The dog and pony show has left town. After three nights of U2 at Croke Park, the hot air which had gathered over the city has blown away, the correspondents who spent the last few weeks writing breathless uncritical copy have gone back to more mundane tasks, and the ridiculous fuss which greets every hometown show by this band has been put away in the attic for another four years.

The late, great music writer Bill Graham said that U2's Dublin shows were always distracting because of the off-stage noises. These have become amplified in the last couple of years as every bandwagon jumper from town and country has sought to leap onboard. Garrett Fitzgerald's photo op back in the 1980s was the beginning. Somewhere along the line, U2 have become part of that great messy ball of confusion which is the Irish cultural identity.

Yet, when you tune out from who's hobnobbing with who or the middle-of-the-road broad- casting buffoons now so in thrall to the band (a side-effect of multimillion album sales), it still comes down to the music. Since U2 last played the big field on Jones Road in 1987, it's not just the stadium which has changed beyond all comprehension.

U2 are an extraordinary band, one whose ability to reinvent and restyle themselves has kept them at the top for decades rather than years. Monday night, though, was a somewhat ordinary show from an extraordinary band. You could blame it on a lot of things - the last night of a hometown run, a ropey sound, a stage-set which dwarfs the band at times - but it doesn't help that they're hawking an album which is a bit of a dog.

Boldly returning to the very same places which All That You Can't Leave Behind visited, How to Dismantle aAtomic Bomb is a triumph of marketing over music, an album which sounds like a band running to stand still and succeeding. No wonder, then, that it's the old songs like Bad and Pride in the Name of Love rather than the new ones which sparked the crowd inside Croker on Monday night.

While U2 would never have envisaged themselves as a greatest hits live machine, this seems to be where they are heading. For all the cool support acts and pre- show booming of Arcade Fire's Wake Up (probably more beneficial to the Canadian band than actually touring with U2), the band have entered a Faustian pact with their audience of late about how challenging or out-there they really can be.

The band still carry the scars from the Pop experiment and, for all the theatrical pseudo-drama which Bono brings to the later stages of the show, it's anthems rather than art which now rule the day. This is unlikely to have changed by the time the band return in four years time.

Yes, U2 are now taking their cues from the Rolling Stones and no, that's not a good thing.

jimcarroll@irish-times.ie