U2 - Achtung Baby 30 Live (2022)

On January 13, 2022, U2 announced their newest fan club subscription gift, Achtung Baby 30 Live for the 2022 subscription year. The gift will be a limited edition CD set in a “special presentation package” featuring live tracks from Achtung Baby recorded over the last thirty years. Downloads of select tracks will be made available in advance of the physical release, and a full download will be available after the CD is sent to subscribers. The tracks are all taken from Achtung Baby from various tours throughout the years, and all of the tracks are unreleased to date with the exception of “Zoo Station” (Live from Buenos Aires, March 2, 2006) which was previously released on the “Window in the Skies“ single, and “Mysterious Ways” (Live from Cape Town, February 18, 2011) which was featured on the “U22“ fan club album. The gift will come in a photo booklet, and will include commentary by author Bill Flanagan, who accompanied the band on their Zoo TV tour.

The full track listing was announced on September 27, 2022, and the first downloads from the gift were made available the same day with the release of “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World” and “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” available in AAC format the same day via your U2.com profile. A second set of downloads were made available October 14, 2022 with the release of “One” and “Love is Blindness” in a zip file that also contained the earlier two tracks. On November 17, 2022, the downloads were expanded to six tracks, with the addition of “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and “Acrobat”. On December 30, 2022, the full 12 musical tracks were made available. (A 13th, hidden track, is not currently available to download.)

The gift is available via subscription only, and you can subscribe to receive the gift now at U2.Com/subscribe. A deluxe version of the subscription gift includes this year’s Achtung Baby 30 Live gift as well as last year’s Live at the Apollo For One Night Only release. If you are renewing a subscription, the cost is $40 (US), and if you are subscribing new, the cost will be $50 (US).

Initially the subscribe page at U2.Com listed this item would be a “Limited edition double CD set” with double CD set emphasized in bold. A couple of hours after being posted, this was edited to read “Limited edition CD set” instead with CD set emphasized. This was the only change made to the text. The help pages at U2.Com still referred to this item as a “double-CD” for a couple of days after those changes but was eventually changed to state that this item is a single CD as well. The customer support team is also confirming that this subscription gift will be a single CD, and the track listing released was also for a single CD. The gift is being manufactured in Europe and shipped direct to European members from Europe this year.

All of the tracks from Achtung Baby have been performed live in concert, with a number of them being dusted off most recently in 2018 for the end of the “Experience + Innocence” tour. Of the songs played, “So Cruel” has been played the least, with only 3 appearances in the set list back in 1992, only twice in full. (Foxboro MA, Pontiac MI, and Tinley Park IL) and it is the performance from Michigan included on this release. The gift includes four tracks from the Zoo TV tour (1992-1993), one track from the Vertigo tour (2005-2006), one song from the Popmart tour (1997-1998), two tracks from the U2360 tour (2009-2011), one track from the Innocence and Experience tour (2015), one track from The Joshua Tree 2017 tour (2017) and two tracks from the Experience and Innocence tour (2018). Like previous gifts, the mix is not continuous, and tracks will fade in and fade out at the start and end of each track.