by Burton Glass

This week has been '80s week at Virgin Megastore. The DJ in the corner booth is playing Duran Duran and Thompson Twins, but also Phil Collins and Mötley Crüe. The sales people are wearing white t-shirts that say things like "CHOOSE VIRGIN," summoning the video ghosts of early Wham! It's a promotion for back catalogue albums.

The managers have helpfully pulled out selected CDs from artists of the era and placed them prominently in the feature racks along the top and at the end of each CD aisle. There, on deep discount, is U2's War, from 1983.

"Some funny guy from the stock room," I thought. Then it hit me. For a majority of people - casual fans to the marketing suits of Virgin Mega in London - U2 is an '80s band, in the same mental organizing box as Kajagoogoo and Human League.

* * *

My friend Don appreciates music. He plays in a band with his buddies. He's smart. He owns several U2 albums, and The Joshua Tree is his favorite. "What happened to them?" he asked me recently. "I kinda lost track of them after Achtung Baby." I'm sure a look of indignation crossed my face, but I tried hard to suppress it.

I mentioned Zooropa (he had heard of it, but didn't pick it up) and Pop (hmmm). Don hummed a few lines from "The Sweetest Thing," formerly a B-side that was re-recorded last year and released as the teaser single for a greatest hits package. He liked that one. I did too - but I thought later that it may have been no coincidence that the song was originally recorded for The Joshua Tree more than decade ago.

As a high school senior, War was the most important album in my life. Now, at 35, I get around to joining the U2 World Service, the official fan club. Based on my happy yelp, my wife thought she was married to a teenager when my first issue of Propaganda, the club's quarterly, arrived in the mail.

Slyly, I had suggested to my wife that we vacation in Ireland this year. The natural beauty, the intriguing political history, and the friendliness of the people quickly convinced us it was a good decision. However, I wonder what she thought when I dragged her to the Irish Music Hall of Fame for two hours. Posing aside Larry Mullen, Jr.'s first drum kit was, it turned out, my version of kissing the Blarney Stone.

* * *

Still, I'm excited about All That You Can't Leave Behind, the new U2 album due in late October. Early reports said the band was stripping away the electronic beats and gurgles, returning to the core U2 sound. The happy cry went up: it'll be Joshua Tree, Part Deux! Bono backed off a bit from the retro talk - to a degree. "We have no reverse gears on our tank," Bono told fans this summer during an online chat. "So the idea of a return to basics is not in the cards. We advance towards simplicity. We advance towards a stripped down sound."

All That You Can't Leave Behind will present 11 tracks - a number that, after two years in the studio, demonstrates either a welcome willingness to self-edit or a shocking lack of new ideas. I choose to believe it represents the former, but we will soon know. (The track list: Beautiful Day; Elevation; Walk On; Stuck In a Moment; Peace on Earth; Kite; New York; In A Little While; Wild Honey; When I Look At the World; Grace. For more information, I direct you to some of the better fan sites such as www.atU2.com and www.U2Station.com.)

But will this new album - and the band -- be relevant? Zooropa was seen as an experimental foray, but Pop was a disappointment to the musical punditry, as it was expected to reestablish the band as the world's top rock act. It didn't, and the stadium tour that was booked before the album was even released played to less-than-capacity crowds.

That was a shame. Pop was and felt rushed, but the ideas that were fully realized - "Staring at the Sun," for example - were superb. The tour started shaky, too. Opening night in Las Vegas was a rough go, I recall, with more than one false start to a song.

But, as if they were finishing the album as they toured, the songs and performances solidified over the next 18 months. I caught the act again, and while the set was largely the same, everything clicked. "Please" from Pop had evolved into the tour's emotional center, much as "Bad" had a decade earlier. Evidence can be found on the new fan-club-only live album, Hasta La Vista Baby!, a 14-track CD recorded in Mexico City in December 1997. The band is captured in top form, sure of its material and sure of itself. Listening to it reminded me how great U2 can be, and by inference how few truly great live rock acts exist today. (Visit the Propaganda site.)

Hasta La Vista Baby! may begin to undermine the conventional wisdom that the Pop CD and tour were flops. That may have been the intent, but surely the band members know that it will be the new record that will answer the relevance question.

For me, All That You Can't Leave Behind will arrive at an opportune moment. Bubblegum and rap rule the charts, and the acts that can be classified as rock are mired in a kind of snotty-nosed rut. The most recent silly wave, led by costume acts like Slipknot, have more in common with Kiss or Hannibal Lecter than anything else.

Musically, most of today's rock acts are stagnant from the get go. Lyrically, they sing a dead end, anger with nowhere to go, aggression as fashion.

Contrast that with what U2 has offered up in the 90s: moody soundtracks (The Million Dollar Hotel [see DAA review -- Ed.]), benefit singles (Bono and Wyclef Jean on "New Day"), willingness to embrace dance culture (Melon, "Mofo"), reinvention of the stadium tour (ZooTV and PopMart), and a campaign for Third World debt relief. And this is just between albums, from a band that has refused to dry up.

Suddenly, U2's idealism, songwriting and appreciation for pop music's history don't seem so, y'know, '80s. These were qualities that the band had been running away from since Rattle and Hum.

Funny, but they sound like things we desperately need now.