U2 was Rehearsing Near Paris Concert Hall

U2 were rehearsing at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris Friday night, less than three miles away from the Bataclan concert hall where the Eagles of Death Metal were playing, when they got word of the terrorist attack on the city.

"Our security locked it down pretty quickly and we got our team and our crew out of there safely," Bono told Irish DJ Dave Fanning in a radio interview Saturday. "We came to the back door of the hotel. Everyone congregated and watched the TV like everybody else in disbelief with what was happening."

Everybody is safe in our party, which is great. We haven’t heard of any of our fans yet down. Thank God for that. Really our first thoughts at this point are with the Eagles fans, the Eagles of Death Metal and this is if you think about it, the majority of victims last night are music fans. This is the first direct hit on music that we’ve had in this so called war-on-terror or whatever it’s called. It’s very upsetting. These are our people. This could be me at a show. You at a show, in that venue. It’s a very recognizable situation for you and for me and the coldblooded aspect of this slaughter is deeply disturbing and that’s what I can’t get out of my head. ... I mean again we didn’t call it off. It was cancelled, honest, and I understand perfectly why. I think music is very important. I think U2 has a role to play and I can’t wait till we get back to Paris and play and that’s what I’m feeling from the messages we’re receiving from music fans is these people will not set our agenda. They will not organize our lives for us. I remember U2 is the first big act back into New York after 9/11. We played Madison Square Garden and the feeling of Madison Square Garden was just unbelievable and the feeling was just this is who we are, you can’t change it. You’re not gonna turn us into haters or you’re not gonna turn us around in the way we go about our lives. That was the feeling of Madison Square Garden back then and I hope that will be the feeling at Bercy when we get back there.

We were just revelers at this desert festival, but there was tension there – there were rocket launchers at the edge of the festival site – within a few weeks, Mali had been overpowered by these Islamist extremists. They had overturned the library in Timbuktu and these sacred manuscripts. The inn, the small hotel that we were staying was now the head of the Islamic justice. Musicians were having their hands cut off in the same hotel that we slept in and ate in. You just realized they hate music. They hate women. They hate all the things that we love. This is an illness that’s in the world now and we just can’t give into it, and try to be sympathetic to the people who are fallen prey to this illness and of course we should love our enemies and all of that. They are victims too. But, we can’t have them decide how we live.