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- Achtung Baby Tour
Paul McClean - ATL producer

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Yeah yeah its U2, but let me assure you that they give good concert. It's 1993 and a young me and my chum Johnny have travelled since around 6am to Dublin and are pretty much squished against a barrier in the RDS waiting for Bono and the lads to come out. We didn’t expect what happened next. The band that only a few years previously had been hanging out with gospel choirs and like finding their like roots like, man, were now an era-defining, post-modern, techno-rock machine. They sound like a 21st century European band with the dust of the Berlin wall still stuck to their hair. Bono is in the wrap shades, phoning the UN and pizza joints, his alter-ego Mephisto is smoking cigarillos and bantering with the crowd and all the while a massive barn storming visual show is unfolding with pictures, text and spliced up archive creating a headspin of media. Sadly this will be the last time that U2 are what you could call 'important', as Pop and subsequent albums had undoubted highlights but little of the cultural relevance. Tonight, it's as if Bono has a lightning rod, conducting the zeitgiest directly into his brain. Then the weather changed.

- Belsonic / EP 2009
Amy McGarrigle - ATL Content Assistant

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My preference for small venues and *serious* bands has meant I can't really recall seeing many big 'shows', but I've seen the Flaming Lips twice and both times they left me in awe. Belsonic 2008 seen me witness Wayne Coyne and Co.'sÌýmagic and madness in the audience, with crazy lights, stage dancers, confetti, video projections, Coyne zorb balling out into the crowd etc. I knew to expect the theatrics, but experiencing them live put a painful grin on my face for days. Then the following year, I had the absolute fortune of being one of the yeti dancers at the side of the stage at Electric Picnic. I still look at those photos in disbelief. What a show! what an experience! What a band! What a mad man!

Harriet Pittard - ATL Trainee

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Aphex Twin's stage show really impressed me at Dublin's Forbidden Fruit Festival this year. The lights and lasers were as hypnotic and intense as the music with bright blues, pinks, greens and purples flashing all over the stage and across the crowd in sync with the beats. But the pièce de résistance was the live visual show on two massive screens that featured faces from the crowd being morphed into bulbous, scary, clown-like creatures. It was especially awesome seeing smiling fans' faces being transformed into pig-like versions of Aphex Twin himself sporting a really sinister grin. It's called live face-mapping apparently and it had the whole crowd transfixed.