1981-04-21

Decade, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Set List of Show:

Main Set:

"The Ocean"
"11 O'Clock Tick Tock"
"I Will Follow"
"I Fall Down"
"An Cat Dubh"
"Into the Heart"
"Another Time, Another Place"
"The Electric Co."
"Stories for Boys"
"Things to Make and Do"
"Boy / Girl"
"Out of Control"

Encore:

"A Day Without Me"
"I Will Follow"

Additional Music

Snippets of Other Songs Performed by U2:

"Frère Jacques" (Jean-Philippe Rameau) / "It's A Long Way to Tipperary" () / "Cry" (U2) / "Yankee Doodle" (Traditional Nursery Rhyme) /

Show Details:

In Pittsburgh the opening act is Carsickness, a local Pittsburgh band, and the bands play at the over-21 club Decade. Karl Mullen, who was the front man for the opening band Carsickness, called U2 “dreadful,” because they played “I Will Follow” multiple times and calling Bono’s routine with a lighter “corny.”

U2 include a number of snippets including “Frere Jacques” during “11 O’clock Tick Tock” and “The Cry” and “Yankee Doodle” during “The Electric Co.” Bono also mentions the song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” when joking with the crowd that they cannot all be from Dublin at the introduction to “Another Time, Another Place.”

The show is a high spirited one, and Bono takes a water pistol from a woman in the front rows who is shooting him from the crowd. Once he gets the pistol he turns it around and aims it at Steve Lillywhite who has been traveling with the band these last few weeks. The venue is smaller than it has been in the last few shows. Bono mentions this, “it’s good that we can actually see the people in the back tonight, it’s been a problem in the last few days.”

This show was initially planned to be the end of the tour and Bono shares this with the crowd introducing a new song. “This is the last night of this first part of our American tour. We’re going somewhere else tomorrow. We’re going to try to play something new. It’s called ‘I Fall Down.’” The band leave after this show for Nassau and a recording session with Steve Lillywhite, but the band are doing so well in the shows in the USA, additional shows are quickly added which follow the trip to Nassau. While in Nassau, the band finish recording “Fire,” a song they started with Lillywhite earlier in the year, and it will be released as the band’s next single, and give audiences the first recorded taste of the October album. But that’s not the new song that U2 play this evening, they instead play a rough version of “I Fall Down” which they are still working on with Lillywhite. The song made its debut earlier in the month.

Officially Released Tracks