Forward Thinking: U2 hold me but don't thrill me

Bono performing on stage with U2 during the 360 degree Tour, Mt Smart Stadium. Photo / NZ Herald

Item One: So that U2 and Jay-Z show was quite something wasn't it? I went the second night - less crowd to navigate aside - on what I suspect was the lesser of the two concerts, which evidently varied little in their setlists.

And apart from Mr Zed, as we call him in these parts, adding more punch up front, and that alien spaceship of a stage, I'm also not sure if this was up with the terrific 2006 shows.

Musically, the songs off last year's over-rated No Line on the Horizon didn't add much. That I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight needed a improvised bookend of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax and Two Tribes might say something about the mediocrity of the tune itself.

And the inclusion of Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me in the encore - resurrected from the '95 soundtrack to Batman Forever - seemed odd. Then again, Bono and the Edge had come here straight from signing off on the Broadway musical of Spider-man for which they've written the songs, so perhaps they had superheroes on their mind.

But it was nice they paid tribute to the Pike River miners and it sounds like the grieving families appreciated the names of their loved ones being up in lights. Though not too sure that Mr Zed extending his tribute to include slain rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. hit quite the right note. But his intentions were good. And Tupac, of course, was from the West Coast too.

Item two: Bon Jovi land in town this weekend to play Vector Arena, having originally set their sights on Mt Smart but been forced to scale down their ambitions. Funnily enough, when the band first played in Auckland in 1989 at the height of their poodle-rock years, they attracted an undersold 20,000 to Western Springs. One of the reasons? A band called U2 had rolled through town the week before and played two nights at the same venue to a combined 80,000, sucking up quite a lot of disposable income along the way.

Item three: Leslie Nielsen died this week. He was the guy most will remember as Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun series, the doctor in Airplane!, or - if you go back to before he was the go-to guy for spoofs - the captain of the good ship Poseidon.

I met him once, back in the Naked Gun days. He was probably the first film star I interviewed face to face. He was certainly the only one who farted loudly and with great relish in my presence.

Well, pretended to at least. Having been introduced in the lobby, Nielsen and I got into a hotel lift together to go to an upstairs bar to talk. Other guests crowded into the elevator. As we headed to the top floor, loud flatulence emanated from Nielsen every few seconds. At every broadcast, he loudly apologised to everyone in the confined space - some of whom started to find excuses to get off at earlier floors - in that deep voice of his. "Pffffft ... sorry ... pffft ahem, sorry, something I ate ... pfffffft ... ," and so it went. Pretty much had an express elevator in a couple of minutes.

Once the lift was clear there was at last room to roll around the floor laughing - and for Nielsen to bring out the whoopee cushion bladder he had in his pocket, and crack a smile that seemed to say: "Charming, ain't I?" He was. And as a final tribute, from Airplane!, his best line ...

Nielsen asks a passenger: Can you fly this plane and land it?

Passenger: "Surely you can't be serious."

"I am serious ... and don't call me Shirley."