NEW YORK • U2 will spend the summer of 2017 re-imagining 1987.

The storied Irish rock band announced on Monday that they would set out on a 25-date stadium tour to honour the 30th anniversary of their fifth album, The Joshua Tree, performing it in its entirety each night.

The shows begin on May 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a stop at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey scheduled for June 28. Along the way, the band will perform in early June at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, which will be their first headlining appearance at an American festival. The festival line-up will be announced today.

The European leg of the Joshua Tree Tour 2017 starts on July 8 in London and ends on Aug 1 in Brussels.

The Joshua Tree was released on March 9, 1987, and was, as The New York Times reported, "designed to achieve megastatus for this band at last". It worked.

The album became the band's first No. 1 seller in the United States, with hits including Where The Streets Have No Name and With Or Without You. It went on to win the Grammy Award for Album Of The Year and has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.

Bono, the group's lead singer, said in a statement he had recently listened to the full album for the first time in nearly three decades, and called it "quite an opera".

The Edge, U2's guitarist, said: "It seems like we have come full circle from when The Joshua Tree songs were originally written, with global upheaval, extreme right-wing politics and fundamental human rights at risk. To celebrate the album - as the songs seem so relevant and prescient of these times too - we decided to do these shows."

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the Edge recalled the Reagan-Thatcher era of politics that surrounded the making of the record. "It feels like we're right back there in a way," he added, citing the election of Mr Donald Trump as United States president. said.

NYTIMES