U2 frontman Bono said something this week at the last show of the Experience + Innocence tour that sparked rumours the band is calling it quits.
“We've been on the road for quite some time, just going on 40 years, and this last four years have been really something very special for us,” he said. “We’re going away now.”
The comment came a little more than a month after the Irish singer told The Sunday Times Magazine there’s no guarantee U2 will go back on the road.
"I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t take anything for granted.”
Bono, 58, admitted he’s not sure he can physically handle the demands of touring any longer. The singer previously revealed a near-death experience in the winter of 2016 that followed a 2014 bike accident that left him seriously injured.
In 2008, U2 signed a 12-year deal with Live Nation that includes worldwide touring commitments.
Last month, U2 bassist Adam Clayton told the BBC the band has been touring for four years and “we need to go away for a little bit and give the audience a break.”
This echoed what bandmates Larry Mullen Jr. and the Edge said in interviews over the summer.
Mullen told The Sunday Times Magazine that a break was in order. “We’ll finish this out and then there will be time to decide what we want to do next. I’d like to take a really long holiday,” he said. “I don’t know that anybody needs a U2 record or a U2 tour anytime soon. People could do with taking a break from us and vice versa.”
Edge told Rolling Stone in May: “I would say that we’ll probably take a little bit of a break at the end of this tour and regroup. There’s lots of ideas for the next records, but I think a bit of time off just to listen to music and to really feed our creative instincts is in order.”