal was that it allowed Bono to swing around. Cut to August 6th in Turin, where not only was the wheel mic back in full splendor, but Bono used the thing as a swingset. Just months after major back surgery. Wow.
- U2 360 Tour has one special moment. The concert at Stadion Śląski in Chorzów was U2's first performance in Poland. During "New Year's Day" (the song dedicated to Solidarność), the whole stadium turned white and red (as Polish national flag). It is one of the most emotional U2 moments ever.
- "Dublin city, it has its good, it has its bad. This song's called Bad". And that was the last time anyone doesn't know about U2.
- While the PopMart tour might not have been U2's finest hour, the 1997 concert in Sarajevo has quite a few:
- The whole thing started during the Zoo TV tour in the early nineties, when aid worker Bill Carter asked U2 to use the tour's facilities to spread awareness of the Yugoslavian conflict. After setting up a transmission system in the besieged Sarajevo, videos of the war victims were transmitted via satellite to the Zoo TV screens for twelve shows in a row. To do this, Carter and a crew of two had to sneak past an area known as the Sniper Alley to broadcast the videos for each shows. While the linkups were heavily criticized by the British press (and even the band had moments of doubt, Bono describing it as the most difficult thing they had done, and Larry worrying about the perception that they were exploiting Bosnians' suffering for entertainment), they helped spread awareness of the conflict and increase coverage of it.
- The buildup to the concert itself. Having endured through years of civil war and ethnic cleansing, the city rejected U2's original plan to do a small benefit show and requested a full PopMart show, giant lemon and all. In spite of a $4 million offer to play in Sweden at the date of the concert as opposed to the inevitable financial loss from a performance in Sarajevo, the band went in anyway.
- The Edge's solo performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
- The Bosnian government, after being unable to operate the railway network thanks to bureaucratic problems, actually running the trains for the concert-goers.
- The audience turning to the 6,000 off-duty UN peacekeepers and applauding at the end of the show.
- The show, after years of warfare and failed efforts by peacekeepers and diplomats, brought together thousands of Bosnians, Serbs and Croats, putting away all differences for a return to normalcy. As Bono appropriately described it, "It was one of the toughest and the sweetest nights of my life."
- The pantomimed heroin hit in U2's live version of "Running to Stand Still" in their concert film: "Zoo TV Live From Sydney" could be considered a little Narm - ish, but it's also rather chilling and sums up the whole point and awesomeness of Zoo TV in a few minutes of theatricality. Also, the entire Red Rocks show that marked their change from post-punk nobodies to world eating megastars could be considered the Crowning Moment of their career.
- During the Zoo TV tour, Bono's stage personas Mirrorball Man and Mr. MacPhisto would make humourous prank calls to various public figures for the audience to listen to. During the encore of the London show, MacPhisto told the audience that he was going to call the notorious author Salman Rushdie, who had hidden in the country to avoid assassination. Unlike the case with many other recipients, Rushdie answered the call himself. It turned out that he was actually in the audience all along, much to everyone's surprise. MacPhisto invited him onstage and eventually declared:"Ladies and gentlemen, I bow to the superior man!"
- The Elevation music video. Most expensive music video ever made featuring each memeber of the band doing remarkably bad-ass things.
- The song itself, especially the more rock-oriented "Tomb Raider Mix" (which is how it is played live.)
- The performance of "Bad" at Live Aid, where Bono pulled a woman out of the audience and danced with her. Turns out that she was getting crushed in the front row, and that he actually saved her life.
- All the band members agree that the moment they're proud of was when they played a concert in Sarajevo in 1997, mere years after the Bosnian War ended.
- Despite all the critiques and complaints about how it was 'invading their privacy', it was brilliant, as well as its own heartwarming moment of U2 releasing Songs of Innocence for free on iTunes.
- In 2017, U2 was featured on "XXX" by Kendrick Lamar which reached #33 on the Billboard Hot 100. This made U2 one of five artists (alongside Kenny G, Michael Jackson, Madonna and "Weird Al" Yankovic) to have a Top 40 hit in each decade from the 1980s through the 2010s.
