U2: Revolution 1937994996, 9781937994990

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: FOUR BOYS
CHAPTER 2: FEEDBACK TO THE HYPE TO U2
CHAPTER 3: FROM IRELAND TO ISLAND
CHAPTER 4: BOY
CHAPTER 5: WAR
CHAPTER 6: FIRE
CHAPTER 7: THE WORLD
CHAPTER 8: THE TREE
CHAPTER 9: ACHTUNG…
CHAPTER 10: ZOOROPA
CHAPTER 11: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
CHAPTER 12: POP
CHAPTER 13: U2000
CHAPTER 14: BOMB
CHAPTER 15: HORIZON
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS
INDEX
A
B
C
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Citation preview

R e v o l u t i o n

u2 mat snow

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Race Point Publishing An imprint of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc. 276 Fifth Avenue, Suite 205 New York, NY 10001 RACE POINT PUBLISHING and the distinctive Race Point Publishing logo are trademarks of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc. Copyright © text by Mat Snow 2014 The 2005 speech at U2’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been reprinted here in edited form with the kind permission of Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or Publisher, who also disclaims any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details. This publication has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by U2 or any of its assignees. This is not an official publication. We recognize, further, that some words, model names, and designations mentioned herein are the property of the trademark holder. We use them for identification purposes only. ISBN: 978-1-937994-99-0 Digital edition: 978-1-62788-503-4 Hardcover edition: 978-1-93799-499-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Cover art by Ivan Ullman Book design by Renato Stanisic See page 228 for a complete listing of the photography credits Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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IntroductIon

Fou R Boys 5

c h a p t e r 1: chapter 2:

1

Fe e dBack to th e hype to u 2 11

chapter 3:

FRom i Re lan d to islan d 23 chapter 4: chapter 5:

WaR 49

chapter 6:

Fi Re 65

chapter 7:

th e WoRld 75

chapter 8: chapter 9:

th e tRe e 89

achtu ng … 113

chap ter 10: c h a p t e r 11:

Boy 33

ZooRopa 135

a n ig ht at th e ope Ra 147

c h ap te r 12:

pop 157

c h ap te r 13:

u 2000 169

c h ap t e r 14:

Bom B 185

c h ap te r 15:

hoRiZon 207

photography credIts 228 Index 232 acknowledgments 236

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intRoduction hoW do they count in their song Vertigo? Uno, dos, tres, catorce. That translates as one, two, three, fourteen. That is the correct math for a rock and roll band. For in art and love and rock and roll, the whole had better equal much more than the sum of its parts, or else you’re just rubbing two sticks together searching for fire. A great rock band searches for the same kind of combustible force that fueled the expansion of the universe after the big bang. You want the earth to shake and spit fire. You want the sky to split apart and for God to pour out.  It’s embarrassing to want so much, and to expect so much from music, except sometimes it happens—the Sun Sessions, Highway 61, Sgt. Peppers, the Band, Robert Johnson, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run—whoops, I meant to leave that one out—the Sex Pistols, Aretha Franklin, the Clash, James Brown. . . the proud and public enemies it takes a nation of millions to hold back. This is music meant to take on not only the powers that be, but, on a good day, the universe and God himself—if he was listening. It’s man’s accountability, and U2 belongs on this list.

o p p o s I t e : Bruce springsteen performs

onstage with the edge and Bono at the 25th anniversary rock and roll hall of Fame concert at madison square garden on october 30, 2009, in new york city. r I g h t: Bruce springsteen inducts u2 into the rock and roll hall of Fame in march 2005.

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It was the early ‘80s. I went with Pete Townshend,

and direct descendants of the great bands who

who always wanted to catch the first whiff of

believed rock music could shake things up

those about to unseat us, to a club in London.

in the world, who dared to have faith in their

There they were: a young Bono—single-handedly

audience, who believed if they played their best it

pioneering the Irish mullet; the Edge—what

would bring out the best in you. They believed in

kind of name was that?; Adam; and Larry. I was

pop stardom and the big time. Now this requires

listening to the last band of whom I would be

foolishness and a calculating mind. It also requires

able to name all of its members. They had an

a deeply held faith in the work you’re doing and

exciting show and a big, beautiful sound. They

in its powers to transform. U2 hungered for it all,

lifted the roof. 

and built a sound, and they wrote the songs that

We met afterwards and they were nice young men. They were Irish. Irish! Now, this would play an enormous part in their success in the States.

demanded it. They’re keepers of some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll. The Edge. He is a rare and true guitar

For what the English occasionally have the refined

original and one of the subtlest guitar heroes of

sensibilities to overcome, we Irish and Italians have

all time. He’s dedicated to ensemble playing and

no such problem. We come through the door fists

he subsumes his guitar ego in the group. But do

and hearts first. U2, with the dark, chiming sound

not be fooled. Take Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry,

of heaven at their command—which, of course,

Neil Young, Pete Townshend—guitarists who

is the sound of unrequited love and longing, their

defined the sound of their band and their times.

greatest theme—their search for God intact. This

If you play like them, you sound like them.

was a band that wanted to lay claim to not only this

If you are playing those rhythmic two-note

world but had their eyes on the next one too. 

sustained fourths, drenched in echo, you are

Now, they’re a real band; each member plays

going to sound like the Edge, my son. Go back

a vital part. I believe they actually practice some

to the drawing board and chances are you won’t

form of democracy—toxic poison in a band’s head.

have much luck. There are only a handful of

In Iraq, maybe. In rock, no! Yet they

guitar stylists who can create a world with their

survive. They have harnessed the time bomb that

instruments, and he’s one of them. The Edge’s

exists in the heart of every great rock and roll band

guitar playing creates enormous space and vast

that usually explodes, as we see regularly from this

landscapes. It is a thrilling and a heartbreaking

stage. But they seemed to have innately under-

sound that hangs over you like the unsettled sky.

stood the primary rule of rock band job security:

In the turf it stakes out, it is inherently spiritual.

“Hey, asshole, the other guy is more important

It is grace and it is a gift.

than you think he is!” They are both a step forward

Now, all of this has to be held down by

“Every good Irish and Italian-Irish

front man knows that before James Brown there was Jesus . . .”

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IntroductIon

something. The deep sureness of Adam Clayton’s bass and the rhythms of Larry Mullen’s elegant drumming hold the band down while propelling it forward. It’s in U2’s great rhythm section that the band finds its sexuality and its dangerousness. Listen to

3

“They dare to

have faith in their audience . . . if they play their best it will bring out the best in you.”

“Desire,” “Mysterious Ways,” the pulse of “With or Without You.” Together Larry and Adam

operator, seller of the Brooklyn Bridge—oh hold

create the element that suggests the ecstatic

up, he played under the Brooklyn Bridge, that’s

possibilities of that other kingdom—the one

right. Soon-to-be mastermind operator of the

below the earth and below the belt—that no

Bono burger franchise, where more than one

great rock band can lay claim to the title without. 

million stories will be told by a crazy Irishman.

Now Adam always strikes me as the

Now I realize that it’s a dirty job and somebody

professorial one, the sophisticated member.

has to do it, but don’t quit your day job yet, my

He creates not only the musical but physical

friend. You’re pretty good at it, and a sound this

stability on his side of the stage. The tone and

big needs somebody to ride herd over it. 

depth of his bass playing has allowed the band

And ride herd over it he does. His voice, big-

to move from rock to dance music and beyond.

hearted and open, thoroughly decent no matter

One of the first things I noticed about U2 was

how hard he tries. Now he’s a great frontman.

that underneath the guitar and the bass, they

Against the odds, he is not your mom’s standard

have these very modern rhythms going on.

skinny, ex-junkie archetype. He has the physique

Rather than a straight 2 and 4, Larry often plays

of a rugby player . . . well, an ex-rugby player.

with a lot of syncopation, and that connects

Shaman, shyster, one of the greatest and most

the band to modern dance textures. The drums

endearingly naked messianic complexes in rock

often sounded high and tight, and he was

and roll. God bless you, man! It takes one to

swinging down there, and this gave the band a

know one, of course. 

unique profile and allowed their rock textures to soar above on a bed of his rhythm. 

You see, every good Irish and Italian-Irish front man knows that before James Brown there

Now Larry, of course, besides being an in-

was Jesus. So hold the McDonald arches on

credible drummer, bears the burden of being the

the stage set, boys, we are not ironists. We are

band’s requisite “good-looking member,” some-

creations of the heart and of the earth and of the

thing we somehow overlooked in the E Street

stations of the cross—there’s no getting out of it.

Band. We have to settle for “charismatic.” Girls

He is gifted with an operatic voice and a beauti-

love on Larry Mullen! I have a female assistant

ful falsetto rare among strong rock singers. But

that would like to sit on Larry’s drum stool. A

most important, his is a voice shot through with

male one, too. We all have our crosses to bear.

self-doubt. That’s what makes that big sound

Bono . . . where do I begin? Jeans designer, soon-to-be World Bank operator, just plain

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work. It is this element of Bono’s talent—along with his beautiful lyric writing—that gives the

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often-celestial music of U2 its fragility and its

home and as quest. How do you find God unless

realness. It is the questioning, the constant

he’s in your heart? In your desire? In your feet? I

questioning in Bono’s voice, where the band

believe this is a big part of what’s kept their band

stakes its claim to its humanity and declares its

together all of these years. 

commonality with us. 

See, bands get formed by accident, but they

Now Bono’s voice often sounds like it’s shouting

don’t survive by accident. It takes will, intent, a

not over top of the band but from deep within it.

sense of shared purpose, and a tolerance for your

“Here we are, Lord, this mess, in your image.”

friends’ fallibilities—and they of yours. And that

He delivers all of this with great drama and an

only evens the odds. U2 has not only evened the

occasional smirk that says, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.”

odds but they’ve beaten them by continuing to do

He’s one of the great front men of the past

their finest work and remaining at the top of their

twenty years. He is also one of the only

game—and the charts—for thirty years. I feel a

musicians to devote his personal faith and the

great affinity for these guys as people as well as

ideals of his band into the real world in a way

musicians.

that remains true to rock’s earliest implications

This band has carried their faith in the great

of freedom and connection, and the possibility

inspirational and resurrective power of rock

of something better.

and roll. It never faltered, only a little bit. They

Now the band’s beautiful songwriting—”Pride

believed in themselves, but more importantly,

(In The Name of Love),” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,”

they believed in “you, too.” Thank you Bono, the

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,”

Edge, Adam, and Larry.

“One,” “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Beautiful Day”—reminds us of the stakes that the band always plays for. It’s an incredible songbook. In their music you hear the spirituality as

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—BRuce spRingsteen, IN MARCH 2005 WHEN INDUCTING U2 INTO THE ROCK AND ROLL & HALL OF FAME

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chapter

1

FouR Boys nisi

Dominus Frustra,” goes the motto of Mount

Temple Comprehensive School, the high school where back in 1976 four teenage students formed the band that

B e l o w : schoolboy adam was “affable

and charming” in tinted glasses, afghan coat, and golden curls.

would become U2: “If not the master, in vain.” Eleven years after the day that the four—plus a few more who soon fell by the wayside—formed their schoolboy band, U2 were indeed the masters of the rock world, and they have retained their preeminence ever since. Unlike many senior statesmen of rock, U2 refuse to coast on their legendary hits. U2 look to the present and to the future. Now in their fifties, they continue to grow as musicians, adding new fans all the time. Mount Temple Comprehensive was never a school of rock excellence. It was created out of an amalgamation of several previous schools just before the four boys entered their teens, and it was a school that did not conform to the norms of the Irish nation. Ireland is and was a predominantly Roman Catholic country, where the church played a very influential part in national life. But Mount Temple was different: it was the capital Dublin’s first coed, nondenominational comprehensive school, admitting kids of all levels of academic ability. In short, it was a school for nonconformists, for kids whose horizons were wider than those laid down by what was still in the 1970s a small, church-dominated island nation. The oldest member of U2, Adam Clayton, was certainly nonconformist. He wasn’t even Irish. Born on March 13, 1960,

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idly drinking coffee from a flask in class, wearing tinted glasses, a long Afghan sheepskin coat, and even, perched on top of his golden curls, a yellow plastic construction worker’s safety helmet. Paul Hewson, on the other hand, was a noisy, cranky baby in the months after his birth in Dublin on May 10, 1960, to post office middlemanager Bob and homemaker Iris, only ceasing a B oV e : malahide, the coastal resort town outside dublin, where

the well-to-do clayton family lived.

to bawl when he went to school, where he was bright, lively, and gregarious, but at times confrontational. He was always a talker, which he put down to his mother’s family, the Rankins, which includes several salesmen among his

in Chinnor, Oxfordshire, Adam was the son of

forebears and which he believes might have

Brian Clayton, a former Royal Air Force pilot

been Jewish before conversion to Church of

who had moved into civil aviation, and Jo, an air

Ireland Protestantism. Mixed marriages between

stewardess. After a stint in Kenya when Adam

Catholic (Bob) and Protestant (Iris) were rare in

was small, which he remembers as a semi-

Ireland, and Paul squeezed his own way through

paradise, his father got a job with the Irish airline

the religious dilemma of the competing faiths of

Aer Lingus on the transatlantic route. The family

his parents when he befriended Derek Rowen,

moved to coastal Malahide, eight miles from

whose family were Plymouth Brethren, the sect

Dublin, whose golf and yacht clubs, and

that rejected church altogether, finding truth only

substantial Protestant population in a country

in the literal word of the Bible.

where twenty-nine out of thirty people were Catholic, made it feel like an outpost of England.

him a precocious understanding of the greater

Adam’s grades failed to repay his parents’

world outside his little patch of Ireland, Paul’s

investment in his old-fashioned private

gave him the craving for finding his own

schooling (“You are an ass,” his headmaster

spiritual path in a country where so much

told him, “a complete washout”), so at the age

religious life was more about national identity

of fifteen he was sent to Mount Temple to com-

than God. Not that Derek—later nicknamed

plete his education for free. Though no good at

Guggi, just as Paul became better known as

school, Adam had some things going for him: he

Bono—was a shrinking violet. Together with Fionan

loved rock music, and had acquired an Ibanezcopy bass guitar; he had spent a summer with a friend on the so-called “hippie trail” in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his eyes were opened to a totally different world; and he was so affable and charming that he could get away with sitting

6

Where Adam Clayton’s upbringing had given

“You are an ass,”

his headmaster told him, “a complete wash-out.”

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F o u r B oy s

Hanvey—later known as Gavin Friday—the best friends formed a trio of rock music–loving, spiritually curious teenage eccentrics who needed to be handy with their fists. Overlooking their

7

“Paul: bright, lively, and gregarious, but at times confrontational.”

modest but comfortable homes in Cedarwood Road, Ballymun Flats were seven high-rise blocks

a hotbed of chapel Christianity, choral singing,

built to vertically rehouse Dublin’s council

rugby football, and socialism. Garvin’s work with

tenants from some of the worst slums in Western

the engineering firm Plessey took the family to

Europe, and Ballymun’s rough lads targeted their

Dublin when Dave was a year old and his brother,

middle-class neighbors in street attacks.

Dick, three. Taking after their parents, both Evans

The consolation of faith became suddenly,

boys loved music and were good at school.

acutely, and tragically vital to Paul at the age

Though traditional enough to attend Protestant

of fourteen. Early in September 1974, his

Church of Ireland services as a matter of course,

maternal grandparents celebrated their fiftieth

they were both of a scientific cast of mind and

wedding anniversary. Always a fun-lover,

fascinated by electronics, with Dick making his

granddad Rankin overcelebrated and was found

own yellow Flying V-styled electric guitar in the

dead the following morning. This was the cause

backyard shed, which was coveted by Dave, who

of sadness, but he was an elderly man who

had to make do with a secondhand Spanish guitar

went the way he would have wanted. But at his funeral, his daughter Iris was so frail she had to

B e l o w : teenage Bono was “often left alone in a house

be supported, and then she collapsed and lost

of grief to brood upon fate and the meaning of life.”

consciousness altogether. After the diagnosis of an acute and untreatable brain hemorrhage, her life support system was switched off four days later on September 10. With his father and older brother Norman out at work by day, over the following months and years the schoolboy Paul was often left alone in a house of grief to brood upon fate and the meaning of life—if any meaning were to be found. Back in Malahide, life was far happier for another Mount Temple student and, like Adam Clayton, a “blow-in” to the Republic of Ireland from the United Kingdom. Dave Evans had been born on August 8, 1961, in Barking, East London, to Garvin, an engineer, and Gwenda, a teacher, who originally came from the tough South Wales’ coalmining and steel town of Llanelli,

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l e F t: dave evans (the edge) grew up in a musical household taking piano lessons and playing “a secondhand spanish guitar bought for him by his mom when he was seven.” B e l o w : after a year’s piano lessons, larry’s teacher suggested he try another instrument instead.

leader for all of ten minutes. Unlike his energetic and high-achieving father, Larry Sr., Larry Mullen Jr. was not an outstanding student or sportsman at school—but he was no dummy either. He was born in Artane, Dublin, on October 31, 1961, to a father who had trained for the Catholic priesthood but changed his mind to become a civil servant, while his mother, Maureen, had been a typist but was happy to become a homemaker in their comfortable middle-class Dublin suburb close to the sea and countryside. The Mullens’s bought for him by his mom when he was seven,

oldest child, Cecilia, is named after the patron

in addition to lessons on the family piano. Beatles

saint of music, and Maureen encouraged her

fans since they were kids, the Evans boys’ record

eight-year-old son in that direction too, but after

collection expanded to include the Rolling Stones,

a year’s piano lessons his teacher suggested

David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Slade, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Irish powerrock trio Taste, starring guitar hero Rory Gallagher. Though when U2 first found success Bono liked to romanticize all four members as “rejects . . . going nowhere” until they found a purpose together in the band, this is least true for Dave Evans—later renamed the Edge—who was intellectually and temperamentally equipped to do well in whatever he chose. Nor was it true of the youngest member of the band, its founder member and, as he joked, its

“Dave Evans was

intellectually equipped to do well in whatever he chose.”

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F o u r B oy s

9

“Bowie

was much more responsible for the aesthetic of punk rock than he’s been given credit for . . .” –Bono, Rolling Stone magazine

he try another instrument instead. He liked the sound of the drums he’d heard played in a marching band, so he washed cars and mowed lawns to raise the money for his first lessons, but hated having to relearn music theory and the lonely practice of paradiddles, flams, and the other tricks of the drummer’s trade. Resentful at being told to trim his golden locks by the Artane Boys Band, the good-looking Larry quit, and for a while nourished his love of the drums by saving £12 for a Japanese toy kit. His parents encouraged Larry by mail-ordering great drumming showcase records by the likes of jazzmen Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, and the rocker Sandy Nelson whose instrumental “Let There Be Drums” was a favorite. Larry was also inspired by the records Cecilia was bringing home by the Rolling Stones

subjects. Musically, his dad got Larry into the

and glam rockers David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy

Post Office Workers’ Union band, which the boy

Music, David Essex, and the Glitter Band.

loved, traveling the country and having fun,

But glam rock’s great year, 1973, was one of sadness for the Mullens’s. Larry has never stated in public more than the bare fact that this

culminating in playing Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March 1975. Above all, though, Larry wanted to rock. At

was the year when his nine-year-old younger

the start of the new school term in September

sister Mary died. That same year Larry made

1976, the fourteen-year-old—as suggested by

the transition from primary (elementary) to

his dad—posted a message on the school notice

secondary (high) school, but with the trauma

board saying he had wasted a lot of money on

of Mary’s death, their father accepted without

drums and wanted to get together with

a fight the fact that Larry was better suited to

musicians who’d wasted a lot of money on

Mount Temple Comprehensive than the two

guitars. That Saturday, September 25, a bunch

more prestigious schools originally in his sights.

of teenage boys gathered in Larry’s mother’s

In the event, Larry settled down well at Mount

kitchen in suburban Artane to take the very first

Temple, with math, English, and art his strongest

step in becoming the biggest band in the world.

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chapter

2

FeedBack to the hype to u2 an

end-of-terrace house with the benefit of a driveway with room to park two cars

nose to tail and a garage for a third, 60 Rosemount Avenue, Artane, Dublin, is as neat but nondescript a birthplace for a global rock legend as there has ever been. That September Saturday, Larry cleared as much space as he could in the kitchen by folding up the table and stacking the chairs so he could fit in his drumkit and whoever turned up to play guitar. Larry’s friend Peter Martin had a guitar and an amplifier but couldn’t play, and another boy in the year below Larry called Ivan McCormick had an electric guitar, so we turned up too. Virtually inseparable, Dave and his older brother Dick Evans arrived with their homemade yellow Flying V guitar, having practiced some Taste and Rory Gallagher licks, and their friend Adam Clayton turned up with his brown Ibanez-copy bass, which, while not a guitar, was clearly something a band would need, never mind that he didn’t seem much of a musician. Least equipped of all, Paul Hewson got a lift on the back of a friend’s motorbike without a guitar but claiming to be able to play bits of Santana’s album Abraxas. The songs they managed to play together—very badly, by all accounts—were chestnuts everyone knew: “Brown Sugar” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Though it soon became apparent that Paul had overstated his playing prowess, what he had was self-confidence, personality, and ideas. And while Adam was no natural Paul McCartney or John Entwistle on bass, he had traveled abroad, acted like a man of the o p p o s I t e : Bono hams it up for the photographer, while the edge wears his trademark gibson explorer guitar.

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l e F t: phil chevron of the dublin band the radiators from space, whose punk-rock example inspired Feedback. B e l o w : guitar hero rory gary gallagher was an early inspiration to the band, particularly the evans’ brothers.

world, and tossed around such cool rock terms as “gig,” “PA,” and “feedback” as if he were a seasoned musician. This last term gave this baby band their name: not just the noise made when a microphone or guitar pickups get so close to the amplifier that the ambient electronic hum starts looping into an ever-louder squeal, but also the response from an audience or listener sitting in judgment. There was no school on Wednesday afternoons at Mount Temple, so their band Feedback gave the guys something to do after morning classes, with a sympathetic teacher arranging a schoolroom to rehearse in. Peter Martin dropped out very quickly, followed by Ivan McCormick. So Feedback were five, far outnumbering the songs they could play with any competence, and at that stage they had only one goal: to play the school talent contest to be held at the end of term (semester) in the gym. Having left school for college, Dick Evans couldn’t make the show, and the four-piece Feedback would play two songs. At Larry’s humorous suggestion, one was the Four Seasons’ 1960s song “Bye Bye Baby,” which the four of them knew as a hit single by the hugely popular Scottish boy band the Bay City Rollers. The other was a song that was also a huge hit of the era, Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” from the hard-working English rock star’s best-selling live album, Frampton Comes Alive! Whereas the original was really just a vehicle for Frampton’s quacking guitar solo played through a talk box,

12

u2: r e Vo lu t I o n

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Feedback reimagined it as a prayer to God. That was down to Bono, who at the same time as he was picturing himself as a rock star, polishing his reputation as one of the biggest characters at school and courting the very beautiful fellow student Alison Stewart, was also in the growing grip of an evangelical but eccentric Christian faith that would develop over the following years. Feedback’s performance of “Show Me the Way” not only thrilled the whooping, stomping audience—it was a revelation to the boys themselves. They felt they had the power— especially Paul, who yearned to connect—to engage with passion and commitment. Only the teachers awarding the prize were less than impressed, but that didn’t matter. Larry had only

a B oV e : a flyer advertising an early show when u2

were still unknowns—entry for less than a dollar!

just turned fifteen and was not looking far ahead, but school dunce Adam suddenly had a focus, as

was only now getting to hear of punk rock. While

did Paul, whose academic record made him a

any band going punk was making quite a state-

borderline college candidate; even Dave, who was

ment of rebellion, by sticking to a repertoire of

clever and knew it, felt that overnight the band

Eagles and Moody Blues a band was making no

was the thing to which he wanted to commit.

less a statement of conservatism. And that was

Feedback spread the word and got them-

not true of the boys in Feedback; they were look-

selves another gig: a Saturday night school disco

ing to the future—they just didn’t know what it

on Dublin’s Northside the following Easter of

sounded like yet.

1977. They scraped together more equipment,

For Dave, seeing the mod revival trio the Jam

rehearsed at Adam’s house, and added a few

explode out of seemingly nowhere like a bolt

more songs, with Adam favoring the Eagles,

from the blue on Top of the Pops—the UK singles

Dave faithful to Rory Gallagher, and Paul

chart show also broadcast on Irish TV—showed

choosing the Moody Blues’ 1967 soft-rock

that lack of sophistication and finesse was no bar

classic “Nights in White Satin.” Fattening the

to making exciting music that teenagers their own

lineup from among their friends that night with

age could really relate to as their own.

a flautist and female backing singers, Feedback

Among the punk albums Adam brought

did not go down nearly as well with the crowd

back to Dublin were two from the New York

as the other act on the bill, Rat Salad. A little

New Wave that were to prove profound

behind the times in terms of what was happen-

influences on the group for years to come: the

ing in London, Manchester, New York, and other

arty, atmospheric guitar rock of Marquee Moon

big cities in the UK and the United States, Dublin

by Television, and the no less arty but far more

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suggest a knowing degree of familiarity with the music scene. It was a bluff, and of course not the last name change. To be a punk at that time in Ireland’s conservative, even repressive climate took courage, and being in a gang of like-minded people gave any punk a sense of not being alone in standing out. Already inclined to eccentricity, Paul’s friends Derek Rowen and Fionan Hanvey led the way in embracing punk as part of a greater group identity founded on surreal humor and private catchphrases, inspired by the UK TV comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, plus a flair for dressing up and playing parts, and a serious enquiry into spiritual truth through Bible study. At first this core of friends called themselves the Village, and then Lypton Village, a B oV e : Bonavox, the dublin hearing-aid store that inspired

with Derek becoming Guggi, Fionan Hanvey

Bono’s name (bona vox is latin for “good voice”).

becoming Gavin Friday, and with others being called Pod, Strongman, and Day-Vid. Obviously Paul could not stay plain old Paul, so at first he

confrontational Horses by Patti Smith. The

became Steinhegvanhuysenolegbangbangbang,

centerpiece song on the latter, “Gloria,” opened

then Hausman, and finally Bono Vox, after the

with a line about Jesus dying for somebody

Dublin hearing aid shop Bonavox (which means

else’s sins, and this resonated with particular

“good voice” in Latin). In turn Paul named

meaning for a band whose two front men were

Dave—who was not a core member of the

practicing Christians. Much easier to play,

Village, living as he did in a different neighbor-

however, were the three-chord songs of another

hood—the Edge, after the angularity of his head,

New York New Wave group, the Ramones, and

hair, and facial features.

with the emergence of the Radiators from Space and the Boomtown Rats proving that Dubliners

as Feedback, the Hype were playing very small

could be punks with their own original songs and

local gigs whenever they could get them. As

style, Feedback found a direction to follow,

well as adding covers of songs by the Stranglers

despite some reluctance from their always

and Ramones to their set, they were now begin-

cautious youngest member, Larry.

ning to write their own. Bono was first with “The

First off, the name: the best punk names

14

By October 1977, a year after they had formed

Fool,” the Edge added “Life on a Distant Planet,”

were both monosyllabic and bold—the Jam, the

and—in rehearsal, which now included Saturdays

Clash, the Damned. Out went Feedback and in

and Sundays as well as Wednesday afternoons—

came the Hype, another bit of hipster jargon to

“Street Missions.” Like those of Patti Smith and

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F e e d Bac k to t h e h y pe to u2

Television as well as the Boomtown Rats, their

in 1960, sparking a Cold War crisis. Bono also

songs were not straightforward up-tempo three-

took time to realize that U2 would be understood

chord constructions; they would often incorporate

as “you-too,” embracing audience and band

a dramatic change of time signature or seemingly

inclusively. In short, U2 was a more inspired

incongruous instrumental passage, masking their

name than the band knew at the time.

lack of slick ensemble togetherness as musicians.

With their streamlined new name, the moment

Though the least proficient player was Adam,

brought to a head the growing suspicion that the

the musician who increasingly didn’t fit in with

older, bearded Dick Evans was as much a misfit

the band’s general progress was the oldest, the

visually as he was musically. Awkwardly,

Edge’s brother, Dick, whose experimental

especially for younger brother Dave, he was

excursions on guitar were proving a nightmare

informed that he was no longer wanted, on the

for Larry on drums to follow.

grounds that he was a member of the old group,

In the history of every great band comes an early lucky break, and the Hype’s came when

15

the Hype, but not of the brand-new four-piece U2, which was replacing it.

Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann), got in touch with Mount Temple’s music teacher Albert Bradshaw to film

B e l o w : an early Virgin prunes lineup (from left:

gavin Friday, guggi, dick evans, and pod.

the choir for a youth-oriented TV show called Youngline. Bono got wind of this, and talked the TV producer into auditioning his band too. Pretending that the catchy Ramones numbers they played were Hype originals, the band made a positive impression and were called into the TV studio to perform a couple of numbers. It was a moment of truth, and at that point it was decided that the Hype no longer represented who they were and where they were going. Adam knew Steve Averill, a former member of the Radiators from Space who had gone back to his job as a graphic designer, and the band sought his advice. The Flying Tigers was one suggestion they rejected, the Blazers another; but they all agreed that U2, which would look powerful as a graphic on posters, record sleeves, and badges, was the best of a so-so bunch. With his flying background, Adam was alone in knowing that the U2 was the U.S. spy plane famously shot down over Russia just four days before Bono’s birthday

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Dick Evans accepted his fate with good grace, and went on to join his fellow oddballs in the Virgin Prunes. Driven by Adam’s ambition,

they’d brought with them were in no doubt, U2 themselves were amazed when they won. With their £500 safe in the wallet of Adam’s

meanwhile, U2 were aiming for the stars. Three

airline pilot father, Brian, the four were eager to

days before that final Hype show over St. Patrick’s

learn the steps they’d need to take as they made

weekend in March 1978, even before their official

the transition from school group to professional

debut gig, U2 had taken a significant step.

band. Bono articulated the vision but it was Adam, who had greater freedom of the phone

FRustRation and tRagedy

at home, who made the calls and cultivated the contacts. Punk’s can-do attitude had nourished an explosion of music journalism as well as of the

In 1978 St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday. That

music itself, and since the summer of 1977 Dublin

evening, the beer brand Harp Lager (owned by

had had its own music paper, Hot Press. Adam

the famous Guinness Brewery) cosponsored,

contacted their journalist Bill Graham in the hope

with the Irish branch of the U.S. record company

of not only piquing his interest but also of picking

CBS (subsequently bought by Sony), a talent

his brain. When he saw them rehearse he

contest in the city of Limerick, some two hours by

was intrigued by the Edge’s atmospheric, almost

rail to Dublin’s west. The prize was £500 and

psychedelic guitar playing. Sensing not only

a CBS Ireland record deal.

musical potential but an honesty of spirit in the

Though they’d entered as the Hype, the four turned up as U2 with a posse of supporters from Lypton Village and Mount Temple. When they arrived, they found that they would, for the first time, be playing on a proper stage with PA and lighting. More dauntingly, they found themselves up against a number of showbands—cover bands who made a good living on the dancehall circuit, taking advantage of Ireland’s protectionist restriction on the TV and radio broadcast of overseas musicians. U2 played three numbers: “Life on a Distant Planet,” “Street Missions,” and, written in tribute to their heroes Television, “The TV Song.” Not even Bono disputed that they were the least slick act in the competition. Though the fan club

r I g h t: winning “pop group ‘78” in limerick set u2 on

their way to the recording studio with a £500 prize.

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r I g h t: horslips, the first Irish rock band

to make a name overseas.

band, Bill wrote a short piece in Hot Press with pictures of the band from a photo session they’d paid for out of their winnings in which—save for Larry who cautiously remained wedded to his flares—they debuted their New Wave look from No Romance, Dublin’s punk clothing shop owned by the Moylett sisters (one of the sisters, Regine, would go on to look after U2’s press in the UK for many years). More importantly, Bill Graham urged U2 to get a manager, and he put them in touch with the ideal candidate: Paul McGuinness.

company financed U2’s debut recording

Paul McGuinness was schooled by Jesuits

session at Dublin’s Keystone Studios. But

but dropped out of Trinity College, Dublin, to

without adequate production expertise helping

pursue a career in movie production or band

out this inexperienced band, nothing resulted

management. Through contacts he’d landed

of release quality.

the job of location manager for John Boorman’s

At least U2 got a demo tape out of it, which

sci-fi movie Zardoz, starring Sean Connery.

they could hawk around venues in search of

Through another friend he saw what it took to

gigs. Long before the days of the CD (never mind

launch the career of Horslips as Ireland’s first

downloads or streaming), musicians had very few

rock band with international appeal, and he

means to publicize, or even communicate one-to-

found himself managing a group called Spud

one, what they could do. The cheap, home-

while making a living as a movie technician.

recordable cassette tape rather than the expen-

Lacking even a tape recorder, Paul had to listen to their demo cassette tape on his answering machine, but it was seeing U2 live, with Bono’s

sively pressed vinyl record was the main tool and currency of any starter band hoping to get noticed. U2 had also got into the habit of cassette-

urgent need to connect face-to-face with the audi-

recording their rehearsals, so they would have a

ence, that clinched his interest. On May 25, 1978,

record of the riffs and rhythms with the potential

Paul McGuinness agreed to become U2’s manager,

to be developed into songs. Bono would free-

but he took his time sealing his commitment.

associate lyrics in what the others called

The band, meanwhile, had redeemed

“Bongolese” to fit the songs, but there was always

CBS Ireland’s record contract offer when the

a thread of heartfelt self-expression to them. From

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that time, “Out of Control” expressed his

9, 1978, U2 secured their biggest gig so far as

existential angst at turning eighteen and realizing

support to the chart-topping English punk band

how little control one has over the events of their

the Stranglers, for which they were paid £50,

life from birth, while “Shadows and Tall Trees”

though were dismayed by the headline act’s over-

was inspired by William Golding’s novel Lord of

bearing attitude toward them. To make ends meet

the Flies.

Adam was forced to get a van-driving job, while

That summer, Bono, the Edge, and Larry joined Adam in leaving school, marking the

if he was better off committing to a career in

moment with their last gig at Mount Temple,

oil exploration. Though that summer U2 found

played in the car park. With varying degrees

a fresh and enthusiastic audience in Ireland’s

of enthusiasm, their parents agreed to help

second city of Cork, frustration at how their

support them in their dream of making it as a

musical technique lagged behind their ambitious

rock band rather than going to college or get-

ideas would erupt in rows, usually initiated by the

ting a proper job. The cautious Larry, however,

combative Bono who, now living alone with his

got employment as an office junior for an oil

father, Bob, constantly bristled at authority and

exploration company, which meant that

the world’s failure to meet his ideals.

sometimes another drummer would have to deputize for him on weekday evening gigs. What he did not realize for a little while

A second recording session produced a better demo tape, cassette copies of which, however, failed to attract much interest when

was U2’s guilty secret: with the exception of

sent to UK record companies in the hope of

Adam, U2 were practicing Christians, with

a deal. It was a tough time, but fate tragically

Bono and the Edge getting deeply into Bible

intervened and pulled U2 together just when

study along with others in Lypton Village. The

frustration might have defeated them. That

bond between U2 and the other Villagers was

November of 1978 Larry’s mother Maureen was

strengthened as the Virgin Prunes, who would

killed in a road accident. Bono, who had lost his

often share a bill with U2 as almost their twin

mother four years before, offered support and

band, coalesced into that unique proposition: a

consolation born of the same awful experience.

Christian confrontational arty punk rock group,

The cautious Larry and reckless Bono bonded

who would even throw pig offal at the audience

as never before, and from then on the drummer

to make their point. This was not something

had no doubt in his mind that the band was his

Paul McGuinness approved of, but U2 them-

first priority.

selves were ready to compromise. What Paul McGuinness could not afford

18

the ever-cautious Larry was beginning to wonder

During the next eighteen months U2 would hammer on the door until they achieved a

to do was bankroll U2 as they grew in

breakthrough to the next stage: a major record

experience and spread their wings beyond Dublin

deal, and a reputation as one of the acts to

as Ireland’s punk scene grew. On September

watch as the 1980s dawned.

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19

a B oV e : u2 in their all-important tour van.

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r I g h t: u2 “relaxing”

in a borrowed london apartment. larry’s harrington jacket and doc martens were the youth uniform of the day.

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chapter

3

FRom iReland to island the

Edge had visited the United States for a short

holiday, determined to buy a better electric guitar and settling on the futuristic shard-shaped Gibson Explorer, his trademark guitar for years to come. But the great leap forward in defining a unique sound for U2 came from Bono who, impressed by the

o p p o s I t e : u2 posing

backstage. B e l o w : Bono would do almost anything to connect with audiences seeing the band for the first time.

Pink Floyd track “Sheep,” which features echodelay guitar, prompted the Edge to buy a Memory Man analogue echo/delay unit. Where standard punk-rock guitar roared, the Edge plucked, but his single notes and terse chords would echo and reverberate to evoke both the far horizon and inner space. Motivated more than ever now they had a signature sound to distinguish them from such postpunk guitar groups as Magazine, the Cure, XTC, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the four cut an even better demo tape in the hope of drumming up record company interest.

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In December 1978 U2 found themselves

cool, and not for them. With Bono, the Edge, and

supporting the Greedy Bastards at the Stardust

other Lypton Villagers increasingly under the

nightclub in Dublin. Fronted by the charismatic

influence of a fundamentalist Christian Bible study

Phil Lynott, one of Ireland’s few bona fide rock

and prayer group called Shalom, U2 were not to be

stars, and including other members of Thin Lizzy,

tempted from the paths of righteousness.

along with two refugees from the Sex Pistols,

Bono was to be tested when, dismayed by

the Greedy Bastards were a good time rock ’n’

repeated rejections from record company A&R

roll band that reveled in their all-boys-together

(artists and repertoire) to whom they’d mailed

excess. While treated well by the headliner, U2

cassettes of their demo tapes, as winter set in at

could not help but feel that bad behavior was not

the end of 1978 he decided to go to London for

B e l o w : adam playing his Fender precision bass at a gig.

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From Ireland to Island

25

picked up from drama lessons he and Gavin Friday had been taking. Even though U2’s songs and musicianship remained work in progress, the shows became “capital E Events,” in the parlance of Dublin’s younger rock fans, as reflected in the pages of Hot Press by its writer Bill Graham and editor Niall Stokes, and on RTE’s evening radio rock show hosted by Dave Fanning. U2 had their detractors, including youth gang the Black Catholics who tried to disrupt their gigs, which stirred controversy and fueled growing grassroots excitement about the band. What they still didn’t have was an obvious hit song that might rapidly repay any record company that took the chance a B oV e : released only in Ireland, u2’s debut

three-track single, Three.

on them. The record deal they had with CBS Ireland was renegotiated to finance the release of U2’s debut three-track single, titled

a week with his girlfriend, Ali Stewart, having

“Three.” Released in September 1979 with

promised her father that her virtue would

“Out of Control” on the A-side (as chosen by

remain intact, to try the personal touch with

listeners of Dave Fanning’s radio show), along

influential music journalists. Though he made

with “Stories for Boys” and “Boy/Girl” on the

UK music press contacts that would later bear

flip, its small pressing run quickly sold out.

fruit, Bono felt U2 had little time to make a

Though not a particularly musically auspicious

breakthrough before his father insisted he get

debut, the sleeve’s strong graphic black, white,

a job or attend college.

and red color scheme would be a recognizable

Fortunately, at home in Ireland things began to look up in May of 1979 when U2 played the first of six consecutive Saturday afternoon concerts at Dublin’s Dandelion Market underground car park. Attracting a younger audience than would be allowed into venues serving alcohol, U2 honed their stagecraft, with Bono incorporating theatrical routines with cigarette lighters, projecting silhouettes through a bedsheet, and using other devices

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U2 visual trademark both early in their career and again more recently.

“U2 had their

detractors, including youth gang the Black Catholics who tried to disrupt their gigs.”

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From Ireland to Island

27

a B oV e : Bono and the edge would eventually become u2’s accelerator to adam and larry’s brakes. o p p o s I t e : Bono brings the word to the people.

But as 1979 and the decade drew to a close, an enthusiastic—but by no means huge—fan base in the very small nation of Ireland would

important talent pool where the big record companies fished for future stars. Even before they boarded the plane to fly

not pay the bills. The Edge’s parents now made

across the Irish Sea, the mini-tour almost came

it clear that it was time for him to attend college

unstuck when the Edge sprained his left hand in

and read for a science degree. But they came

a minor road accident with Adam at the wheel,

through with a loan—as did the other parents,

and had to play through the pain in a cast.

even Bono’s skeptical father—to finance what

Playing London’s New Wave circuit of club-sized

looked like a last throw of the dice to secure

venues, U2 attracted respectable though hardly

that all-important major record deal: a tour of

world-beating crowds of the curious, helped by

London. The British capital, along with New

a front cover feature in the UK music weekly

York and Los Angeles, was the world’s most

Record Mirror in November. However, none of

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l e F t: on stage at the sense of Ireland

Festival in london, with a backdrop demonstrating the graphic power of “u2” as a logo. B e l o w : contrary to popular belief, u2 always had a sense of humor. o p p o s I t e : u2 performing onstage circa 1980 with an animated Bono.

was hardly the Rose Bowl, but was still where only the biggest acts touring from overseas played. For a home-grown junior band, booking the National Stadium was a gamble that might have backfired; not only did the band rise to the occasion and play a great set with families and friends in attendance as well as a decent crowd, but also among that crowd was the man who would grant U2’s most fervent the UK record company A&R personnel attracted

wish. A tall, genial product of England’s private

by the press buzz felt inclined to commit. U2 returned to Dublin broke and disheartened, save for one, brilliantly cheeky idea. Long before cell phones and the Internet, there was far less instant, verifiable information flying about, so you could write your own truth. Armed with their Record Mirror cover story, as well as their first in Hot Press and an almost clean sweep of the paper’s readers’ poll that year, U2 spread the word that their London tour had been a sensation, and they would now be booking a homecoming victory lap in Ireland, culminating in a show on February 26, 1980, at the National Stadium in Dublin. Holding fewer than 3,000, it

“Booking the

National Stadium in Dublin was a gamble that might have backfired.”

28

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From Ireland to Island

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school system—like so many others in the

Records, and subject to key colleagues agreeing

company he worked for, Island Records, founded

with him, he offered U2 a contract.

by former Harrow schoolboy Chris Blackwell—

Bouncing back to London to play the Sense of

“Captain” Nick Stewart had been intrigued

Ireland festival, promoted by the Ireland Chamber of

by U2’s London shows but needed to be sure

Commerce as a showcase for new talent, along with

before he could build a solid case for the company

the likes of Berlin and the Virgin Prunes, on March

to invest in a record contract. Under the im-

19, U2 did what they needed to do to convince Nick

pression that their playing Ireland’s National

Stewart’s Island colleagues to back his judgment.

Stadium meant they were already superstars

Four days later, in the ladies’ restroom at London’s

in their own backyard, he flew over to see them

Lyceum theatre, where Echo & the Bunnymen, the

again. Though this stadium show was rather

Liverpool rock four-piece who would rival them in

more modest than he’d expected, Stewart was

the UK for the next few years, were headlining, U2

impressed by what he saw. On behalf of Island

signed an international deal with Island Records.

“There is a root arrogance in any

writer; a hugely arrogant assumption that anyone is going to listen to them.” —Bono

30

u2: r e Vo lu t I o n

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o p p o s I t e pag e :

Bono sees the light. l e F t: u2 “reflecting” on a hotel roof.

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CHAPTER

4

Boy Island Records was the right record company for U2. Founded by the wealthy white Anglo-Jamaican Chris Blackwell as a tiny independent record label in 1959 and

O P P O S I T E : Bono takes a

breather. B E L O W : U2’s first UK release, the single “11 O’Clock Tick Tock.”

moving to London to import Jamaican ska records for sale to the UK capital’s growing West Indian community, Island then went on to produce its own hits like Millie’s “My Boy Lollipop,” before diversifying into rock with such legends as Traffic, Free, Bad Company, Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Nick Drake, Mott the Hoople, and Larry’s glam-rock favorite, Roxy Music. By 1980, its biggest act reflected the company’s Jamaican roots in the form of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Bob was ailing, though, with the cancer that would kill him the following year. Where other record companies had leapt in to sign any punk and post-punk act with even the slightest promise, Island had held back save for the B-52s. But they needed to refresh their artist roster in the new decade and, having an independent-minded and offshore relationship with the UK in common, the Irish four-piece were the perfect fit for Island. The UK’s biggestselling and most influential music paper, the New Musical Express (or NME, as it’s more commonly referred to by readers), had written a cover feature raving about the band, and

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“Island needed U2

to release a new record before the buzz faded and moved on to another act.” Island needed U2 to release a new record before the buzz faded and moved on to another act. With so little recording experience, and none of it satisfactory, U2 needed a sympathetic record producer to understand their vision and capture it on a record that would need to stand out among all the others vying for attention. Island suggested Martin Hannett, who was working with the Manchester group Joy Division (the forerunner of New Order) on their second album. Though melancholy in the extreme—their singer Ian Curtis would commit suicide that same year— Joy Division were a U2 favorite, and the Irish band were intrigued by what this pioneer of sculpting sound through an eccentric array of

bill to Wah Heat! and Pink Military at Manchester

analog effects could do for their songs. Though

Polytechnic. Excitingly futuristic in feel, the

disconcerted by the intense atmosphere Hannett

Edge’s guitar playing was unlike anyone else’s at

cultivated in the recording studio (where he played

the time. And unlike every other post-punk front

Wagner and small-hours Frank Sinatra ballads for

man, Bono would climb the speakers and light-

inspiration), U2 recorded their first Island single,

ing rig—anything to engage emotionally with

“11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” a song inspired by a show

their audience; he was as much a charismatic

Bono had attended by Goth rock legends the

preacher as a singer. The crowd loved them,

Cramps, taking its sepulchral atmosphere at face

and as the months went by U2 climbed from the

value, and rather missing the camp humor.

bottom of such bills to the top.

Though not a big hit, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock”

34

A B OV E : Recorded in December 1979 and released only in Ireland before the band signed to Island, U2’s rare second single “Another Day.”

Hannett was due to produce U2’s first album,

was a powerfully dramatic record, and the band

but the plans fell apart following the death of

celebrated by buying a van to make it easier

Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. A new producer, Steve

to play outside of Dublin. Sleeping in the van

Lilywhite, was found and their compatibility was

after gigs, U2 could afford a good PA and moni-

tested on a new single, “A Day Without Me,”

tor desk, and they began to build up their UK

the first completed track of their debut album

fan base with a succession of college gigs. This

sessions at Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios.

author first saw U2 that May of 1980, third on the

Recording in Dublin allowed the four, then on

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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35

a weekly wage of £25 each, to save money by continuing to live with their parents during the month in the studio that summer. Steve Lilywhite had produced XTC and the classic single “Hong Kong Garden” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, and had just finished recording Peter Gabriel’s daringly experimental third solo album, nicknamed Melt. Though he put Larry’s nose out of joint by remarking that the eighteen-year-old drummer struggled to keep time, Lilywhite found a special rapport with Adam, and the pair would contrive all sorts of playful experiments to make new sounds, like strumming bicycle spokes with a fork or smashing bottles. The creative energy also inspired Bono to complete, polish, and finalize lyrics he had semiimprovised and changed as songs developed

A B OV E : From their debut album, Boy, the anthemic single “I Will Follow.” B E L O W : Guggi’s brother Peter Rowen, age five, was the sleeve star of Boy.

over the course of live performances. As a statement of the belief in the pure spiritual

Lypton Villagers, U2 had long agreed to title their

strength of uncompromised childhood, as held

debut album Boy. Rather than a band portrait on

in particular by Bono and Guggi among the

the sleeve, as was conventional when introducing a new act to the market, the image was a monochrome photo of Guggi’s angelic five-year-old brother Peter Rowen, seemingly naked and staring at the camera (an image that for a while inadvertently proved controversial in the United States). First played live at that Manchester Polytechnic show in May, “I Will Follow” was Boy’s standout song, a cathartic cry of the pain and yearning Bono had felt since the death of his mother when he was fourteen. Even as the song developed in rehearsal, the powerful emotions that inspired it erupted in fury when Bono seized the Edge’s guitar to show him the correct degree of urgency with which the two-note riff needed to be played. Other highlights included “An Cat Dubh/Into The Heart,” poetically treating a brief digression Bono had taken from his relationship

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“Every

age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.”—BONO

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37

with Ali, and ”The Electric Co.,” which raged against the abuse of electro-convulsive therapy in the treatment of mental illness in Ireland. In many respects Boy was a typical postpunk album of the time in its shiny textures, nagging guitar, rhythms derived from the European “motoric” style rather than the American rhythm and blues of the “old wave” rock bands, and an atmosphere of enigmatic self-revelation veiled in mystery and dramatic suspense. In hindsight, Bono came to think that his singing was mannered, in the style of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Siouxsie Sioux, and he was yet to find his own, authentic voice. He is overstating the likeness, but in their ambition to express their conflicted, far from serene spirituality, U2 still hadn’t audibly shaken loose from their New Wave influences. Boy’s closest UK post-punk competitors that year were Empires and Dance, the third album by Scottish art-rockers Simple Minds, and another debut album, Crocodiles, by Liverpool’s Echo & the Bunnymen, which in many ways was more accomplished than Boy and would initially sell better in the main market for this kind of music —the UK. U2 were their support band at London’s Lyceum in September 1980 as the Irishmen took to the UK’s roads to promote Boy, which was to be released in October, during which time the worst rock ’n’ roll habit they picked up was a major Space Invaders habit at motorway service stations. Though all roughly contemporaries, U2 were a couple of years younger than these two rival bands and never felt it necessary to contend

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O P P O S I T E : Bono’s handwritten lyrics for “The

Electric Co.,” a song that raged against the abuse of electroconvulsive therapy in the treatment of mental illness in Ireland. A B OV E : U2 headlining at London’s most prestigious New Wave venue, the Lyceum, with Bono crowd-surfing (top).

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A B OV E : U2’s “patent sincerity and angst-hued rock resonated among young people facing unemployment as the

1980s recession deepened.”

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with the anxiety that, by reaching out to as many

A B OV E : Before Paul McGuinness took the management

people as possible all over the world, they were

reins, Adam was the one who put in the calls.

39

somehow compromising their artistic integrity— in short, selling out. While Echo & the Bunnymen

resonated among young people facing

would continue making great records, band

unemployment as the 1980s recession

tensions and the loudly maintained belief that

deepened, U2 were determined to conquer

playing to crowds larger than a certain size was

the cooler-than-thou metropolis. Booking four

somehow uncool kept them the property of the

consecutive Monday nights—always the quietest

cognoscenti rather than the mainstream. Simple

evening of the week—at the famed Marquee Club

Minds made a decision later in the 1980s to abandon

where the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience

high art for epic rock, but could not sustain their

had made their names back in the 1960s, U2 built

vast mid-’80s popularity into the 1990s.

their London audience in a month.

Though they would come to overtake their

Now with fan bases in Ireland and the UK,

rivals, for now U2 were growing organically

continental Europe was the next stop, with

as a band rather diligently executing a global

landfall in Amsterdam at the famed Melkweg 

takeover masterplan. While their main UK fan

(Milky Way) rock venue, where U2 were thrilled

base was in Scotland and the north of England,

to find that language was no barrier to

where their patent sincerity and angst-hued rock

converting the curious into full-blown fans.

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But would U2’s European sound and

four-piece bands with a flair for the big gesture

atmosphere of shadowed angst get lost in

were not going out of style in America any time

translation across the Atlantic?

soon, and the copies of Boy he’d mailed ahead of the U.S. release to American college radio

amerIca—and crIsIs

stations were getting a good response. Frank Barsalona was the biggest, most

Boy would not be released in the United States

respected rock talent agent in the United States,

until March 3, 1981, but U2’s manager Paul

his Premier Talent Agency working with

McGuinness wanted to maintain the momentum

promoters across the Continent to break acts

of growth. Though U2 were burgeoning in

from club level to stadium superstardom for

popularity in the UK with their dramatic, even

more than fifteen years, starting with the Beatles

bombastic style connecting at grassroots

back in 1964. Paul McGuinness got an appoint-

level, they struggled to impress a media that

ment to see the most important gatekeeper and

believed irony, archness, and camp were the

enabler in the live-performance business.

key components of the new decade’s zeitgeist. But McGuinness suspected that punchy rock

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For U2, as for so many Irishmen, the United States was the promised land, offering

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41

O P P O S I T E PAG E :

Freezing in Canada in December 1980. L E F T: Sweating on stage.

acceptance and readymade communities in New

at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, the

York and Boston in particular, where a young

worst intra-band row yet ended in fisticuffs on

migrant or even just a visitor could feel at home

stage when a hyped-up Bono attacked Larry,

straightaway in the overwhelmingly bigger,

whose drums had not been properly secured to

brasher, and more varied country than the one

the stage, and in turn was decked by the Edge.

he’d left behind.

Energized by creative conflict and not too much

Getting their nine-date East Coast tour off to

impulse control, U2 were more in the grand tra-

a jet-lagged, stuttering start at the Ritz in New

dition of such classic rock bands as the Who than

York on December 6, 1980, U2 dug deep into

they might have thought.

their self-belief to win over a supercool crowd

With barely a pause for breath, U2 returned

initially unimpressed by this bill-propping act

to Ireland to start a twenty-eight-date European

of modest renown, with a performance that

tour in conflict-torn Belfast, Northern Ireland,

convinced Frank Barsalona they could go all

with the rest of the dates taking in their home

the way. On December 9, the day after John

nation south of the Irish border, plus Scotland,

Lennon was shot dead, U2—big Beatles fans

England, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Germany,

themselves—responded to the news that trau-

Switzerland, and France, most of them coun-

matized the rock nation with an inspired show

tries where they had never played before. U2

at Toronto’s El Mocambo club, and four nights

then took a week off before returning to North

later, perhaps not surprisingly, the Irish quartet

America to play sixty shows in three months to

found another enthusiastic audience in Boston,

promote Boy, now on sale four months after its

primed by college radio. Yet the following night,

European release. Being a band of hopefuls rather

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A B OV E : Performing at the Rock on the Tyne Festival at the

International Stadium, Gateshead, England, on August 29, 1981. The bill included The Polecats, Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls, Doll By Doll, Huang Chung, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

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than stars, the tour could not hope to recoup its costs in ticket sales, so was subsidized by U2’s North American record company, Warner Bros., as a marketing cost offset against sales of their records, which, in contrast to recent years, was the major money-spinner in the music industry

43

“Three months solid on the road, in motels, backstage, and the tour bus can test even the best of friends.”

at the time (provided, of course, you actually had hits). U2’s account with Warner Bros. would not go into the black for a few years, but if U2 were to sell records in North America, the only way to do it back then was road miles, making fans in person by wowing them in their own home towns. The Police had done it three years previously when there was hardly a rock club on the North American continent they didn’t play as they became the only British New Wave group to make it really big across the Atlantic. This whole way of “breaking an act,” as it was called, would change with the establishment of MTV and the rise of the video as music’s main marketing tool, but MTV would not even launch until August of 1981, so for now the old rules pertained. Three months solid on the road, living in motels, backstage, and the tour bus can test

A B OV E : Recorded in Nassau, Bahamas, the single

“Fire” was not U2 at their best.

even the best of friends, and while Adam and Paul McGuinness would sit at the front of the bus

studio in Compass Point, Nassau, in the Bahamas.

with the road crew enjoying various

Reveling in the Caribbean sunshine, U2 made a

relatively soft refreshments, Bono, the Edge,

single, titled “Fire,” whose slick and shiny sound

Larry, and Lypton Villager and former-Virgin-

barely concealed a formulaic song whose high-

Prunes-drummer-turned-U2-crew-member Pod

est chart placing would be just inside the UK Top

(Anthony Murphy) sat at the back, insulating

40. It was an early sign that U2 were facing what

themselves from temptation’s way with Bible

in music circles is called the ”Second Album

study and discussion. There were camps within

Syndrome.”

U2, but not armed camps.

Back when an album on vinyl or cassette

In the last week of April, U2 took a working

tape was around forty minutes long, record

break from the grind when Island’s Chris

companies, fans, and the acts themselves

Blackwell invited them to record in his famous

expected to release one album a year to maintain

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momentum and show both artistic and commercial growth. Second albums were the acid test of any act: you had a whole lifetime to

B E L O W : From their second album, October, the single “Gloria” reflected a spirituality that almost brought an end to the band in 1981.

write your first record, but only a few months

backstage had stolen Bono’s bag, which

to write the second. By the time U2 returned to

contained notes and lyrical ideas for the second

Ireland in June 1980 after the North America trek

album. Not that U2 had much material for him

followed by four headlining dates in the UK and

to complete anyway—yet they faced a deadline

the Netherlands, including a show at London’s

to make an album that would be a step up from

Hammersmith Palais where Bruce Springsteen

Boy. Nor did it help that, short of funds because

and the Who’s Pete Townshend came backstage

of the debt to their record companies, they

to meet them (with their explosive tensions and

had to go back to their old school to find a

spiritual search, the Who were a huge inspiration

rehearsal room.

for Bono), the pressure was mounting. Early in the North American tour, in Portland, Oregon, three would-be groupies visiting

Back then, the architecture of any U2 song is not hard to make out. Every song is about an attacking drum pattern, a guitar riff, and, over the top, Bono’s singing defining the melody. Though Larry struggled to keep time and come up with interesting drum patterns, most of the pressure fell on Bono. In a burst of desperate inspiration, he came up with the words and tune for “Gloria,” one of the very few rock songs containing lyrics in Latin, quoting from the Catholic liturgy; it was inspired by an album of Gregorian chants that the nonbelieving Paul McGuinness had given to Bono. Other songs were struggling to get into shape, as was horribly exposed on August 16, 1981, when, in the hope that Bono would be creatively energized by live performance to come up with final lyrics, U2 previewed some of the numbers they were working on to their biggest audience yet as a support act to Thin Lizzy in the first ever open-air concert held at

“While struggling

to make U2’s second album, the Edge quit the band.”

44

Slane Castle, forty miles north of Dublin. Flying by the seat of their pants, U2 flopped horribly. Nor was that all. The prayer group was living together in a caravan in a field in Portrane on Dublin’s north shore, with Bono undergoing

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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45

L E F T: Portrait of U2 on March 7, 1981 (left to right: Larry Mullen Jr., Bono, the Edge, and Adam Clayton). B E L O W : Adam’s champagne bubble hair was the only upbeat note in the gloomy mood surrounding U2’s second album, with a cover photographed at Dublin’s docklands.

baptism on the beach, the Shalom Bible study and prayer group to which all but Adam belonged was demanding of its members ever greater degrees of commitment. Within the group questions were being asked whether being in a rock group was compatible with doing the Lord’s work. The Edge decided the answer was no. While still struggling to make U2’s second album

extreme, even cultish, group dynamic, they

at Windmill Lane with producer Steve Lilywhite,

decided to recommit to U2.

the Edge quit the band, first telling Bono, who decided to quit as well.

That U2’s second album might miraculously redeem the situation would be too good to be

Larry went the other way; he quit going to

true. It didn’t. Inspired by U2’s travels around

the prayer meetings. Confronted with the

Europe, the Edge added piano to the group’s

decision the Edge and Bono had made, Adam,

palette of sound, poignantly so on the album’s

Steve Lilywhite, and Paul McGuinness were

title track; and in “Tomorrow,” Bono’s song in

stunned. When U2’s manager pointed out to the

remembrance of his mother, Vinnie Kildruff

two quitters that, while he respected their faith,

played Ireland’s traditional Uilleann pipes. With

they would be breaking commitments and leav-

its composition so rushed and completion so

ing people in the lurch, they reconsidered their

traumatized by the embarrassment of Slane

decision. Suspecting that they had been swayed

Castle, and Bono and the Edge’s crisis of

in the first place by Shalom’s increasingly

conscience, it’s a miracle that October—as Bono

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artistic control to which they were contractually entitled in the face of Island’s dismay at this image, U2 refused to change it, even though it showed the twenty-year-old Edge’s hair beginning to thin. Where everyone hoped that October would build on Boy ’s sales, it did the opposite. That a A B OV E : On the first leg of their 33-date European

band still very much at the stage of adding to

October tour, U2 touched down in Leeds, England.

its fan base should reward its loyalty and enthusiasm with such a patchy, downbeat

titled the whole album, capturing a mood of

album might well have been taken as the cue

gloom true to the band as they teetered on the

for their record company to end the contract.

verge of premature burnout—is actually as

This would probably have dealt U2’s finances

good as it is.

and morale a fatal blow. But Chris Blackwell

Aptly released in October 1981, a year after

and his team at Island had a history of support-

Boy, the new album came housed in a sleeve that

ing their artists through sticky patches, and

portrayed the band against the drab backdrop

they offered U2 the chance to redeem them-

of Dublin’s docklands. Determined to retain the

selves and regain the upward path.

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A B OV E A N D O P P O S I T E : U2 “unplugged” rocking a photoshoot.

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CHAPTER

5

War U2

had learned an important

lesson from the October setback: not to rush their records. Fifteen years later, they would forget that lesson, but at least by then they would take the consequences from a position of strength. As 1981 turned to 1982, U2 had few resources to fall back on. They did have, however, a stroke of luck. MTV was test-launching in the United States, and desperately needed content to play on the cable channel in the form of promotional music videos. Taken from October for release as a single, “Gloria” had a video shot in Dublin’s Canal Basin by the renowned commercial and music video director Meiert

O P P O S I T E PAG E : The band

in 1982; the first glimmering of the hat and hirsute look to blossom five years later. A B OV E : The windswept years start here.

Avis at the dawn of his award-winning career. Though in the disappointment surrounding October, their U.S. label Warner Bros. did not bother releasing “Gloria” as a single, the video found its way to MTV who, for want of much else to play, gave it a lot of exposure in those cities where it was available on cable. Returning to North America for a month’s tour, U2 found that while in some cities they were still playing clubs such as Toad’s Place in New Haven, in others where MTV was available, like Los Angeles, ticket demand was so high that they found themselves playing grander theaters, such as the Hollywood Palladium. No matter that imported copies

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A B OV E : Adam and Larry retreat into the background of U2’s public image.

of “Gloria” climbed no higher than No. 81 in the

chart where it stayed for six weeks, just as they

U.S. singles chart, U2 had caught the MTV wave,

were touring with U2 in support. Suddenly, U2

which was translating into ticket sales—and in

found themselves playing arenas, improvising

time would translate into record sales too.

the stagecraft to win over those old-school J

U2 enjoyed another stroke of luck in the United States when, in February and March of 1982, they secured the support slot on tour with

port act Tom Petty for being too New Wave. Though U2 managed the unlikely feat of

another early beneficiary of MTV, the J. Geils

adding to their fan base despite a flop album, they

Band. From Massachusetts, they had reinvented

returned to Dublin broke, Paul McGuinness having

themselves from being an early 1970s harmon-

maxed out his credit card on the airfares home.

ica-driven good-time rhythm-and-blues party

50

Geils fans who had previously bottled off sup-

Meanwhile, events were playing out in

band, to a slick pop-rock outfit. The video for

Ireland that would reverberate all over the world,

their single “Centerfold” was heavily rotated on

especially in the United States with its large

MTV, launching the record to the top of the U.S.

population of Irish ancestry. The uprising and

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subsequent civil war sixty years before had split Ireland into two: the larger, majority Catholic South, a republic with its capital in Dublin; and a smaller, majority Protestant North, a province of the UK with its capital in Belfast. For decades the Protestant majority in the North had monopolized the best jobs, housing and education, rigging the electoral system to deny the Catholics a voice in the running of the province

51

“The British army

played into the IRA’s hands when they massacred fourteen unarmed Catholic protesters in Northern Ireland on the notorious Bloody Sunday.”

and allocation of resources. In the late 1960s, inspired by the black civil

Parliament while refusing food in jail. In Irish

rights movement in America, Catholics starting

communities in America, the IRA came to be

campaigning for fair treatment. A violent

seen as rebel heroes, and the British as colonial

Protestant backlash brought arson and disorder

oppressors. Time and again in 1981 and ’82, U2

to the streets, and the UK government in London

were asked to declare their allegiance to the Irish

sent in troops to restore order. Many Catholics

nationalist cause, with fans starting to throw

soon saw them as a force of occupation

the Irish green, white, and orange tricolor flag

propping up the Protestants. Long dormant, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) revived, resorting to violence in pursuit of full national independence for Northern Ireland as well as the South.

B E L O W : Bono with his trademark flag, on stage at the

Torhout Festival, Belgium, on July 3, 1982. During “The Electric Co.,” Bono climbed to the top of the stage’s scaffolding to the crowd’s amazement.

On January 30, 1972, the notorious Bloody Sunday, the British army played into the IRA’s hands when they massacred fourteen unarmed Catholic protesters in Northern Ireland’s second city of Derry, boosting IRA recruitment and support. Despite an IRA campaign of bombings, shootings, and assassinations, countered by similar atrocities on the Protestant side, the 1970s saw no progress toward a political settlement. When Margaret Thatcher became UK Prime Minister in 1979, the conflict became more bitter still. In 1981 ten IRA prisoners went on a hunger strike and starved to death, the most famous of whom, Bobby Sands, had been elected to the British

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on stage. But U2 were not and are not typically

the government of the South was very careful to

Irish: Larry is the only fully Catholic member,

keep out of the troubles in the North.

Bono’s mother was Protestant, while the Edge

While U2 believed that Northern Ireland’s

is of Welsh Protestant ancestry, and Adam of

Catholics suffered injustice, they also believed

English Protestant background. Whether by birth

that violence solved nothing, provoking reaction

or adoption, all are proudly Irish, but that was

and so stoking up the cycle of violence, pushing

not the same as being Irish nationalist, just as

peace further and further away. And peace is what they believed in above all. U2 found a dramatic

B E L O W : Bono waving the white flag on the groundbreaking UK pop and youth culture show The Tube in early 1983.

symbol of where they stood in the middle section of the Irish green, white, and orange tricolor flag: the white. When Irish fans threw the Irish tricolor flag on stage, Bono would make a point of tearing out and brandishing the white middle third. Plucking from the divisiveness of nationalism and conflict the universal symbol of surrender and peace was the germ that would grow into U2’s third and breakthrough album, War. In contrast to the unrest in his homeland, Bono was beginning to find stability in his own life. While not renouncing the spiritual search itself, he now found that the overlapping Shalom Bible group and Lypton Village were increasingly oppressive and harshly judgmental of the success U2 sought as a rock band (in contrast with the uncompromising confrontational pranksterism of the Virgin Prunes). There was a falling out and a cooling of feelings between the old friends for a few years. Bono had outgrown the old gang because he now invested his happiness in one person, Alison Stewart, who became Mrs. Ali Hewson on August 21, 1982, with Adam as best man. After a two-week honeymoon in Jamaica, the couple returned to their first home together, a house in Howth rented by U2 so they could write and rehearse what they knew would be their make-or-break third album. The Edge, meanwhile, had been using Bono’s two-week absence constructively, working out

52

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53

the basic parts of several songs on a four-track cassette recorder, including the concept and lyrical sketches for a song that would address the Northern Ireland Troubles head on: “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Cursing both sides of the conflict who resorted to violence, the song’s rage and frustration actually sprang from a row the Edge had had with his girlfriend Aislinn O’Sullivan, who resented him working while others holidayed. Where the Edge’s original lyrics had condemned both the IRA and its Protestant paramilitary counterpart, the UDA (Ulster Defence Association), upon his return Bono removed these specifics but retained the imagery of violence in which families were torn apart and the innocent suffered. That the song was titled “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and featured Steve Wickham’s Irish fiddle made the song’s context unmistakable,

A B OV E : The cover for the single “Sunday Bloody

and Larry’s marching band drums added militant

Sunday” from the album War; U2’s black, white, and red graphic style was a stark contrast to pop’s multicolored fashion of the day.

punch to Bono’s beseeching cry for peace, unity, and self-sacrifice as symbolized by Easter Sunday, sacred to both Catholics and Protestants. Reinforcing this song’s centrality to the

Quieter moments like “40” aside, the mood of the aptly titled album War is defined by the Edge’s

forthcoming album, the song “40” prayerfully

jagged guitar, Adam’s menacing bass rumble,

reprises the key lyric in “Sunday Bloody

and Larry’s aggressive drums. Larry had finally

Sunday”: “How long must we sing this song?”

solved his problem keeping time, which could

His voice shredded by six o’clock in the morn-

make recording sessions fraught with delays and

ing after working all night, and with only two

retakes. He had always refused to play along to

hours to go before U2 had to quit Windmill Lane

an electronic “click track,” thinking it an affront

Studios to let in the next band booked to start at

to his ability, but when the veteran rock and funk

eight, Bono pulls out one of his most emotive

session drummer Andy Newmark (of Sly and

performances, and “40” was to close U2’s

the Family Stone fame) told him that he always

shows for the rest of the decade.

played along to a click track, Larry no longer

“Who in Ireland could have too much

respect for organized religion? We’ve seen it tear our country in two.” –Bono

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L E F T: On stage at the Torhout Festival, Belgium, on July 3, 1982. Also on the bill were Allez Allez, the Members, the Steve Miller Band, Mink DeVille, Tom Tom Club, Talking Heads, and Jackson Browne.

resisted this technical fix. From then on, U2’s recording sessions went much more smoothly. In their old-fashioned, Who-like seriousness of purpose and four-piece rock attack, U2 were bucking the trend in mainstream pop music, which was going through a soft phase of its cycle after the hard and insistent edges of punk, post-punk, and disco. With MTV soon reaching every cable-connected TV in North America, and into Europe and Asia, it fast became pop’s main marketing tool. As MTV was feeding pop videos to a TV audience around the clock, it meant that children were now watching, so the music itself was becoming more preteen-friendly to take advantage of this marketing opportunity. Even the biggest rock hits of 1982—Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”—were a twelve-year-old’s idea of, respectively, heavy metal and party-on-dude music. U2’s song “New Year’s Day” was indirectly inspired by just such an arch, heavily stylized pop song: “Fade to Grey” by the New Romantic group Visage. During a live gig sound check, closet New Romantic fan Adam tried to play its bass line, and instead found that he had come up with an interesting variation which would provide the foundations to a song inspired by Poland’s banned Solidarity grassroots workers’ movement and the first crack in Communist rule in Russia and its satellites. Though not commercially promising in theory, “New Year’s Day” had only to be heard once to demand to be heard again; in short, it had huge hit potential, and would herald the new album.

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“War: would it

make them or break them?”

set every mind at rest, charting in twelve countries, including the UK Top 10, and only just missing the U.S. Top 50. The sleeve reprised Boy’s red-lettered monochrome cover star, Peter Rowen, now aged eight, his face anguished rather than angelic, and the album followed on February 28. War went straight to the top of the UK charts, and though it peaked just outside the United States Top 10, it went on to sell four-million copies in the States alone as U2 took to the road to play its songs. As A B OV E : A little older and more anguished, Boy’s Peter

well as huge festivals in the United States and

Rowen, now 8, returns. O P P O S I T E : A shirtless Bono waving the Irish flag at the U.S. Festival in May 1983.

Europe, U2 performed in Japan for the first time on the year-long 110-date world tour that previewed, promoted, and then celebrated the songs

Unlike the rushed October, U2 had taken their time in getting War right because they knew

the band sounded born to play. War’s moral heart was “Sunday Bloody

their future hinged on it working artistically and

Sunday,” and its gentler reprise, “40,” but

commercially. Though U2 could feel fairly confi-

on stage older numbers like “I Will Follow,”

dent that the live fan base they’d grown despite

“Gloria,” and “I Threw a Brick Through a

October would be loyal enough to want to hear

Window” became cries for peace expressed with

War, there were no guarantees that even if it

the urgency, even militancy of youth.

were their best album yet, it would prove the

Though Adam was bemused by the very con-

necessary great leap forward. They needed

cept of militant pacifism, he went along with the

that leap to maintain not only their own self-

theatricality of U2 appearing on stage, in videos,

belief but the belief of their record company on

and in press pictures as paramilitary rockers,

whose support they depended.

with the stage set and video shoots based on the

War: would it make them or break them?

cheap but striking motif of the white flag. The flag was a great prop, and as U2 found itself playing to ever bigger crowds of ever

Flags

56

greater enthusiasm, so Bono became ever more

Released with appropriate media fanfare on

daring as a performer, climbing gantries and

January 1, 1983, the spin-off single preceding

rope ladders to the stage canopy or entrusting

War’s release, “New Year’s Day,” was the hit to

himself to the fans as he’d scamper off stage

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into the throng—sometimes, like Bruce Springsteen, returning with a female fan to join him on stage for a dance. Playing to their biggest crowd yet— 670,000 at California’s U.S. Festival on Memorial Day, May 30, 1983—Bono grabbed a girl called Angeline for a rendition of the Chubby Checker oldie “Let’s Twist Again.” Quoting standards from everything from the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” and John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” to Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” within their own songs became part of the show, weaving themselves into the history of great song. It was no coincidence that the biggest band of the previous decade, Led Zeppelin, had done the same in their marathon sets; U2 had hired Led Zeppelin road crew veteran Dennis Sheehan as their tour manager, and he had passed onto his new charges many instructive tales of how the great British legends of excess would bestride the world’s greatest stages. Despite having left the Shalom prayer circle, Bono, the Edge, and Larry remained clean-living and very un–rock ’n’ roll on the road, leaving that side of things to late-night party animal Adam.

“Bono became

ever more daring as a performer, climbing gantries and rope ladders to the stage.”

58

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59

O P P O S I T E PAG E , A B OV E : The album cover of War. O P P O S I T E PAG E , B E L O W : The February 26, 1983, issue

of New Musical Express confirms U2 as the UK’s hottest rock band. A B OV E : Bono giving it his all on stage in the United States.

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L E F T: Playing to their biggest crowd yet—670,000 at California’s US Festival on Memorial Day in 1983. A B OV E : Bono and Ali interviewed backstage at the US Festival.

Sensing that the success of War and the unrolling tour was a breakthrough worth marking for posterity in a special event, U2 had a location in mind, high up in the Rockies near Denver, Colorado: the open-air Red Rocks Amphitheater. A few days after the U.S. Festival, they slotted June 5 into their tour schedule and flew in the UK’s top music and TV show director and producer, Malcolm Gerrie, and his team to film their performance, swallowing up every penny of the profit they had finally made on tour—all £30,000 of it. Then disaster struck. On the day of the show it rained and rained, with the crew worried that they and the band risked electrocution from the lighting and amplification equipment. The promoter went so far as to announce the show was canceled, but U2 did not want to write off the cost of the film

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crew with nothing to show for it so they announced on radio that the Red Rocks show would go ahead anyway, adding that they would play an indoor show in Boulder the following night for any ticket-holder who didn’t want to risk it. Two hours before show time, the rain stopped and the fans (about half of the 9,000 capacity) who braved the cold and fine drizzle were treated to a particularly committed performance, steamily and atmospherically captured on film for commercial video release the following year as U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, preceded in November by an eight-song mini-album, also called Under a Blood Red Sky, which also included performances from Boston and Germany. U2 took a month off that summer, and on July 12, the Edge, still only twenty-one, married his girlfriend, Aislinn O’Sullivan, with Bono his best man. A month later, among a handful of European festivals, U2 headlined a bill that included Simple Minds, Eurythmics, and Steel Pulse at a huge homecoming show at Dublin’s Phoenix Park Racecourse, where a century before two senior members of Ireland’s British

62

A B OV E T O P : Tickets for shows in Rochester, New

york, and New york City for U2’s breakthrough 1983 North America tour. A B OV E : The cover for the Under a Blood Red Sky live album.

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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63

A B OV E : The Edge and Bono in excelsis.

administration had been stabbed to death by the

U2 had delivered their message. They had

Irish National Invincibles. “This is not a rebel song,

also demonstrated to fans now numbering in the

this is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’” Bono announced,

millions, and the whole wider music world, that

whipping up the crowd to put history behind them,

they could deliver both on stage and on record.

and for hours after the show the crowds sang the

And their oldest member, Adam Clayton, was

chorus of “40” as they made their way home that

still only 23. There was now an air of expectancy:

summer night.

what would they do next?

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CHAPTER

6

FIre on

tour in America, the senior music journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, Jim

Henke, had fallen into discussion with Bono on the history of the African-American civil rights movement of the 1960s, and given him biographies of the militant Malcolm X and the pacifist Martin Luther King, both of them martyrs to the cause. Dr. King’s teachings and leadership particularly gripped Bono, and a song began to take shape that was first given utterance in the sound check preceding one of the very last shows of that inspiring but exhausting breakthrough year, in the paradise setting of Hawaii. It would be titled “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Returning from the Pacific to Ireland, U2 needed time off. The Edge’s wife, Aislinn, was pregnant, while both Adam and Larry sought a period of peace, quiet, and domestic stability too. Larry also officially added the “Jr.” to his surname to distinguish him from his namesake father after Larry Sr. received his son’s tax bill in error. Now with enough money to buy their own home, Bono and Ali moved into a Martello tower, one of around fifty cannon-platform fortresses built on the coast of Ireland to defend against attack by Revolutionary France in the Napoleonic era. O P P O S I T E PAG E : On tour in Sydney, Australia, in September 1984. R I G H T: The hit single “Pride (In the Name of Love)” from the album The Unforgettable Fire.

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R I G H T: Bringing

a fifth dimension to U2, the English avant-garde musician and producer Brian Eno.

Downstairs, below the top-story living

game now was artistry. But still only in their very

accommodation, there was space for U2 to rehearse.

early twenties, and isolated from the kind of com-

Though such rock acts as AC/DC, Def Leppard, and Van Halen were hugely popular,

keep pushing, U2 knew they needed fresh ideas

they were restricted by their genre and fans.

and fresh ears to help make things happen.

Their music might be heavy metal but their

Their record producer, Steve Lilywhite, forced

content could never be anything but lightweight.

the issue by insisting that their relationship had

To join the ranks of the great rock legends who’d

already outlasted his rule to make no more than

dominated the 1960s and into the 1970s—U2’s

two consecutive albums with the same act to

influences the Beatles (defunct), the Stones

stop everyone from getting stale. Nobody could

(creatively past their best), and the Who (a

have predicted who this now very successful

shadow of themselves without drummer Keith

rock band would invite to produce their next

Moon), or their tour manager Dennis Sheehan’s

album: Brian Eno.

old bosses, Led Zeppelin (also defunct)—there

66

petitive ferment that so inspired their forebears to

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de

had to be both content with real meaning and

la Salle Eno, to give him his full name, was in

resonance, and a readiness to take risks to

the classic tradition of British rock giants

progress. Milking a winning formula could

(including John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith

condemn U2 to no better than the second rank.

Richards, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, John Cale,

Secure now in their popularity, the name of the

Ray Davies, and Freddie Mercury) who had been

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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FIRE

“U2 wanted to

try new things out and record in unconventional spaces.”

67

next record, fearing that what resulted would be fascinating but might fly over the heads of their teenage fans. When U2 insisted, it was Eno’s turn to be doubtful: he was bored of record production. But when U2 explained that they wanted to record in unconventional spaces (Windmill Lane was cramped and the band wanted to stretch out

inspired as art students to reinvent the music

and breathe), try new things out, and have fun, he

they loved, placing a premium on radical

relented, and brought along to their first meeting

originality. After attending a lecture by the

his regular engineer, Daniel Lanois, to whom he

Who’s Pete Townshend on how tape recorders

would delegate much of the hands-on work. The

could open up sound creation to nonmusicians,

Canadian would prove critically important to U2

Eno had become an avant-garde musician and

in years to come.

experimenter with tapes and synthesizers, falling

Thanks to its rock-loving titled owner, Henry

in with fellow art school musicians to form Roxy

Mount Charles, the grand setting of Slane Castle

Music, whose eclectic and often very weird glam

came available as a recording space. U2 and

rock was to inspire Larry and the Edge.

their new producers filled the ballroom with

A clash of egos with Roxy’s front man, Bryan Ferry, saw Eno quit for an eccentric solo career

recording equipment, moving later to the even better acoustics that were to be had in the library.

that quickly diversified into the development of instrumental “ambient” music, exploring quiet but often unsettling moods hitherto only touched upon by classical music. Never

B E L O W : Slane Castle, where U2 started recording their bold leap into the unknown, The Unforgettable Fire.

a conventional record producer, Eno also proved himself an inspiringly original collaborator on classic albums by David Bowie (including Low and Heroes) and Talking Heads (including Fear of Music and Remain in Light), as much by inspiring fresh ideas in those artists as by introducing fresh techniques. Though those records had sold well, they were not commercial blockbusters nor ever expected to be. Island boss Chris Blackwell was doubtful when U2 told him they wanted Eno to produce their

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The sessions in May and June were suitably

As ever, the problem was Bono, or rather the

relaxed in that spacious setting, with the

singer’s belief that the lyrics he free-associated

four-way group dynamic now six-way—Eno

were no more than sketches of the songs he had

inspiringly offbeat and impatient, Lanois

not yet time to finish. His thoughts on Martin

passionate and painstaking. Eno focused on

Luther King and nonviolent protest aside, Bono

experimental approaches to making music and the

had not been neglecting his education, and the

sound picture’s middle range, enriching

Edge joined him in wishing to integrate themes

its texture with keyboards, electronic orchestra-

into their new songs that had seized their imagi-

tions, and effects, while Lanois brought out the

nations, like the dropping of the atom bombs

best in the rhythm section, working on subtly pow-

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The song “The

erful grooves deeply embedded into each song.

Unforgettable Fire,” which would become the name of the album itself, would come from this

B E L O W : Slane’s stately setting encouraged informality

and experimentation in U2’s music-making.

68

inspiration. Another highlight, “Bad,” imagined the epiphanic appeal of heroin, which, freely

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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69

“The problem

was Bono, or rather his belief that the lyrics he freeassociated were no more than sketches . . .”

and inexpensively available, was sweeping unemployment-hit Ireland at the time, including people U2 knew personally. In sweet though eerie contrast, the effects-treated guitar instrumental “4th Of July” captures the blend of exhaustion, elation, and spirituality that greets a first-time parent—it being the date when the Edge’s wife, Aislinn, gave birth to their first child, Hollie. When they moved to Windmill Lane in June, July, and into August 1984, recording sessions yet again lengthened to exhausting

A B OV E : The Unforgettable Fire’s cover; its

atmospheric photo was by Anton Corbijn, U2’s regular photographer for years to come.

twenty-hour days as Bono’s disinclination to

album, its textures and overall atmosphere

decide a track was finished spread to the others.

sound haunted with a lush, mysterious, and re-

While the production team was happy with

cessed grandeur, in contrast to the hard-edged,

Bono’s “Bongolese” first vocal takes, where

up-front aggression of War. This atmosphere

he never gave less than everything, he usu-

is clear even on the sleeve, which sumptuously

ally felt that the performance had outpaced the

frames in purple and gold a rich monochrome

lyrical development. Meeting Bob Dylan, who

shot of the ivy-covered ruins of Moydrum

played a show at Slane Castle that July of 1984,

Castle—burned down by the IRA toward the end

reminded Bono of the gap between his broad-

of 1919–21 Irish War of Independence—beneath a

sweeping attempts to articulate racial injustice,

dramatic cloudscape towering over the tiny fore-

nuclear fear, and the waste of self-destruction,

ground figures of the band itself. Photographed

and the old master’s compellingly worded

by Anton Corbijn, whom U2 had met on a press

protest classics of twenty years before. But

trip with the UK’s New Musical Express weekly,

Dylan gave Bono great encouragement, and in

this image would be the first of several by the

turn Bono recommended Daniel Lanois as a pro-

Dutchman to create an atmosphere of history,

ducer who, five years later, would sound-sculpt

mystery, and mystique around the band.

Dylan’s biggest hit album in years, Oh Mercy. Though The Unforgettable Fire is a rock

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“Larry worried that the album lacked hits.”

atmospherically from end to end. But just as Bono complained that his lyrics weren’t finished, Larry worried that the album lacked hits. Both were right in a sense, but there was a bigger picture to consider. What U2 had achieved was one of those albums whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts—a fullimmersion experience rather than a hammering tattoo of hits. Yet there was one huge hit—a song and performance so powerful that it energized the whole album and, as a heavily rotated radio, TV, and chart hit, swept it along in its commercial slipstream: “Pride (In the Name of Love),” which in September 1984 heralded the album’s release a month later. Though The Unforgettable

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T O P : Bono draping himself in the Irish tricolor, a

move he would soon abandon to avoid taking sides in the Northern Ireland conflict. A B OV E : A concert ticket and membership card as U2-mania gathered momentum.

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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FIRE

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L E F T: The Unforgettable Fire tour program. B E L O W A N D B O T T O M : U2 fans were well informed, even in the 1980s.

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FIRE

Fire sold slightly fewer in the United States than

in sadness, but for a while he helped add to

War, it more than made up for it in sales world-

the broadening of the band’s horizons as they

wide. Meanwhile, growing North American ticket

traveled the world, finding creative inspiration

demand now meant U2 had to graduate from

from places and people alike.

theaters to 15–20,000-capacity arenas, requiring a

While playing a show on November 21, 1984,

bigger, more elaborate show to make an impact,

in Dortmund, West Germany, Bono received

with sequencers being introduced to replicate the

a phone call that would make U2’s world a

complex studio effects of the new songs.

whole lot wider. It was a call from home, from a

For the first time, too, the multi-legged world tour that ran with breaks from August 1984 to July the following year included dates

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Dubliner: Bob Geldof. Within days, U2 were on a trajectory that would redefine the power of pop music forever.

in Australasia, where rock fans hailed them as superstars from the moment they touched down. In New Zealand, a Maori stagehand called Greg Carroll made such an impression that U2 invited him to join their road crew. His story was to end

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O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono dousing himself and fans with water in Sydney, Australia. T O P : A ticket for a London show on November 2, 1984. A B OV E : The Edge at the keyboard.

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CHAPTER

7

The World For a few years, Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats were one of the most successful punk bands not only in Ireland, but also in Europe. By 1984 their popularity had dwindled and Geldof needed a fresh outlet for his energy. Reputedly something of a cynic—the band’s first hit was called “Lookin’ After No. 1”—Geldof was in reality a passionate but frustrated idealist. Seeing a TV news report on the famine sweeping Ethiopia, he reacted immediately and dramatically: he would work every contact he had in

O P P O S I T E PAG E : Adam and Bono

fly into London on November 25, 1984, to sing on the all-star charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” a landmark in music’s potential to mobilize fans for a good cause. B E L O W : Bob Geldof—fellow Dubliner, lead singer of The Boomtown Rats, Live Aid mastermind, and famine-relief campaigner.

the music industry to write, record, and release an all-star charity benefit single in time to capitalize on the Christmas market. First the song: cowritten with Midge Ure of Ultravox, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” pulled off the trick of being simultaneously seasonal and provocative. It demanded a reaction, if only to buy it and so make a contribution to famine relief. Then the stars: consisting of the cream of the most successful British and Irish pop musicians of the day, they included, among others, George Michael, Sting, and members of the groups Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, and Queen. For the single, they would merge their identities into the group name Band Aid.

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When Geldof phoned U2 on November 21 to ask them to get involved in Band Aid, there was no time to think it over. The recording studio in London was booked for November 25, and the aim was to get the single pressed, printed, and distributed into the shops for sale just four days after that. The drama of the story added to the wattage of the star-power to make the biggest rolling showbiz story in Britain for a long time, which could only help sales. Put on the spot, Bono and Adam agreed to fly to London to take part in the recording; the Edge and Larry were otherwise engaged. Released on schedule, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” sold a million copies in the UK in its first week, staying at No. 1 for five weeks and outselling even the Beatles and Wings to take the record for the best-selling single ever in the UK, totaling nearly 12 million sales worldwide by the end of the 1980s. The response of the public, music industry, and media was a phenomenon, and Geldof was determined to build this energy and enthusiasm toward an even greater event: two simultaneous megashows to take place the following summer, featuring the biggest stars in the world and to be broadcast to a worldwide TV audience, with all proceeds going to Ethiopian famine relief. Meanwhile, the U2 bandwagon was rolling on in its own right. From February to May 1985, their North American tour saw a landmark show A B OV E : The cover for “Do They Know It’s

Christmas?” Bob Geldof united the UK’s biggest pop stars of the day, including George Michael, Sting, and members of the groups Duran Duran, Culture Club, and Queen, for this record-breaking charity single.

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at New York’s Madison Square Garden, and Rolling Stone magazine hailing them in its cover story on March 14 as “The Band of the ’80s,” summarizing their status thus: “for a growing number of rock-and-roll fans, U2 have become

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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“By that summer, U2

were arguably the biggest rock band in the world.” encore, “40,” they were quoting excerpts from “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” as well as its equally phenomenal U.S. counterpart, “We Are the World” by USA for Africa, featuring Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Bruce the band that matters most, maybe even the

Springsteen, and many more superstars. U2

only band that matters.”

were doing their bit in the build-up to the

By that summer, U2 were arguably the biggest rock band in the world, not only headlining

greatest event in pop history. On July 13, 1985, Live Aid achieved every-

a triumphant homecoming show at Dublin’s

thing it had hoped for to raise money for the

Croke Park with a rising band from Athens,

starving of Ethiopia and awareness of famine

Georgia, called R.E.M. below them on the bill,

in Africa. Quite simply, like the Apollo 11 moon

but also, again with R.E.M. as well their punk

landing, it was a unifying world event that made

inspirations the Ramones, at a rain-swept Milton

history as it unfolded before your very eyes.

Keynes Bowl north of London. By then, staking

There were also unplanned consequences for

their place among the greats, U2 were not only

some of the acts on the bill, chief among them

including snippets of Elvis, Dylan, Stones, Lou Reed, and David Bowie songs in their set, as well as John Lennon anthems, but in their final

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A B OV E : (clockwise from top left) The Unforgettable

Fire Collection video, the Wide Awake in America EP, the official U2 Magazine, and a concert set list.

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“The band’s greatest strength is

that there are no boundaries, there are no limits.” –Larry Mullen, Jr.

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THE WORLD

U2. Geldof’s brief to the stars was simple: the

popularity with a fusillade of hits that gloriously

eyes and ears of the world are tuned in, so

honored Geldof’s concept of a “global jukebox,”

hit them with your best stuff for twenty min-

and U2. Yet U2 not only nearly failed to appear

utes and keep the famine relief money rolling

at all, but, when they did, they almost blew the

in. Later on, when the simultaneous shows at

opportunity to impress in a moment of Bono

London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s

madness that turned out to be inspired.

John F. Kennedy Stadium were assessed, the

The panic started the night before when

big winners who were deemed to have seized

U2 were told that none of the acts would get a

the moment and wowed the crowd in the flesh

sound check. When Bono and Larry suggested

and on screen were Queen, who reboosted their

that the band might pull out rather than risk

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sounding awful, Bob Geldof was furiously O P P O S I T E PAG E A N D B E L O W : U2 headlining the Milton Keynes Bowl in England, on June 22, 1985, with R.E.M. and their punk inspiration the Ramones on the bill.

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uncompromising, and they agreed that the risk was worth taking for the cause. Introduced by Jack Nicholson in a relay from

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THE WORLD

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O P P O S I T E PAG E A N D B E L O W : Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, London, on July 13, 1985; Bono (seen also with organizer Bob Geldof) steals the show at the biggest televised event in pop history when he spontaneously enters into the crowd.

Philadelphia, U2 hit the stage in London at 5:20 pm local time with “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the first of three songs they were scheduled to play. But then in the second, “Bad,” Bono went wildly off-script. As the U2 banners waved in the 72,000-strong crowd, Bono went on a walkabout over the stage monitors, dropping down into the photographers’ pit, and down to the crowd barrier, where he had the roadies pluck from the crush a fifteen-year-old Londoner, Kal Khalique, whom he embraced on camera before returning to the stage. All this made for great live television. The problem was that on stage, the rest of band could not see what was going on. As they vamped away on “Bad” for minute after baffled and increasingly panic-stricken minute, they feared that Bono, out of sight, was either in trouble in the crowd or had even returned to the dressing room. By the time he made it back to the stage to their enormous relief, it was time to end the set, so U2 never played their biggest hit, “Pride (In the Name of Love).”

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With no idea how spontaneously exciting this had been on TV, his bandmates were furious with Bono, and no one was more convinced than the singer that, thanks to him, U2 had completely messed up in front of nearly two billion people watching it all on TV. Fearing he’d be fired, Bono even considered quitting in embarrassment. But the following week the media and people were unanimous in praise of U2’s segment of the show, and their album sales all over the world went through the roof. Far from jumping in straight away to reap the rewards of their unforeseen elevation to the top of rock’s aristocracy, however, U2 almost seemed to disappear for twenty months, surfacing in public only to promote another good cause. But behind the scenes, they were sending down the roots for the biggest success of their career—perhaps even their masterpiece: The Joshua Tree. While the Edge and his wife, Aislinn, awaited the birth of their second child, due in October 1986, Bono and his wife, Ali, had accepted an invitation from the Evangelical Christian humanitarian aid, development, and advocacy organization World

A B OV E : Steve van Zandt, organizer of the “Sun

Vision to become relief workers in charge of an

City” recording.

orphanage in Ajibar in northern Ethiopia. Though nothing was asked of Bono beyond his help on the

not only humbled Bono but it dismayed him upon

ground, he was eager to see for himself the issues

his return to be reminded of the complacency

and realities that had so mobilized the pop and rock

and indifference to others that lay beneath the

world while leaving the Western governments led

comforts of the West. Contrary to what had been

by the likes of President Ronald Reagan and Prime

suggested by Shalom five years before, Bono saw

Minister Margaret Thatcher virtually unmoved.

that rock ’n’ roll success might, after all, be a force

The experience of trying to help people, especially children, on the verge of starving to death

for moral enlightenment and spiritual redemption. Upon his return from Africa, Bono immediately

“Fearing he’d been fired, Bono even

considered quitting in embarrassment.”

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U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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THE WORLD

threw himself into another good cause when Steve Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band invited him to join a huge cast of rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B stars in a record urging a boycott of apartheid South Africa’s entertainment resort, Sun City. Being political and controversial—several Western musicians saw nothing wrong in playing at Sun City—the single that

83

“Listen, I don’t

blame you for picking up these guns and fighting back, but you cannot win that way. We can win this war, but it’s gonna be won on TV.” –Steve Van Zandt

resulted, “Sun City,” was ignored by many radio stations and had no more than so-so sales. But rock stars had a huge platform of popular-

recording of the Band Aid single, U2 played New York’s famed Radio City Music Hall. Attending

ity, and such was the relative novelty after many

the show was Jack Healey, the former Franciscan

years of social and political idealism being out

monk and Catholic priest who had come to head

of fashion in music, that when Bono and others

the U.S. division of Amnesty International, the

publicly supported a cause, that gesture in itself

organization that has campaigned for human

mobilized music fans, especially college kids, to

rights and on behalf of prisoners of conscience

pay attention and join in. Below the radar of the

since 1961. He so impressed Bono and Paul

established political leaderships, a young grass-

McGuinness that they pledged him a week of

roots movement was gathering strength that

U2’s time when he cared to call it in.

would change the world in the following years,

Having played the Self Aid festival in Dublin,

helping to bring something like human rights and

organized to create jobs and raise money and

democracy not only to South Africa, but also to

awareness during Ireland’s unemployment crisis—

the countries of the Soviet Bloc.

some 250,000 out of an entire population of 3.5

Just before Christmas 1984, soon after the

million were out of work—on May, 17, 1986, U2 were called on again a month later to support those less fortunate when Jack Healey got back in touch to cash in their earlier promise. That these commitments interrupted the first steps U2 were making toward a new album in fact turned out to be propitious. Rather than distracting their creative focus, the causes into which U2 threw themselves in 1985 and 1986 fueled their imaginations, their moral passion, and their creativity for an album they felt free to make in their own time, confident that the world would wait.

L E F T: The controversial “Sun City” protest single by Artists United Against Apartheid.

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A B OV E : Larry and Adam performing at Dublin’s RDS Showgrounds for the Self Aid festival on May 17, 1986.

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THE WORLD

What Jack Healey had in mind was a superstar tour to raise money and awareness, and refresh the membership of Amnesty

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A B OV E : Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of

Hope press conference with (from left) Joan Baez, Sting, Bono, the Edge, Lou Reed, and Peter Gabriel.

International among a new generation now that the organization was twenty-five years

African freedom campaigner Steve Biko, who

old. Quickly discovering, as Bob Geldof had

was murdered in police custody, became the

shown with Band Aid and Live Aid, that musi-

tour’s unofficial anthem.

cians were far more likely to say yes to other

The last three shows featured a reunion

musicians than to management, Bono hit the

of Sting’s old band, the Police. Bono was touched

phone to recruit fellow superstars to Amnesty

when this headlining act requested that U2 close

International’s A Conspiracy of Hope tour, six

the show, passing on the baton of greatness

shows in eleven days from June 4 to the finale at

from one group already seen as legendary to

the Giants Stadium on June 15; numerous artists

one who were legends in the making.

took part in the final show, and they all featured

U2 headed back to Dublin for further recording,

U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Lou Reed, Joan Baez,

but Bono’s travels in pursuit of the truth about

the Neville Brothers, and Peter Gabriel, whose

the world were not over. As the band learned

song “Biko,” written in memory of the South

more about the poor of Africa and the repression

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seeming safety and moderate prosperity of the capital San Salvador, the army ruled the peasantry with fear, death squads murdering civilians just to remind the people who was boss. Not only did the Hewsons meet the Mothers of the Disappeared, who campaign also in Argentina and Chile for A B OV E : A ticket to Amnesty International’s A

the return of the remains of their loved ones

Conspiracy of Hope concert at the Forum in Inglewood, California; the tour had six shows in eleven days and starred U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, the Neville Brothers, and Peter Gabriel.

murdered by the military juntas, but the couple got caught up with villagers in the crossfire of an army mortar attack and were lucky to return to Dublin unharmed. Bono turned with relief to his old friendships with Gavin Friday and Guggi.

of human rights in what was then called the Third World, they were discovering the un-

superstardom, Bono had wanted to stay

comfortable truth about the Third World taking

grounded and fix his moral bearings by wit-

the brunt of the Cold War between the capital-

nessing at first hand the reality of fear and

ist First World and communist Second. Under

need that blighted so many lives. What he had

President Reagan, the United States was prop-

seen for himself was covert American foreign

ping up some vicious regimes whose only

policy operating undercover and out of sight of

merit was that they ferociously repressed the

Americans themselves, the bitter irony of the

Communists, as well as anybody else who

Land of the Free repressing by proxy the poor

challenged the ruling elite. At the time, the

of other countries so that its own people could

tiny Central American republic of El Salvador

enjoy peace and prosperity with no idea of the

was torn by civil war between leftists and a U.S.-

price others were paying for it.

backed junta. Nearby in Nicaragua, the United

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Fleeing the lifestyle of newly anointed

Bono had witnessed the long arm of

States was backing the contras seeking to

American state power, and was so horrified it

overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.

became his mission for years to come to alert

Violence in both countries was endemic. Invited

U2’s growing army of American fans to what

by the multidenominational Christian refugee

was being done in their name. And yet, like the

aid organization Sanctuary, in July 1986 Bono

other three, he loved and was fascinated by

and Ali flew out for a week to see for themselves.

almost everything else about America. Together

In Nicaragua, Bono was impressed by the

again in Dublin, U2 creatively put to work the

relaxed and civil atmosphere despite the mili-

insights they had gained into the world’s big

tary on the streets, but a short flight away in El

picture, an education that had started when Bob

Salvador he found that once you had left the

Geldof phoned them in Germany.

U2: R E VO LU T I O N

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THE WORLD

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“The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.” –Bono

A B OV E : Bono with the legendary Lou Reed. U2 covered Reed’s “Satellite of Love.”

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CHAPTER

8

The Tree The album that most fans would hail immediately as U2’s masterpiece, and which remains their most popular, has deep roots in U2 and Bono’s moral and political journey of discovery that started with Band Aid. It also has deep musical roots. But these were roots that had not come naturally to U2; the band consciously and

O P P O S I T E PAG E : No looking back—U2 on tour in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at the Pan American Center on April 10, 1987. B E L O W : U2’s most popular album, The Joshua Tree, with its iconic cover photography by Anton Corbijn.

quickly grafted themselves onto rock’s traditional origins in blues and folk music. It had all started at that meeting between Bono and Bob Dylan at Dublin’s Slane Castle in 1984. Dylan’s contemporary, Van Morrison, who was no less steeped than Dylan in American roots music despite being from Northern Ireland rather than the United States, was also present, and Bono was amazed by the common language the two men shared in old songs and poetry. He felt excluded and shamefully ignorant, knowing only the rock and pop he’d grown up with, but not its roots and byways. It took another legend of 1960s rock to give Bono the start of an education. In New York to take part in the recording of the “Sun City” protest song, he had been invited by

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U2’s old producer, Steve Lilywhite, to drop by the recording sessions of the band he was currently producing, the Rolling Stones, in the hope that a fresh presence might help overcome the bad patch in their friendship that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were going through. The whole band welcomed Bono, but he had nothing to offer when asked to sing a roots song they could all join in on. Worse, Bono told Keith he had grown up believing the blues was the tired last resort of artists with nothing fresh to offer. The Rolling Stones’ guitarist reckoned his best counter-argument was to play the young ex-punk blues like he’d never heard before, and amazed him with some

A B OV E : U2 inspiration and fellow Celtic rockers The

of the classic recordings of Robert Johnson

Waterboys, performing on The Tube. O P P O S I T E PAG E : Typically studious in the studio, the Edge multitasks on his Fender Stratocaster guitar and a keyboard.

and John Lee Hooker. An overnight blues convert and fan, Bono wrote a protest song in the blues idiom for the

absorbed these conflicting passions in the songs

Sun City album, and invited Keith to accompany

U2 were crafting back home in Dublin in the

him on guitar. Even better, fellow Stone Ronnie

unrushed, on–off recording sessions that

Wood joined them on slide guitar, played with

stretched throughout 1986 for the album with

his flick-knife. The song, “Silver and Gold,”

the working title “The Two Americas.”

would be revisited by the whole of U2 in 1988. For now, what Bono’s crash course in the

lodestar, it was not to be a narrowly defining

blues had kick-started was a fascination with

theme. U2 were not creating a concept album,

the music and literature (especially Norman

but an album that captured what was going on in

Mailer, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin,

their heads and hearts as they hit their mid-

Charles Bukowski, Ralph Ellison, Sam

twenties. U2 were hanging out at this time with

Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams,

the cinematic Celtic-rock group the Waterboys and

and Raymond Carver) of unofficial, excluded

Irish folk-soul fusionists the Hothouse Flowers,

America, with its sense of fate, injustice, love,

which reinforced their feeling that by integrating

and loss playing out in natural images of earth,

Irish and American, old and new, their creative

wind, water, and fire. He was as inspired by

instincts were part of a bigger movement.

this side of America as he was dismayed and

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Though America was to be the new album’s

Like Bono, the Edge had discovered the blues,

horrified by its covert murderous imperialism

but on National Public Radio on the U.S. legs of

under President Reagan, and Bono consciously

the Unforgettable Fire tour rather than from the

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Clannad—he was neglecting his home life, and has hinted that 1986 was one of personal unhappiness. The low was the death in Dublin on July 3, 1986, of U2’s beloved crew member, Greg Carroll, when he was delivering a motorcycle Bono had just bought. A week later the band played at his burial in Kai-iwi Marae in New Zealand. That the Hewsons then flew to Central America on their fact-finding mission only immersed them deeper in a sense of loss and waste.

A B OV E : The Edge’s movie soundtrack for Captive. R I G H T: Bono’s hit single with Irish folk-rockers Clannad. B E L O W : The “One Tree Hill” single from The Joshua Tree.

Rolling Stones’ guitarist. While he had no desire to set off down the white bluesman’s road of a New Wave Eric Clapton, he was to incorporate a dirty, distorted sound in the new songs. At the same time, the Edge had been given the prototype of the Infinite Guitar, which could electronically sustain notes for as long as you wanted, by the musician and inventor Michael Brook, with whom he cocreated the soundtrack to the movie Captive as a side project to U2. Like Bono with his conceptual vision and lyric writing, what the Edge would do on guitar would be a great leap forward while remaining very recognizably his style. With Bono’s head bursting with ideas and activity—despite everything else he had going on, he still found time to record the hit single “In a Lifetime” with the Irish soft-rock group

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“Bono hinted

that 1986 was one of personal unhappiness.”

Loss and waste haunted the lyrics Bono was writing. “One Tree Hill” was written in memory of Greg Carroll and also Victor Jara, the Chilean writer, singer, and activist murdered by the military junta that seized power in 1973 with U.S. backing, while “Running to Stand Still” revisits the theme of “Bad” in the wake of the death of Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, following years of heroin addiction. The song touches on social deprivation too, as symbolized by the seven Ballymun Flats towerblocks that loomed over

A B OV E : Brian Eno’s studio partner, Daniel Lanois,

Bono’s teenage home (“I see seven towers/But I

who became a vital element of U2’s music making.

only see one way out”). Likewise, mourning the divisive and depressing defeat of the 1984 UK

recommended by Gavin Friday for his work with

national miners’ strike, “Red Hill Mining Town”

the Virgin Prunes. Whereas the recording trend

summoned the tradition of the North American

of the era was to make every voice and instru-

mining disaster folk song.

ment sound gleamingly digital and processed,

Though writing with more conscious craft

Flood helped spearhead a contrary movement

than his previous freestyle method, Bono

to a full, raw, forcefully natural and human

resisted lyrical specifics, throwing out vivid

recorded sound.

phrases rather than the clear-cut narratives of

Looking to buy a house for his expanding

the traditional folk balladeer. Likewise, the music,

family (he had become a father for the second

arrived at in U2’s usual way as they developed

time with the birth of daughter Arran the

patterns and riffs that emerged in jams, was viv-

previous year), the Edge had viewed but passed

idly dramatic, even cinematic in its spacious and

on a Georgian mansion in foothills of the

exhilarating evocation of sky, long distance, and

Wicklow Mountains. But he could see it would

wide horizons. Seldom have songs so mournful

offer a great recording environment, with the

on paper sounded so inspiring, so exciting on

double-height drawing room giving massive

record and in performance.

acoustic resonance to the drums. Renting the

Once again, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois

house, called Danesmoate, U2 moved in, and

were back on board, augmented by the British

work on the backing tracks of the new album

recording engineer Flood (a.k.a. Mark Ellis),

got underway in earnest.

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Fired up as he was with what he had witnessed in Central America, Bono showed the

feat of being stark yet also inspiringly grand.

Edge footage of atrocities on video and pinned

Photographed in December 1986 in California’s

up pictures in their makeshift studio to illustrate

Mojave Desert by Anton Corbijn, with U2’s old

the violence and fear he wanted the guitarist

Dublin friend Steve Averill art directing, the band

to evoke in the song that would be finalized as

are portrayed unsmilingly in black and white

“Bullet the Blue Sky.” This searing indictment

in Death Valley. Inside the gatefold sleeve, U2

of U.S. foreign policy provided the centerpiece

appear in grim panorama, the Joshua tree that

and most exciting highlight of an album that

titles the album writhing behind them. A cheerful

would top the U.S. Billboard charts for nine

package it was not. But there has seldom been

weeks and go on to sell at least 10 million of its

a more atmospheric record sleeve, promising

25 million worldwide sales in that very nation.

music of drama and emotional challenge within.

As gentle as “Bullet” is aggressive, “Mothers

What set millions of new fans alight with

of the Disappeared” laments the dead of Latin

enthusiasm for U2 were the opening tracks.

America’s coups and civil wars, and closes the

“Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still

album on a note of intense pessimism.

Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With

Seldom does the bleakness let up. The album

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as packaging the music within, pulled off the

or Without You” are songs that build dramatic

sleeve, from an era when most records sold as

tension then allow release of joyous intensity,

vinyl albums whose foot-square sleeves were

even though the sense of yearning remains

as much about making an artistic statement

unrequited throughout. The original recordings

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were remixed by Steve Lilywhite, whom U2 had lured back for his ear for a radiofriendly hit sound, and the first two singles from the album, “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” both went to No. 1 in the U.S. charts, the same position the album held in America and all over the world for months. That spring, summer, and fall of 1987 was a time of U2-mania. They were indisputably the biggest, most acclaimed, most scrutinized rock band in the world. There had been blockbuster rock albums in the recent past by the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and AC/DC, but none of those bands had an agenda of talking points and issues of belief and conscience that they wanted their gigantic audience to engage with as U2 did. For the Dublin quartet, the instant, phenomenal worldwide success of the album that was the fruition of so much life experience

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O P P O S I T E PAG E : U2 and manager Paul McGuinness having a

relaxed business meeting in a New Mexico hotel suite in April 1987. A B OV E T O P : The band at a press conference for The Joshua Tree. A B OV E : The Edge and his Gibson Les Paul.

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A B OV E : Bono and the Edge on the set for the making of the “I Still Haven’t Found

What I’m Looking For” video. R I G H T T O P : Larry goes solo on the “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” single. R I G H T M I D D L E : The media reflect on U2’s biggest year. R I G H T B O T T O M : The Edge on the “With Or Without You” single. O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono and Adam on stage at the Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford, New Jersey, in May 1987.

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R I G H T: Bono reaches out to the Dutch multitudes at Feyenoord Stadium, Rotterdam, in July 1987.

as well as musical growth was not just the culmination of their recent years, but a platform to reach out to even greater things—and a ticket into the heart and minds of the most engaged mass audience any rock band had enjoyed since the Beatles. The project with the working title “The Two Americas” would continue on stage, on screen, and on record for the rest of the decade.

The LoudesT FoLk Group in The WorLd That The Joshua Tree turned out to be so instantly and phenomenally huge caught U2 and their team unawares. They had planned their stage show for arenas but discovered straight away in North America that ticket demand would have justified stadium shows, which were booked for the European and return American legs. Computerized, centrally controlled lighting was coming in, and production values were rising for the top rock shows, which were getting slicker but also more samey as everyone fell in love with the same technology. U2, by contrast, wanted to keep faith with the imagery of The Joshua Tree. Styled like California gold rush–era prospectors in puritanical black, with Old West hats surmounting long hair (though Adam and Larry stayed shorn), U2’s front men led a show based on the stark, widescreen black and white of their album sleeve, which in turn evoked Hollywood’s classic Westerns and film noirs of the 1940s. Keeping the feel human rather than computerized, all the follow-spotlights were hand-swiveled by

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A B OV E : Adam backstage at the Arizona State University Activity Center, Tempe, in April 1987.

operators in full view of the audience in the

was to suffer throughout the tour as he struggled

gantry above the stage, and this striking theatrical

to communicate with tens of thousands of fans

device was taken further when Bono himself

every night with his old intimacy. Concerned that

would pick up a spotlight to illuminate the Edge

it would distract the fans, only reluctantly did U2

as he played the searing “Bullet the Blue Sky.”

introduce a big video screen so the stage action

In the final rehearsal before the tour opened in Tempe, Arizona, Bono fell and cut open his

But The Joshua Tree Tour was not just a

chin. Worse still, having strenuously warmed up

gigantic marketing exercise to promote sales

during a week’s rehearsals, in the dry desert air

of the album. It was U2’s reintroduction to the

of the first night he lost his voice and had to ask

good side of America, whose bad side they were

the audience to sing for him, while the show’s

bringing to the biggest stages. Three weeks into

promoter read out a band statement denouncing

the tour, Time magazine granted U2 the rare

Governor Evan Mecham’s intention to abolish

accolade for a rock band of a cover story,

Martin Luther King Day in Arizona. U2 would not

cementing the fact that not only were they

hear the last of this statement.

hot, but they had arrived as household names,

Overcompensating for the sudden and unexpected scaling up of their audiences, Bono

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could be seen at the back.

whether you were a rock fan or not. Having accepted an invitation to take ringside

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seats at the WBC World Middleweight Title Fight

Me”; with some help from the Edge, it remains one

in Las Vegas where Sugar Ray Leonard defeated

of the U2 front man’s least known but best and

Marvin Hagler, U2 were summoned into the

most beautifully performed compositions.

presence of no less a luminary than Frank Sinatra,

As before, U2 were open to interesting

the Chairman of the Board taking time out to chat

encounters and spontaneous collaborations. The

with Larry about his old touring roommate, the re-

opportunity to break routine and create a fresh

cently deceased jazz drumming legend Buddy Rich.

event was seldom spurned. The day that their

Nor was Ol’ Blue Eyes the four Dubliners’ last

Time magazine cover hit the streets, U2 flew into

encounter on that tour with one of America’s

Los Angeles (no longer did they tour by bus) for

giants of song. Roy Orbison, his life beset by

five sold-out shows at the Sports Arena to find

tragedy and his career low-key after early 1960s

crowds on the street outside their hotel. On April

stardom, was making a comeback, and Bono was

20, Bob Dylan joined them on stage to duet on

moved to write a song with the Texan legend’s

his classics “I Shall Be Released” and “Knockin’

spectral voice in mind. When the Big O made an

on Heaven’s Door,” the latter song extended

unannounced backstage visit at U2’s London show,

when Bono freestyled new lyrics.

Bono played him the song, “She’s a Mystery to

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Bono’s practice of working rock classics into

L E F T: On April 20, 1987, Bob Dylan joined U2 on stage in Los Angeles to duet on his classics “I Shall Be Released” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” the latter song extended when Bono freestyled new lyrics.

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“The sound they pioneered—the

driving bass and drums underneath and those ethereal, effects-laden guitar tracks floating out from above—was nothing that had been heard before . . .” —Chris Martin (Coldplay), Rolling Stone magazine live performance now included starting the show

borrowing the Irish showband tradition of

with “Stand By Me,” the Ben E. King song also

covering pop classics and taking it to the world’s

famously covered by John Lennon, plus snippets

vastest stadiums, U2 were also announcing

of “Gloria” by Van Morrison’s 1960s group Them,

themselves as heirs to rock’s biggest and best.

the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Joy

movie, and their manager, Paul McGuinness,

Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” In Europe

revisiting the movie production road not taken

they added the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,”

earlier in his career, was the man who suggested

“Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan, Eddie Cochran’s

it. Just as the Red Rocks show and video almost

“C’mon Everybody,” and Peggy Seeger’s and

blew the modest profits of the War tour, the

Ewan MacColl’s “The Ballad of Springhill” (a.k.a.

project to film The Joshua Tree tour was quite a

“Springhill Mining Disaster”). Returning to play

burden of risk, trouble, and expense to load onto

stadiums in North America, they closed the tour

the backs of four musicians and a small manage-

back where they had started, in Tempe, Arizona,

ment and logistics team already under pressure

in time for Christmas 1987 with snippets of “Do

to deliver a great show and communicate a

They Know It’s Christmas,” “We Are the World,”

troubling message in huge spaces night after

“Jingle Bells,” and Darlene Love’s “Christmas

night, while being away from family and home.

(Baby Please Come Home),” having preceded

Though he only had one feature-length

the seasonal fare with the Beatles’ “Help!”

directorial credit to his name—the high school

and “Helter Skelter” (reclaiming the latter, as

comedy Three O’Clock High—and, at the age of

Bono would announce, from cult leader and

twenty-five, was even younger than Larry, the

life prisoner Charles Manson), the Impressions’

little-known Phil Joanou impressed U2 with his

gospel song “People Get Ready,” Bob Marley’s

love of the band and technical expertise, and he

“Exodus,” and the Latin American freedom

got the job of making the movie. Shooting on

slogan “El Pueblo Vencerá” (the people will win).

film (mostly in black and white, in keeping with

Playing to audiences often not yet born when

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The very scale of U2 seemed to demand a

The Joshua Tree aesthetic) for movie-house

these songs were first hits, Bono was taking

release rather than on videotape for TV meant

on the weight of rock’s golden age, back when

a whole new set of lighting issues for the stage

the biggest names often had a big message. By

show. Things got more complicated still when

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Bono, again overdoing it in his frustration to en-

103

A B OV E : Director Phil Joanou in 1991.

ergize the vast crowds they were playing, slipped during a show at the rain-lashed Robert F. Kennedy

the IRA before U2 kicked into “Sunday Bloody

Memorial Stadium in Washington D.C. and dislo-

Sunday” provoked personal threats. Worse still,

cated his shoulder; he carried on in agony and for

when U2 closed the tour back in Tempe, the sta-

the next month had to perform in a sling.

dium was packed with FBI personnel who were

Then, on November 8, 1987, the day U2

taking very seriously the death threats that had

played the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver,

been made against Bono for his stand against the

an IRA bomb killed eleven people at a

abolition of Martin Luther King Day in Arizona.

Remembrance Day ceremony in the Northern

When U2 were finally able to go home, after

Ireland town of Enniskillen. Suddenly, U2’s

having been seen on tour by more than three

thoughts and focus were jerked back from

million people, they struggled to decompress

America to Ireland, and Bono’s condemnation of

from the rigors of the road and filming. The

“Phil Joanou impressed U2 with his

love of the band . . . and he got the job.”

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Edge’s wife, Aislinn, was not happy in their marriage, and it didn’t help when he had to take

U2 went ahead in Justin Herman Plaza in San

off again with the band to Los Angeles to record

Francisco with a filmed mock-benefit concert

new songs and sound mix the movie.

to “Save the Yuppie” following the previous

There were moments of lightness, such as the

104

Three days after the Enniskillen bombing,

month’s stock market crash. They played Bob

three performances of a hitherto unknown coun-

Dylan’s Biblically ominous “All Along the

try band, the Dalton Brothers, as U2’s support act,

Watchtower” and, during a performance of

which came about after their scheduled support

“Pride (In the Name of Love),” Bono spray-

act, Los Lobos, missed their flight. Alton (Bono),

painted “Stop the traffic—rock and roll” on

Luke (the Edge), Duke (Larry) and Betty (Adam

the Vaillancourt Fountain in defiance of Mayor

in drag) were seldom recognized and usually

Diane Feinstein’s offer of a $500 bounty for the

booed for their lack of ability on such fare as Hank

arrest of any graffitist in the city. With a warrant

Williams’s “Lost Highway” and, recalled from the

issued for his arrest, Bono hastened to write the

days of Feedback, The Eagles’ “Tequila Sunrise.”

city a letter of apology.

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“When U2 originally recorded ‘I Still

Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ it had been conceived as a gospel song.” U2 were breaking the tour routine by having

Studios in Memphis, where Roy Orbison (for

fun and meeting people. They were also filming

whom Bono and the Edge had also recently writ-

it all to make their movie more interesting than a

ten a song), Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and

standard filmed concert performance. Likewise,

Howlin’ Wolf had recorded; the band were thrilled

set up for Phil Joanou’s crew was an exhilarating

to find that little had changed since Elvis cut his

encounter with grassroots America. When U2

earliest and best records there more than thirty

originally recorded “I Still Haven’t Found What

years before. Bringing the famed Memphis Horns

I’m Looking For,” it had been conceived as a

into that hallowed studio, U2 also cut “Angel of

gospel song, an idea that fired up Brian Eno, who

Harlem” (Bono’s tribute to Billie Holiday and the

loved the church’s blend of human voices and

romance of jazz and nightlife) and “Love Rescue

had taken to educating U2’s singer in such greats

Me” (a Bono cowrite with Bob Dylan).

as gospel group the Swan Silvertones. When U2

Initially conceived as a tour documentary,

were tipped off by an Island staffer about the

Phil Joanou’s movie was generating its own

New Voices of Freedom gospel choir, they went

momentum, its own agenda—and its own

to Harlem and filmed the two bands—one rock,

problems. Chief among them was the lack of

the other church vocal—rehearsing together a

script—costs shot up as new ideas were added,

new version of the hit record. In Madison Square

requiring the hiring and transportation of film

Garden, the New Voices of Freedom joined U2

crew and logistic support. The cost had spiraled

on stage for an exuberant, jubilant performance,

to $5 million—four times the original budget—

the soloists George Pendergrass and Dorothy

and U2 had to sell the rights to Paramount just

Tennell interweaving with Bono in, perhaps, the

to break even. The studio needed a more

Dubliners’ most moving expression of the divine

coherent movie than just a collection of discon-

spirit in their music.

nected scenes, so short explanatory interviews

Only slightly less likely on paper than this rock-

had to be filmed to link the set pieces. And the

gospel fusion was Bono writing a song for B.B.

mountain of footage had to be picked through

King after they met in Dublin, where the great

to find not only highlights but also an under-

veteran blues singer and guitarist had been playing

standable sequence of events.

a club date. Titled “When Love Comes to Town,” it touches on the Crucifixion in a lyric Dylan himself might have been pleased to write. Consciously seeking mentors and inspiration among music’s giants, Bono was in his element when B.B. King and U2 recorded the song’s backing track at Sun

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O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono leads the New Voices of Freedom gospel choir in the encore performance of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” at Madison Square Garden, New York City, on September 28, 1987. I N S E T: The single “When Loves Come to Town” featuring the blues legend B.B. King.

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L E F T, B E L O W, A N D O P P O S I T E PAG E : Life on the road—while on their marathon tour, U2 recorded new songs and filmed it all for a movie release.

“The Edge

was on as much of a creative roll as Bono.”

By then, U2 had worked out what they were doing. They were making a movie that

a creative roll as Bono. Back home in Dublin,

documented not only the North America stadium

listening to Bob Dylan’s career on record as well

leg of the Joshua Tree tour but also the band’s

as the music of country music pioneer Lefty

adventures in American music as they used their

Frizell and Iggy Pop’s incendiary early band, the

fame to open doors and explore creatively the

Stooges, he was inspired to conjure the music

deeper roots of what they were at heart: a rock

for “Desire,” “Angel Of Harlem,” “All I Want Is

’n’ roll band.

You,” and “Hawkmoon 269”—songs founded on

That creative exploration was giving birth

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to new songs, and the Edge was on as much of

hallowed rhythm-and-blues riffs and rhythms.

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Bono’s lyrics were a perfect fit, celebrating the Dubliners’ fresh discovery of the breadth of American music from country to soul to jazz to folk to electric blues, and honoring the themes American musicians never cease to chew over: loneliness, need, love lost and found, the road, and the party. In tandem with the movie, a new album was taking shape too, with the same mix of live performances of old songs, including a faithful cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” and studio recordings of new ones. To the record industry, this was neither fish nor fowl, though back in 1968 the blues-rock trio Cream had enjoyed a No. 1 hit album with a similar hybrid, Wheels of Fire. But U2 being U2, they could do what they liked—not least because they now owned part of the record company. Unable to pay all the royalties (some $5 million) it owed U2 for the sales of The Unforgettable Fire, Island compensated U2 with company shares amounting to about a tenth of its estimated total value. Also, they got back

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the rights to their master tapes, which henceforth would be leased to Island rather than owned by the record company. This would be of huge benefit two years later when Chris Blackwell, Island’s majority shareholder, came to sell the label to the multinational Polygram (which has now morphed into Universal) for nearly ten times Island’s 1987 valuation when U2 became major shareholders. Not only were U2 now seriously rich, but also they were the crown jewels of a major multinational whose worldwide record distribution system would maximize both sales and prompt payment. To supervise the movie’s live-performance sound mix and properly record and complete all of the new songs, the band decamped to Los Angeles to work with Bruce Springsteen’s regular producer, Jimmy Iovine. Far from home, Larry was despondent, while the Edge, sensing that his marriage was crumbling, threw himself into work. Adam partied hard, joined by Bono, now giving free rein to his expansive, gregarious personality. But the work got done. Its title taken from a lyric in “Bullet the Blue Sky,” which gave the movie its most dramatic live performance, Rattle and Hum hit over a thousand cinema screens in late October 1988, preceded by a double vinyl album and cassette of the same title a fortnight earlier. The fans loved it, but the unconverted sniffed hubris. Even so, the movie made Paramount’s money back and the album sold some 14 million copies, about two-thirds of The Joshua Tree’s phenomenal total. With lots of songs to choose from on the record, four were released as

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“Not only were U2

now seriously rich, but they were also the crown jewels of a major multinational.” Aislinn gave birth their third daughter, Blue Angel. Adam, meanwhile, hung out with fellow musicians in a lively Dublin scene, which now included the American singer Maria McKee, whose band, Lone Justice, had supported U2 on tour in 1987. Having recharged their batteries, U2 were ready to get rolling once more. There were parts of the world The Joshua Tree tour had not reached, so in September 1989 they set off again for a forty-seven-date tour of Europe and the Far East, with half of the total being played in Australia, a country for which U2 felt both a personal and a historical connection. The Rattle and Hum song “Van Diemen’s Land” was the Edge’s remembrance of the Irishmen transported in the wake of their country’s Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century to what is now called Tasmania. O P P O S I T E PAG E A B OV E : Video shoot in Hollywood

for “Desire.” O P P O S I T E PAG E B E L O W A N D T H I S PAG E A B OV E : The Rattle and Hum live and studio album birthed several singles, including “Desire,” “Angel of Harlem,” and “All I Want Is You.”

B.B. King was the support act and U2 called it the Lovetown tour. Making a change from the stark monochrome of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum albums, tour, and movie, a colorful set inspired by Bono’s 1986 adventures in Central

singles, with the hits “Angel of Harlem,” “When

America was designed by the Chilean artist René

Love Comes to Town,” and “All I Want is You,”

Castro to include symbols of the hawkmoon,

keeping U2 before the ears and eyes of the world

dollar sign, snake, guitar, and the Amnesty

as at last they took a breather for most of 1989.

International candle, which illuminated accord-

On Bono’s twenty-ninth birthday, May 10, Ali Hewson gave birth to their daughter Jordan, and a few weeks later, on June 26, the Edge’s wife

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ing to the lighting conditions. Due to Bono falling sick for a few days, which postponed some of the Dutch shows until

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January 1990, the tour would otherwise have concluded in Dublin on New Year’s Eve of 1989 to bring to an end in a live worldwide radio broadcast by both RTE and the BBC not just the decade, but the entire Two Americas stage of U2’s career. The Edge in particular was beginning to bristle at the rootsy, retro turn that U2’s music had been taking, and wanted to look forward, not back. The rest of the band shared his mood. Reported all over the world, at the Dublin show on the night of December 30, Bono had an enigmatic but weighty announcement: “This is just the end of something for U2 . . . we’re throwing a party for ourselves and you. It’s no big deal, it’s just we have to go away and dream it all up again.” Go away, they did. Dream it all up again, they did. And, rather than looking West, to America, for inspiration, U2 turned to look East. Across the A B OV E T O P : U2 hit Australia and the Far East on the

Lovetown tour, with B.B. King (TOP, with Bono) as the supporting act. A B OV E : The colorful Lovetown tour program by the Chilean artist René Castro. O P P O S I T E PAG E : The Edge and Bono in Paris, France, on the European leg of the Lovetown tour.

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other side of Europe, momentous events were redrawing the map of the world, ending one era and starting a new one. In the last decade of the second millennium, U2 wanted to be part of a new history being written.

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THE TREE

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“This is

just the end of something for U2 . . . we’re throwing a party for ourselves and you. It’s no big deal, it’S just we have to go away and dream it all up again.” –Bono

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CHAPTER

9

achTunG . . . Back

in April 1987 when U2 made the cover

of Time magazine, there was an inset photograph of a political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to illustrate another story. As the Soviet Union’s head of state, it was he who set into motion the internal reforms and strategic

O P P O S I T E PAG E : On the eve of

the 1990s, U2 says farewell to neon America and hello to the new Europe. B E L O W : People on the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, the day after the fall of the Wall, November 10, 1989.

restructuring that would lead to the unraveling of the Eastern Bloc, which for more than forty years had confronted the U.S.-led West in the Cold War. The Cold War’s most visible symbol and hottest potential flashpoint was the Berlin Wall, built when U2 were babies, which divided the city into Western and Eastern halves. The evening the people of Germany’s biggest city tore it down in November 1989 after twenty-eight years was world history in the making, witnessed by people wherever there was a television screen. Having felt they had exhausted their exploration of America, its conflicting identity of freedom at home and imperialism abroad, and the richness of the music made by its poorest people, U2 would now

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look to where the future was being made, across

it made in 1971, before pulling it from UK distri-

Europe in the East.

bution the following year when it was blamed

But it took a few months of the new decade

in court for a number of violent copycat crimes.

for the band to reset their compass. For now,

Burgess was not entirely happy with the movie,

they enjoyed the fruits of having joined rock

and in 1990 the august Royal Shakespeare

royalty, inducting the Who into the Rock and

Company staged his theatrical adaptation, com-

Roll Hall of Fame, and, two years later, doing the

missioning U2’s front pair to provide the music.

same for another of the legendary London bands

With his marriage to Aislinn failing despite

that rose to prominence in 1965, the Yardbirds.

the arrival of their third child, the Edge moved

Among the side projects they worked on during

out of the family home to a nearby cottage, and

this time, Bono wrote “Jah Love” and “Kingdom

was immersing himself in the most abrasive,

Come” with their Amnesty International

discordant music of the era, the “industrial rock”

Conspiracy of Hope co-tourers the Neville

of Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nine Inch

Brothers, the veteran New Orleans group also

Nails, Insekt, Front 242, KMFDM, and the Young

produced by Daniel Lanois, and the band

Gods. In particular, their use of samples and

“With his marriage

to Aislinn failing, the Edge moved out of the family home to a nearby cottage.”

pounding rhythms was to inspire a fresh direction for U2, who in the three years until then had been tending toward the “authentic” instrumentation of rhythm and blues. Even so, U2, now all pushing thirty, were unnerved that a younger new wave of “Madchester” rock bands—hailing from Manchester in northwest England—most notably the Stone Roses and

recorded Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” for the

Happy Mondays, were already popularizing a

first of the Red Hot + Blue AIDS benefit albums.

dance-rock-sampladelic fusion in the UK. Could

But it was a project into which Bono and the Edge threw themselves in the first weeks of 1990

A Clockwork Orange flopped on stage, with

that gave U2 a route into the future. Anthony

Burgess (also a composer, who had hoped his

Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange had been

music would be scoring the production)

an instant cult hit from its publication in 1962,

singling out Bono and the Edge’s music as being

imagining a not-too-distant dystopia where

“neo-wallpaper,” while the Edge retorted that

feral teenage gangs speak Russian street slang

Burgess’s music was “a score written by a

and our anti-hero, Alex, is a Beethoven-loving

novelist rather than a songwriter.” Bono and

psychopath subjected by the state to aversion

the Edge in fact felt that they were getting a grip

therapy to cure his love of “ultraviolence.”

on the tools they would need to make the U2

The Rolling Stones had toyed with the idea of

music of the future.

adapting it for the screen in the 1960s, but it was the great director Stanley Kubrick who got

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U2 do something different?

Bono has hinted that the collapse of the Edge’s marriage had a knock-on effect on other

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L E F T: Despite being a flop, the London stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange with a controversial Bono–Edge score sent U2 in a new musical direction.

The Joshua Tree production team of Eno, Lanois, and Flood were on board, and Eno was credrelationships in their group of close friends, but

ited with suggesting that they go to record at

as much as personal stress was to feed into new

the famed Hansa Tonstudio in newly reunited

songs, so was concept of new life, with Ali falling

Berlin, the very city where in 1976 and ’77 he had

pregnant with Eve, who would be born in July

shared an apartment with David Bowie and Iggy

1991. Not for nothing, Bono has said, was the

Pop while playing on the former’s classic Hansa-

album they would take nearly two years to make

recorded Low and Heroes albums.

eventually titled Achtung Baby, the very word

Arriving on October 3, 1990, the night the two

“baby” cropping up twenty-seven times in its

halves of Germany were officially reunited, U2

songs, compared to the zero times in U2’s entire

found accommodation in Berlin hard to come by.

songbook up to that point.

And when they set up in the Hansa Tonstudio,

While on the Lovetown tour in Australia, Bono had written feverishly in the midst of jetlag, and early in 1990 the band recorded demo versions of a number of new songs in Dublin’s snug STS studios. But for a fresh feel—and to take a break from domesticity—U2 felt they needed a fresh location. Enticed by the thought of making futuristic music using new technology,

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now run down and needing Eno to bring in more

“Though the word

never appeared in U2’s songbook previously, ‘baby’ crops up twenty-seven times on Achtung Baby.”

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“Each member

of U2 feared this new beginning might turn out to be the end.”

slighted. Tensions grew, with Bono and the Edge (“the Hats,” according to U2 insiders) blaming the rhythm section for failing to get with the program, while “the Haircuts”—Adam and Larry (and Daniel Lanois)—argued that the songs Bono and the Edge increasingly wrote as a pair away from the group were not very strong, and that the poor reception accorded to their score for A Clockwork Orange suggested that continuing down that path was wrong for the band. U2’s crew-in-attendance was nonplussed by this unprecedented disagreement, and mounting costs only added to the pressure. Each member equipment, the main room’s earlier incarnation as

of U2 subsequently admitted that he feared this

a ballroom used by the SS to host social events

new beginning might turn out to be the end.

further blighted the atmosphere and spirit of

“Sick Puppy” was the working title of the song

the band. It soon became clear that, far from

that almost brought Bono (who, thanks to his out-

basking in Berlin’s spirit of unity and rebirth, a

bursts, was banned from drinking coffee by the

split had grown between the new dads and the

rest of the band) and Lanois to blows, so violently

childless rhythm section, the emotional, even

did they disagree with how it should develop.

confrontational front men, and the more

Working on the bridge, however, the Edge came

cautious back line.

up with two chord progressions that, in a flash

As the four set to work in their usual way,

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of insight, Lanois suggested should not only

working up in rehearsal a bunch of sketches,

be combined but also spun off into a completely

riffs, and patterns into songs, the atmosphere

new and separate song. Sensing a breakthrough

failed to gel toward constructive creativity. The

moment where the four-way chemistry of the

critical issue was rhythm, with the Edge keen

band could work once more, everyone joined in,

to impose dance music’s reliance on samples,

with Bono improvising lyrics about breaking up

loops, synth pads, and drum machines on a

and making up, difference yet mutual need, with

bassist and, especially, a drummer who felt

the song coming together in fifteen minutes.

that their own creative contribution was being

Titled “One,” this soaring, surging song, as much

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inspired by the ructions in the band as the reverberations of the Edge–Aislinn split, remains one of U2’s greatest. As for “Sick Puppy,” it eventually morphed into “Mysterious Ways,” one of several songs on the album where Bono expresses his conflicting desires to both idealize women and let them be human. U2 had pulled back from the brink of disaster. They would not push their luck any further by remaining in Berlin beyond the time spent being extensively photographed by Anton Corbijn at the studio and hotel. By way of a corrective to the cold, O P P O S I T E PAG E : A 1991 issue of Propaganda, the

official U2 fan magazine. R I G H T: The East German Trabant car that caught U2’s fancy, and a detail of its artistic customization for their live shows. B E L O W : Bono’s smoking eventually causes voice problems.

“‘Sick Puppy’ was the

working title of the song that almost brought Bono and Lanois to blows.”

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bleak mood of these photo sessions, U2 flew to balmy Tenerife in February 1991 for a fortnight of photo and video shoots, donning masks and joining the crowds in the Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, dressing in drag and giving themselves a playful, lighthearted, even camp alternative to the cold, hard, conflicted Berlin feel

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“The Edge is a

scientist, and a poet by night; he’s always got a little rig at home.” –Daniel Lanois, Rolling Stone magazine.

that only told half the story of where the band were at, where they wanted to go, and how they wanted to project themselves. Having dodged disaster in Berlin and found a new modus operandi and creative breakthrough, U2 reconvened to record in a house called “Elsinore” that they had rented in the swanky Dublin coastal resort of Dalkey, just a mile from Bono’s home so he could walk to work. What they brought back to Dublin via Tenerife was the concept of a split between oppressive, industrial bleakness and a masked, play-acting sense of fun. This was not a debate to be resolved on record or in the live shows to come, but rather a conflict to be presented in an intriguingly unresolved interplay that would redefine U2 from being the American-facing, consciousness-raising, and heroic band of the previous few years, into a much more playful and ambiguous proposition. A random prop from U2’s stage wardrobe—a

fantasy selves, Bono felt free to write lyrics in the

pair of wraparound “Superfly”-style shades—

character of his own creation, just as Bob Dylan,

was the prompt for Bono to imagine a new song-

Randy Newman, David Bowie, and others had

writing and performing persona behind which he

done before him. The “Fly” typified this approach,

could hide or peep with as much sincerity as he

being the anthem of the wiseacreing paranoid

chose. Reviving the character of the holy, truth-

fantasist barfly holding court from a stool.

telling “Fool” that he had played back in the days of Lypton Village when they were all imagining

As much as the shades, it was what the Edge was playing on guitar, electronically processed with Flood’s help in particular, that inspired

O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono sports the “Superfly” shades

that give him a new stage persona, the Fly, which was also the title of the new single ( A B OV E ) from their first album of the 1990s.

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Bono. What Jimi Hendrix had done in the 1960s and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in the 1970s, the Edge was doing now: finding new sounds that an

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L E F T: The poster for the German director Wim Wenders’s movie Until the End of the World; U2 wrote the title song for the movie that became a highlight of the Achtung Baby album (O P P O S I T E PAG E ). B E L O W : The single “One.”

dislocation, which felt right for an album that U2 wanted to reflect the group in a new phase of history, where everything had been defamiliarized and nobody could predict the future. Where Bono sang unprocessed and true—he was listening to the richly romantic voices of Roy Orbison and Scott Walker at the time—those moments when the sonic mask was dropped carried an extra emotional punch, not only in the song “One,” but also on another standout, “Until the End of the World,” written for the German director Wim Wenders’s movie of that name. Referencing the betraying Judas kiss, Bono sings allusively of sexual infidelity, which those close to U2 hint was an issue within the camp at the time. Though the most audible leaps forward on the new album were those of the Edge and Bono, electric guitar could generate through a growing battery of electronic effects, and layering the resulting riffs, licks, and lines into three-dimensional sound pictures such as had never been heard before. With his fondness for industrial rock and the abrasive end of electronica echoing the personal pain of his collapsed marriage, the Edge was playing exhilaratingly but seldom sweetly. Improvising vocal melodies and lyrics in the guitar’s comfort keys of D, A, and E, Bono was forced out of his own vocal comfort zone of B-flat, thus tending to sing uncomfortably high or uncomfortably low. Studio processing effects like double-tracking would remove the sense of strain and add to the overall atmosphere of

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Adam’s bass-playing was growing in authority and invention, while Larry was making his own drum loops and had found a way to play off prerecorded rhythm tracks. Brian Eno’s role as producer was as a patient mediator between warring factions, a pair of ears that could penetrate the layers and layers of recording that the musicians and engineers kept adding until they lost sight of the song, and as a provider of off-the-wall techniques to break deadlock and facilitate focus, clarity, and momentum. Though “One” was the song that retrieved U2 from the very real possibility of a split in Berlin, Eno detested the over-complex arrangement and stripped it right back in a new mix. Steve Lilywhite was also invited to mix a number of songs, with the band picking those they liked best from the competing mixes. Contrariwise, right at the final mixing stage, the Edge would suddenly come up with yet another guitar part to give a song a fresh element or emphasis, so, not for the first time, it took a while before everyone could reach a consensus that the new U2 album was as good as they were going to get it, and was, therefore, finished.

“Given the new

babies born to the Edge and Bono, Achtung Baby seemed to fit the moment.”

Visually, Anton Corbijn had a wealth of material from which the band struggled to

Heads, while “Cruise Down Main Street”

choose a defining album cover image, toying

referenced the Rolling Stones’ classic 1972 album

with a picture of the band in drag, then, no less

Exile on Main Street and the Cruise missiles being

jestingly, a full-frontal nude picture of Adam.

unleashed by the United States against Iraq in the

“Man” (as in the maturing of the band from their

Gulf War being played out on CNN while U2

first album, Boy) was an early thought for the

recorded in Berlin. The German experience was

album’s title, then Adam, as in the first man,

key, and U2’s sound man Joe O’Herlihy was

naked in the Garden of Eden. These options

prone to quoting from black-comedy movie The

had the ring of pretentiousness, though—and

Producers: “Der Führer does not say, ‘Achtung,

U2 wanted the freedom to have fun. “Fear of

baby!’” Given the new babies born to the Edge

Women” was a suggestion that alluded to the

and Bono, Achtung Baby seemed to fit the moment.

Eno-produced Fear of Music album by Talking

As for the sleeve, rather than settle on just

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“The story went that during the heavy bombing Berlin suffered late in the war, the zoo animals escaped on the streets, a vision of surreal chaos . . .”

one image, U2 picked several, arranged in a grid,

summation as the first stage of a work in

not unlike Robert Frank’s scrapbook style sleeve

progress; the tour that followed would spin off

for Exile on Main Street.

another album that would test their fans’

Convinced that what they had given birth

readiness for the unexpected even harder.

to with so much difficulty and pain was an artistic peak for the band, they felt it should stand or fall in the marketplace on its own

overLoad

merits, with no pre-release interviews or direct

On tour, rock singers tend to party the least

media promotion by U2. Initially, the picture

hard. Voices are fragile and need to be nurtured.

was mixed, with the first single, “The Fly,”

While touring in Australia at one point, it would

released a month before the album, flopping in

be Adam who had to miss a date (replaced by a

the United States but going to No. 1 in the UK.

roadie), having over-refreshed the night before.

When the album followed in November, it was

To perform at his best, Bono had to spent a lot

greeted with rave reviews (including by this

of time in hotel suites reading, writing, watching

author in the UK’s bestselling Q magazine: “It’s

TV, and brainstorming.

U2’s Blood on the Tracks, their Tunnel of Love. For their sakes, here’s hoping they won’t have

format” of caffeinated fly-by-the-seat-of-its-

to get this sort of record out of their systems

pants wackiness, with hosts, guests, phone-ins,

again”) and sales that launched it straight to the

and commercials piled up without a script,

top of the U.S. album charts, and currently total

migrated to television, especially late at night—

around 18 million, only 10 percent fewer than

unstructured, cheap to make, suited to drunks

their phenomenal commercial career peak of

and insomniacs. Coming from Ireland with few

The Joshua Tree.

TV and radio stations, Bono was mesmerized by

Feeling vindicated that the risks they had taken with their fans’ expectations had paid off,

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Originating on American radio, the “zoo

this insane profusion. In Berlin a few months later, he was tickled to

U2 took to the road. Months before the album

discover that on the U-Bahn subway system the

was even finished, they had been working up all

lines were numbered, and on the U2 line there

the ideas buzzing around their heads for a tour

was a Zoo Bahnhof—Zoo Station. Better still, the

that would take not only the Achtung Baby songs

story went that during the heavy bombing Berlin

but also its themes and context onto the world’s

suffered late in the war, the zoo animals

biggest stages before millions of fans. There U2

escaped onto the streets, a vision of surreal

would find that Achtung Baby was not so much a

chaos. All that and more germinated the first

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A B OV E : As the Fly, Bono could parody rock star narcissism while still being a real rock star; here he records

himself for the ZooTV tour’s giant screens.

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song of Achtung Baby, titled Zoo Station, but for U2 the idea had much more still to offer. During U2’s grueling Berlin recording sessions, the first Gulf War turned hot with

B E L O W : U2 fan and belly dancer Christina Petro

joined the show just by showing up to rehearsals. O P P O S I T E PAG E : The Fly and the Trabant lighting platform—no idea was too off-the-wall for the ZooTV tour.

Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led attack on Iraqi forces in Kuwait, its images of destruc-

Dylan had feverishly juxtaposed high and low

tion beamed by CNN satellite straight from the

images, and the Rolling Stones’ breakthrough

pilots’ cockpit monitor to the world’s TV screens,

hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” protested

including the band’s in Berlin. The nightmarish

the bombardment of advertising these young

juxtaposition of death, game shows, and TV

Britons were astounded to discover on tour in

commercials further fueled the concept taking

America, Bono felt that modern life was now

shape in Bono’s mind of the modern age being

so media-drenched and surreal in the rapid-fire

characterized by sensory overload and moral

juxtaposition of news, nonsense, commercials,

shutdown. Where back in 1965 Bono’s idol Bob

and instant communication (mobile phones were coming in, though the internet was still barely born) that it amounted to a global electronic zoo. From that thought, the most ambitious rock tour by anyone up to that point, and perhaps ever since, was born. Three months before the final all-night mixing and running order session for Achtung Baby, U2 met their creative team, including Eno, set-andlighting designer Willie Williams, an ex-punk who’d been on board since 1982, and video director Kevin Godley, formerly of the 1970s hit group 10cc of “I’m Not in Love fame.” With Bono taking the lead, U2 had a lot they wanted to pack into the spectacular show that they would be living with for nearly two years. First, there had to be huge TV screens, showing both prerecorded material, electronic static, loaded messages and images, and what could be found by flicking through what was picked up by the band’s own satellite receiver. Tellingly, of the vastly reduced program of cover versions compared to previous outings that U2 would play on the ZooTV tour, one of them was Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.”

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“The ZOOTV tour was something never

before seen, mixing multimedia, satellite hookups, politics, fan-generated videos and wild images . . . the most spectacular show I’ve ever seen.” –Jeff Pollack, Huffington Post

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There would be a video confessional, where fans were invited to say or do their thing, the best bits being flashed up on screen, especially during

sway as Bono sang “Mysterious Ways.” There would be Bono himself, costumed in

the gap between U2 leaving the stage at the end

black leatherette like a parody of Elvis’s famous

of the main set and their return for the encores.

1968 TV comeback, and starting the show in

There would be a second, B-stage projecting

his alienating wraparound “fly” shades, which

into the crowd from a 150-foot catwalk off the

would then come off to reestablish Bono’s

main stage, from where U2 would perform

customarily intimate engagement with the fans.

intimate acoustic arrangements of “Angel of

And then there would be the Trabants. Just

Harlem” and a few others while surrounded on

as the rest of the show ironically celebrated the

three sides by fans.

excessive profusion, pace, and scale of media

There would be a belly dancer (Christina Petro,

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final rehearsals in Miami) to shimmy, shake, and

imagery and message, the Trabant was hilariously

a U2 fan who got herself added to the show at

excessive the other way: it was the small, ugly,

the last minute simply by turning up to the band’s

and joyless 600cc two-cylinder family car

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O P P O S I T E PAG E : Fans reaching for the Fly; interactivity, both real and virtual, was a theme of the show, including phoning to order Speedy Pizza for an entire Detroit audience.

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of Bono calling the White House from the stage to speak to the President, 1992 being the election year when the incumbent George Bush Sr. faced the challenge of the telegenic young Arkansas

manufactured for the masses in East Germany

Governor, Bill Clinton. Bono never succeeded in

from 1957 onwards, driven west by East

being put through (“The President of the United

Germans fleeing to freedom and abandoned by

States is not available to me? I mustn’t be as

the roadside as they broke down. Symbolizing

important as I thought I was!”), though he would

for U2 their Berlin experience (one was pictured

get to meet not just the next president but his

on the Achtung Baby cover), on tour Trabant

two successors. If Bono was trying to acquire a

bodies, artistically painted by the band’s old

reputation for mischief, he was also acquiring

friend, Catherine Owens, would house lighting

one for ego. As the joke of the day had it, “How

pods and the DJ booth.

many members of U2 does it take to change a

None of this came cheap. Yet the band also wanted to peg ticket prices, and stuck to their

lightbulb? Just Bono; he holds the lightbulb and the world revolves around him.”

guns despite the fact that the tour would only show any sort of profit if it played to consistently full houses. There it succeeded, quickly becoming rock’s must-see event, its dynamism and spectacle not only establishing U2 as rivals to such seasoned live acts as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, but also, as Mick Jagger admitted to Paul McGuinness, raising the bar for everyone. Opening in Florida, the ZooTV tour was complex to stage and seldom deviated from a set list whose first eight numbers consisted entirely of songs from the new album—challenging any fan hoping to be eased into the new U2. Even so, U2 built in an element of unpredictability to make every night different. On March 27 in Detroit, Bono phoned Speedy Pizza midperformance to order for the entire audience of 10,000; they managed around a tenth of that number. With Bono’s Fly persona upgrading to Mirror Ball Man, a self-adoring, silver-suited, and cowboy-hatted parody televangelist/huckster, the stadium-sized pranksterism of the whole enterprise was symbolized by the nightly ritual

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“The President

of the United States is not available to me? I mustn’t be as important as I thought I was!” —Bono” That summer, when the tour moved from

arenas to stadiums (ZooTV Outside Broadcast), U2 opened the show with a montage of the President’s voice sampled from several speeches and cut back together again to the tune of Queen’s stadium rock anthem “We Will Rock You.” Though, as Irish nationals, U2 denied they were taking sides in the presidential election between Bush and the Democrat challenger Clinton, this mockery suggested otherwise, and on the campaign trail that August of 1992, the candidate “Bill from Little Rock” cannily called up New York’s Rockline Radio, where U2 were being interviewed and exchanged pleasantries live on air, then engineered a meeting when both the band and the candidate were in Chicago, each warming to the other. At a Greenpeace benefit show in Manchester, England, on June 19, 1992, U2 campaigned directly on an issue that affected both Ireland and the UK: the proposal to build a second nuclear energy and weapons-grade plutonium reprocessing plant at Sellafield, which faces Ireland across a narrow stretch of sea high in radiation. The following day, U2 were part of a Greenpeaceorganized demonstration and publicity stunt O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono’s guitar quotes a James

Brown song, one of many semi-ironic pop culture references in the show. R I G H T: ZooTV tour passes and memorabilia.

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A B OV E : On June 20, 1992, Bono joins a Greenpeace-organized protest at the beach by the Sellafield nuclear power and

reprocessing plant in Northern England that was discharging waste into the Irish Sea.

“Thanks to his photoshoot on the cover

of Vogue, Bono now had an entrée to the world of supermodels . . .”

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where, banned by law from all the surrounding

singer-songwriter wife Kirsty MacColl having

land, protesters in radiation suits “stormed the

been entrusted few years before, as a fresh

beach” at Sellafield in rubber dinghies,

pair of ears, with deciding the running order

displaying placards, with U2 spelling out their

of The Joshua Tree.) And at an arena show in

opposition to the plant in semaphore like the cover

Stockholm, ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn

of the Beatles’ Help! album. The work went ahead

Ulvaeus joined U2 for a performance of “Dancing

anyway, but Bono’s wife persisted in the “Stop

Queen.” (That evening would not be U2’s last

Sellafield” campaign, achieving some success.

dalliance with disco pop.)

Whereas The Joshua Tree tour had been

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Love was in the air on the tour. The original

grueling for U2, including the diversions into

belly dancer, Christina Petro, left the tour and

Americana at the behest of a costly movie

was replaced by the show’s choreographer,

project, the five-leg ZooTV tour (renamed

Morleigh Steinberg, an American modern

Zooropa in European stadiums after a six-month

dancer who had first worked with the band on

break in 1993, then Zoomerang and New Zooland

the video of “With or Without You.” A romance

in Australasia) was inspirational and fun.

blossomed with the now solo Edge.

Starting on St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, Larry

Meanwhile, thanks to his photoshoot on the

was persuaded, despite his acute and endur-

cover of Vogue magazine with Christy Turlington,

ing bashfulness, to sing a song mid-set to give

Bono now had an entrée to the world of super-

Bono’s voice a break, choosing Ewan MacColl’s

models, which he was surprised and delighted

song, most famously sung by the Dubliners,

to find was full of savvy, music-loving, and

“Dirty Old Town.” (MacColl, by the way, was

self-reliant people who were full of fun. Knowing

Steve Lilywhite’s father-in-law, the producer’s

that Adam had lusted after Naomi Campbell from afar, Bono took pleasure in engineering their introduction, and soon they were an item. In the end, it was not to be, but for a time it added to a mood of lightheartedness in the U2 camp, crowned when Adam and Larry attended Bill Clinton’s inauguration ceremony the night before joining members of R.E.M. in a scratch band called Automatic Baby, after the hit albums each had out at the time, at a party held by MTV, whose Rock the Vote campaign had done so much to mobilize young people’s support behind the victorious Democrat candidate.

L E F T: Bono becomes a Vogue cover star with Christy

Turlington, one of several supermodels to join U2’s entourage.

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While a previous Southern president, Jimmy Carter, had loyally, if at arm’s length, championed Southern rock bands in the late 1970s, for the first time the Oval Office was occupied by a baby boomer who knew his rock music and even played the saxophone. With the world coming out of the late 1980s recession, with the fall of the totalitarian Eastern Bloc, with both record and ticket sales hitting ever greater heights, and with a rock fan in the White House, it looked for a moment as if rock’s 1960s dream of freedom and dancing in the streets was at last coming true. But nagging away in the background, freedom from Communist state control in Eastern Europe was not an unmixed blessing. With political power up for grabs, some dangerous forces were flexing their muscles.

A B OV E : Tour passes reflecting U2’s interest in the

1992 presidential election in support of Bill Clinton. R I G H T: Adam and Larry with R.E.M.’s Mike Mills

(left) and singer Michael Stipe in their scratch band Automatic Baby, named after the hit albums each band had at the time, at an inauguration party held by MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign.

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CHAPTER

10

Zooropa During

the five-month break between

the end of the ZooTV Outside Broadcast tour of North American stadiums and its resumption as Zooropa in Europe, U2 yet again found themselves swept up in a new project undertaken to keep things interesting and fresh. Faced by a return home to an empty house and a sense

O P P O S I T E PAG E : On the Zooropa

tour in Europe, Bono mutates the Fly into a new stage persona, the devilish MacPhisto. B E L O W : Adam Clayton performing live onstage at Wembley Stadium in the UK during the Zoo TV Zooropa tour in 1993.

of personal loss, the Edge was determined to channel his energy and emotion into work. The band had been road testing a couple of new, unrecorded songs; why not record them and a few more, and release them as an E.P. (extended-play record, midway in duration between a single and an album) while the tour was still underway to give it some extra artistic momentum and deepen the fans’ experience? Why not, indeed; very quickly, mission creep stretched the E.P. idea to a full album, recorded not only during the five-month break but also stretching into the tour to create a parallel activity, with the dangers of splitting the band’s focus and risking their burning out through overwork.

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A B OV E : The Edge and Adam performing at the Rotterdam stop of the Zooropa tour in May 1993.

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137

The principal problem was that, though U2 had a lot of material, including leftovers from the Achtung Baby sessions, much of it was still no more than sketches and riffs; as ever, the band took their time cooking it from various raw stages until they were all happy. Though by the perfectionist standards of Achtung Baby, the album that would be called Zooropa came together quickly, it still required the band to fly back to Dublin by private plane straight after almost every mainland Europe stadium show in May 1993, record for a couple of hours before getting some sleep, and the following day carry on again until they flew east again for the next show. Fortunately, only the first three shows of the Zooropa tour, in Rotterdam’s Feyenoord Stadium, were on consecutive nights.

A B OV E : Zooropa, the avant-garde album U2 made

Even so, the utter dislocation of this period—

in tour downtime.

a hectic switchback between the adrenalin of touring, the relaxation of home, and the steady

simultaneously across two Dublin studios, the

focus of the recording session, without any

various rooms further subdivided with ad hoc

decompression and adjustment time between—

partitions, made from things like flight cases,

gave the songs and the whole album its char-

to minimize audio leakage from microphones

acter. Just as the ZooTV tour was a casserole of

recording one thing to those recording another.

sensory overload and the collapse of not only

With the Edge dictating the industrial, sampling

moral certainties but even fixed personality in

philosophy of record-making and Adam now

a 24/7 blitz of electronically delivered infotain-

involved too in the mixing process, Brian Eno

ment, so was the album to be titled Zooropa.

directing the traffic and breaking gridlocks with

Even the way it was made teetered on the verge

his inspirational problem-solving ideas, and Flood

of chaos, with jamming, recording, improvising,

attending to every detail, the creative atmosphere

and editing on several song ideas taking place

was heady, with self-expression prioritized over second-guessing the reaction of the fans.

“The utter

Such, however, was Bono’s determination to

dislocation of this period gave the songs and the whole album its character.”

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get across to the maximum number of people what was on his mind and Larry’s conservative adherence to the song as the key unit of what U2 were about, that music which might have run away with ideas of disintegration and collage in

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“Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” evolved from a ballad Bono was writing for Frank Sinatra into the theme song for the German movie director Wim Wenders’s sequel to his award-winning Wings Of Desire, the no-less garlanded Faraway, So Close!, starring Willem Dafoe and Nastassja Kinski. The album closes on a song whose point was the contrast between U2’s cheap and cheesy electronica backing track and the vocal by that most monumentally dignified and god-fearing singer, Johnny Cash. In the spirit of such Dylan classics as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “The the end cohered into a song-based album—

Wanderer” sourced the Bible (the Book of

albeit one that came with advance notice that it

Ecclesiastes) for its resonant language of moral

represented the band at their most experimental.

gravity and poetic profundity, offering a half-

The running order was critical to Bono’s

joking, enigmatic sense of depth where the rest

broader vision of a journey from the chaos of

of the album played with the concept of surface

the modern age to a state of spiritual and moral

impressions and the pleasure of speed and

redemption. Zooropa’s opening title track pro-

novelty but the shrinking of an unearthed soul.

jected the new Europe of dissolving borders but rising racism, a neon-lit babble of advertising

L E F T: The single “Lemon” from Zooropa. B E L O W : Ol’

slogans and buzz phrases, including Bono’s own

Blue Eyes never did get to sing “Stay (Faraway, So Close!),” as Bono had hoped, but the pair duetted on its Cole Porter classic B-side.

“dream out loud,” which he has dropped into songs and shows ever since 1989. The dislocated landscape of sound and meaning continued through the Edge’s solo vocal “Numb,” then “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car” and “Some Days Are Better than Others” echoed the affectless, anaesthetized mood of David Bowie’s Eno-collaboration Low album. Among the diversions from the main themes were two songs, “Lemon” and “Dirty Day,” where Bono referenced his parents, the first being the color of his late mother’s dress in a home movie he had just seen for the first time, and the second offering a selection of his father’s catchphrases.

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Released on July 5, 1993, while U2 were playing

By the time U2’s world tour reached its

stadium dates in Rome and with five months of

Zooropa phase in the stadiums of Europe from

a world tour still to play, Zooropa immediately

May to August 1993, the world had gotten over

topped charts worldwide, but unlike the obvious,

its initial shock of major European warfare for the

heroic masterpieces that The Joshua Tree and

first time since World War II; news reports from

Achtung Baby were, it lacked commercial legs

Sarajevo and other battlefields in which civilians

over the long term. With global sales of seven

were dying had joined the 24/7 news routine, and

million, though, Zooropa may rank as the biggest-

compassion fatigue in the West meant there was

selling experimental rock album of all time. That

not enough political will to intervene in this grow-

U2 have seldom played songs from it in subsequent live performances suggests that they share the widely held view that, once people got to know it, the album was much more interesting for its concepts and sounds than for its actual songs. The tour, meanwhile, was taking off on an

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“Zooropa may

rank as the biggestselling experimental rock album of all time.”

even stranger, more troubling tangent, where art intersected not just with life, but death as well.

ing humanitarian crisis. Also, politicians in Europe

With the fall of Communism in Russia

were paralyzed by the symbolism of Sarajevo

and its former satellite states, including East

itself, the flashpoint in 1914 to the cascade of

Germany, which was now reunified with the

diplomatic blunders that set off World War I.

West, economic uncertainty and migrations

From the start of the tour, Bono had personi-

were stoking a resurgence of violent racism in

fied the sinister shadow falling across Europe

Germany, Italy, and France in particular, with

in a new character replacing the Fly and Mirror

several innocent victims of arson and other

Ball Man. Combining the gloating Satan of the

attacks. Far worse, however, was the situation

Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and

in the former Yugoslavia, where an ethnic and

Peter Cook’s louche tempter in the 1967 movie

religious patchwork held together peacefully

Bedazzled, while adding a few comic turns of

under the Communist autocrat Marshal Tito was

his own like a gold lamé suit as well as the

now falling apart as different ethnicities tried to

scarlet horns suggested by Gavin Friday,

establish their own nation states while expelling

MacPhisto took the camp humor of the 1990s

people of other ethnicities from they territories

U2 to a whole new level. Whether you could use

they claimed. In an immensely complex set of

camp humor to draw attention to deadly serious

overlapping wars, the most visible symbol of

issues without trivializing them was the

the turmoil was the Bosnian city of Sarajevo,

challenge Bono rose to bit by bit.

home to half a million people, and besieged by

Initially, he would make prank calls from

the Serbian army for four years starting in 1992,

the stage to the likes of Benito Mussolini’s grand-

with up to 14,000 people dying from the shelling,

daughter, Alessandra, who was trying to revive

shooting, food shortages, disease, and cold.

her grandfather’s sinister political legacy in Italy,

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and in France to the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. And at Berlin’s show in the stadium built by Hitler for the 1936 Olympics, U2 tested the good will of the fans by displaying footage on the giant video screens of Leni Riefenstahl’s spectacular Nazi propaganda documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia. When U2 played Verona in Italy the stakes were raised still higher when American writer and filmmaker Bill Carter got in touch. He was

“He’s a poet. He’s a

philosopher. And last night, I think I saw him walking on water.” –Mick Jagger describing Bono based in Sarajevo, enduring the same hardships and dangers as the rest of the population, and set about persuading U2 to run the blockade and play in the city. Carried away with the belief of what a band of U2’s fame could achieve to prick the conscience of the West, Bono agreed. But when it was pointed out that he was not only committing the crew and support team as well as the band to risking their lives but also, by playing a gig, presenting a huge target to the besieging forces, he backtracked, and the band agreed to a live satellite link-up from Bill’s video crew in the city to the band’s TV screens in Europe so that every night the victims of the siege could speak to the outside world. Though perhaps the most high-concept rock show ever staged, ZooTV was still about R I G H T: Setting new heights for rock’s most

spectacular stage set, Wembley Stadium, London, in August 1993.

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A B OV E : Salman Rushdie comes out of hiding to join U2 on stage at Wembley Stadium, London, in August 1993;

the author had been under Ayatollah Khomeini’s death-sentence fatwa since 1989 for alleged blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses. R I G H T: The Edge and Adam rehearsing at Wembley Stadium, London, in August 1993.

entertainment and fun, but what was being

Eno initiating the charity War Child as a direct

bounced by satellite live and totally unscripted

consequence was only the first manifestation of

from a city under siege could not help but be

the fact that U2 had put Sarajevo squarely on the

harrowing. When three desperate Bosnian

map of thinking rock fans everywhere. The ends

women told the 70,000 fans at London’s Wembley

justified the means. Nor would U2’s connection

Stadium that when they disappeared from the

with the city end when they terminated the

screens, the show would go on and everyone’s

satellite link after the London shows; U2 would

fun would resume but they, meanwhile, would

play Sarajevo, but not quite yet.

die, nothing that U2 could do to follow that would expunge that chilling thought from the fans’

project. In August at one of four evenings at

minds—nor did the band want it to be expunged.

London’s Wembley Stadium, the writer Salman

Many felt that U2 were vicariously exploiting

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Rubbing shoulders with history was U2’s

Rushdie, in hiding since 1989 because of Ayatollah

other people’s horror to intensify their own

Khomeini’s death-sentence fatwa for alleged

sense of virtue and plugged-in edginess. But

blasphemy in Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses,

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A B OV E : Bono with Frank Sinatra after the legendary “Hoboken Canary” was honored with a Lifetime

Achievement Award at the 36th Annual Grammy Awards on March 1, 1994. R I G H T: The ZooTV: Live from Sydney video release.

risked his life to join U2 on stage, having been invited by Bono to meet backstage the year

Turlington’s, was a Naomi Campbell foot that

before, the two of them publicly sharing an

rubbed the Edge’s face on the video for “Numb,”

interest in Central American affairs since 1986.

but the British supermodel’s superior behavior

That same month, Bono recorded his vocal to

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Playing a cameo role, alongside one of Christy

on tour had ruffled feathers. As half of a celebrity

accompany Frank Sinatra on Cole Porter’s song

couple, Adam had seemed to be enjoying himself,

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for the seventy-eight

but a tabloid story linking him to rock-star excess

year-old legend’s biggest-selling album in years,

did not wholly exaggerate a lifestyle of hard

Duets. Ol’ Blue Eyes was furious at the suggestion

partying on tour that culminated on November

that he record a duet with Bono until it was ex-

26, 1993, when a hangover forced him to miss

plained that it was the U2 singer and not the male

the first of two concerts in Sydney, with his bass

half of Sonny & Cher who would have the honor.

technician Stuart Morgan filling in as Bono told

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the crowd that a virus had laid the blond fun-lover low. Fortunately, he recovered to play the second Sydney concert, expensively shot from twenty-five different camera positions and globally broadcast on pay-per-view TV before being released as a commercial video the following year. While in the past their shared English roots as sons of Royal Air Force officers, interest in the business side of the band, and failure to join

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“I think one of the

great things about bands is that they allow you to be irresponsible for longer—whether or not in the end that’s a really healthy position to take . . .” —Adam Clayton

in the evangelical Christianity of Bono, the Edge, and Larry had made allies of Adam and manager

up—or else leave. To help him, his other half in

Paul McGuinness, the bassist’s personal

the band’s engine room, Larry, would be there as

problems were something that his closest

his nursemaid and cop. Adam accepted the offer.

friends felt they must take responsibility for

As the ZooTV tour wound down, Adam’s

helping him get through. Bono, the Edge, and

health and happiness were part of the cost that

Larry let Adam know that they were ready to

had to be counted. While the vast audiences and

break up the band rather than have him fall

economies of scale helped mitigate the costs of

victim to rock ’n’ roll excess, and that they

staging the show meant that promoters in North

needed him to commit to the band and clean

America and Europe could live with U2’s demands for low ticket prices, the far higher costs in Australasia gave promoters no choice but to charge more unless they were to make a loss. Many fans Down Under felt priced out of attending, though there were always plenty more to take their place. Even so, it was not a good note to end on, while the band themselves, though they had enjoyed such perks as being able to fly to Paris for after-show dinners on their chartered Z-liveried Boeing 727, only showed a handsome profit on two years of touring thanks to T-shirt and merchandise sales, which grossed $30 million. So the most ambitious, spectacular, and eventful tour up to that point in music history, seen by over five million people, came to an end at the Tokyo Dome on December 10, 1993, in an atmosphere of exhaustion but also unfinished business. Apart from anything else, how could U2, still only in their early thirties, follow that?

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11

a night at the opera For

a year U2 decompressed, during what the

Edge called a “lost weekend.” The Edge and Bono had bought homes forming a compound in the South of France, where their privacy was respected. There the Edge and Bono relaxed and listened to a lot of new British music like Leftfield, Chemical Brothers, and

O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono and the Edge attend the 51st Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 22, 1994, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Beverly Hills, California. B E L O W : The Nanci Griffith album on which Adam and Larry played four tracks.

Underworld, who were emerging from the fusion of rock, dance, electronica, and industrial music, as well as the retro-rock sensations Oasis and Blur whose public rivalry revived interest in melodic guitar music in the tradition of the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, and Small Faces. Adam and Larry also left Dublin to live for a while in New York. For Adam, it was principally about “doing the geographic”— staying clean and sober by moving away from old haunts of temptation. But while in New York, both halves of the rhythm section wanted to do something constructive to develop their musicianship. Larry undertook specialist drummer’s physiotherapy to break bad drumming habits and help heal the wear and tear of

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when released at the start of the blockbuster summer season in June 1995. A few months later, the Bono-Edge–composed theme song for the new James Bond movie, Goldeneye, was a hit for Tina Turner. Not to be trumped by the “Hats,” “Haircuts” Larry and Adam slickly rearranged Lalo Schifrin’s 1966 theme from the TV series Mission: Impossible for the 1996 movie reboot starring Tom Cruise. For U2 to experiment their way toward making their next major album, a full-length movie soundtrack commission seemed a good idea. But in November 1994, just when U2 and Eno were getting into gear, with Larry and Adam in particular musically sharp from

“U2 refurbished an

unused song for the movie soundtrack of Batman Forever .”

their time in New York, the commission for The Pillow Book, by art-house British director Peter Greenaway, fell through. No problem, said Eno; by then he had already released as a solo artist

two years on the road, and Adam, being so far self-taught, took lessons from a top bass tutor to sharpen his skills. The pair also studied programming. In April 1994 the pair recorded four tracks as far from the U2 sound as you could get with folk-country songsmith Nanci Griffith for her acclaimed Flyer album. Mindful of how working on the A Clockwork Orange project had lit the creative fuse for Achtung Baby, the Edge also sought out a new side project to get the juices flowing toward the next U2 album. U2 refurbished an unused song from Zooropa, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” for the movie soundtrack of Batman Forever, the third in the franchise, this one directed by Joel Schumacher, and it was a hit

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A B OV E : The blockbuster movie themes for Batman

Forever ( T O P) and Mission: Impossible.

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A B OV E : Larry with fans at New York City’s Limelight Club during U2’s “lost weekend” in 1994.

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three excellent albums of electronica, Music for Films volumes I, II, and III, where the fact that the movies of which they were notionally the soundtracks did not actually exist detracts not one whit from the pleasure they give. U2 could do the same; who needs a movie, anyway? Feeding off the inspiration of watching videos

“Larry was least committed to this project— which would be titled Original Soundtracks 1.”

of movie favorites in the West London studio, the band reveled in the opportunity to work fast

rather than U2 in order to distinguish it from the

creating musical backgrounds of rhythm,

main body of their work—while Eno occupied

texture, and mood without having to worry

the other end of the spectrum, followed by the

about the foreground of a song and its focus on

Edge and Bono.

the singing voice and lyrics. This kind of project

One song, the sensual “Your Blue Room,”

was close to Eno’s heart, but for the band it was

wound up on the soundtrack to the movie

akin to a relaxed clearing of the musical throat

Beyond the Clouds, directed by Wim Wenders

before the real work of the next U2 album.

in collaboration with the art-house director

Conservative Larry was least committed

legend Michelangelo Antonioni and starring

to this project—which would be titled Original

John Malkovich and Sophie Marceau, and

Soundtracks 1 and credited to Passengers

another, “One Minute Warning,” ended up on the highly influential Japanese sci-fi anime Ghost in the Shell, which directly inspired the makers of The Matrix. Also Japanese themed, and beautifully sung by Japanese singer-songwriter Holi, “Ito Okashi” captures the mood of dislocated, urban night-time reverie that, for Bono, was the modern condition—at least, perhaps, for rock stars on a huge world tour. One song, however, could hardly be described as background music; indeed, the foreground bulked large. For some years Bono had been cultivating what he called his “Fat Lady” voice, striving in a soft, feminine style toward the operatic tenor as loved by his father, in common with many Irishmen of his generation in whose youth John McCormack had been a musical icon. Back in 1990, arguably the three greatest opera tenors of the day—Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras—had combined

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A B OV E : Bono pays a private visit to Sarajevo to ring in the New Year in 1996. O P P O S I T E PAG E : The U2 side-project album Original Soundtracks 1, “credited to Passengers to distinguish it from the main body of their work.”

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B E L O W : Brian Eno, Bono, the Edge, and legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti debut the song “Miss Sarajevo” at

the annual Pavarotti and Friends concert in Modena, Italy, on September 12, 1995.

“Pavarotti demanded that Bono

write him a song—refusal was not to be contemplated.”

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L E F T: The single “Miss Sarajevo” with its sleeve depicting the defiant beauty contest in the besieged Bosnian city.

as the Three Tenors to sing gala, charity,

of creative attention-grabbing defiance by the

and commercial stadium concerts, and their

beleaguered civilians, a beauty contest to find

version of Giacomo Puccini’s aria “Nessun

Miss Sarajevo was filmed by Bill Carter, intercut

Dorma” became the unlikely theme tune of the

with footage of women running the gauntlet

soccer World Cup. The larger-than-life Pavarotti

of sniper fire in the shell-blasted city. The pag-

was certainly no musical snob, and he demanded

eant where the contestants held up the banner

that Bono write him a song—refusal was not to

“DON’T LET THEM KILL US” appealed to Bono’s

be contemplated. After all, “It’s Now or Never,”

belief in the escapist power of absurdity that

Elvis Presley’s worldwide smash of the year

had underpinned Lypton Village thinking and

of Bono and Adam’s birth, 1960, was just an

Virgin Prunes performances years before. On

English-language adaptation of the Neapolitan

September 12, 1995, Bono, the Edge (respect-

song “O Sole Mio,” while Queen singer Freddie

fully bare-headed), and Brian Eno joined the

Mercury, duetting with opera soprano Montserrat

great tenor to premiere “Miss Sarajevo” at the

Caballé, had more recently enjoyed a huge hit

annual Pavarotti and Friends concert in Modena,

with “Barcelona.”

Italy, and, released as a single in November, it

Bono had just such a song in mind: a duet,

sold well in many territories, save for the United

with the Italian maestro singing the second half.

States. Nor did Original Soundtracks 1 break into

During the Siege of Sarajevo, among several acts

the U.S. albums Top 50 when released the same

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L E F T: The album Melon: Remixes for Propaganda was a fan club–only release. B E L O W : The redesign of fan magazine Propaganda confirmed how indebted U2 now had become to the dance and club styles of the day.

trip-hop and drum and bass were influencing artists from Björk to Madonna. Not only had U2 set up their own studio, Hanover Quay, but the Edge and Bono had also bought the Clarence Hotel in Dublin and set up the Kitchen nightclub in the basement, in which DJs were spinning the banging new sounds. In their mid-thirties with nearly twenty years of U2 behind them, U2’s “Hats” were thrilled to be part of such an exciting, innovative scene.

month; though offering little of what U2 fans expected or wanted from the band, the album has some great moments. For Larry, it was a self-indulgence too far. Undaunted, the Edge and Bono in particular were enthralled by the sounds and atmospheres they could conjure: dreamy yet danceable, a modern urban melancholy for the mediasaturated, electronically connected new millennium taking shape in the 1990s. The two felt at the forefront of a movement of cuttingedge dancefloor loop-and-sample music-makers including, from Glasgow, Scotland, Howie B (Howard Bernstein, a DJ, arranger and musical jack of all trades) and, from Bristol, England, Nellee Hooper, a hitmaker with Soul II Soul and Massive Attack. New, British-made genres like

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“Larry was upset to find that the

Edge and Bono seemed to be getting on fine with Howie B for the new U2 album.” A huge problem, however, was the

the band were trying square a circle, trying to

“Haircuts,” especially Larry. A key part of the

retain the musical chemistry they had developed

aesthetic of the new music was programmed

as a song-based four-piece guitar rock band in

rhythm rather than real live drumming, and,

a new style that was mood-based rather than

beset by the back problem for which he needed

song-based, and, moreover, substantially

an operation and recovery time, as well as

keyboard- and computer-derived and mechanical

being occupied by the birth of his first child by

in its construction.

Ann Acheson, his partner since school days,

With Larry a doubter, U2 were convinced that,

Larry was upset to find that the Edge and Bono

given time, they could work things out. But time

seemed to be getting on fine with Howie B

was now something they did not have. Knowing

providing rhythm loops as early sessions for the

how long to leave your fans wanting more before

new U2 album got underway. Also on board for

hitting them again with a tour has never been a

the sessions were Flood and Nellee Hooper, and

science, but Paul McGuinness judged it propi-

a lot of fun was being had.

tious not to let much more than three full years

Brian Eno had not wanted to be involved in

elapse between the end of the ZooTV tour and

the project, but had offered one piece of advice:

the start of the next trek round the world’s

to wait until Larry was fit and ready to play again

stadiums. With the band’s agreement, he came

before recording in earnest. Eager to maintain

to an arrangement with promoter Michael Cohl

momentum, Bono and the Edge ignored him.

to book a stadium tour of some 100 shows

The sessions ran into trouble. With the

lasting from April 1997 to March 1998. They

contagiously enthusiastic Howie B coming up

projected that it would attract some five or six

with all sorts of samples and loops as starting

million fans and gross $260 million, beating the

points, Bono and the Edge were finding it hard to

Rolling Stones’ record for their 1994–95 Voodoo

work them into songs or integrate the songs they

Lounge tour by some $20 million.

already had half-composed into a dance format.

In the end, U2 and their commercial partners

Then there was the legal issue that samples of

were to be disappointed. Nor would their fans be

pre-existing music inevitably required copyright

as convinced by either the tour or the album as

clearance and payment to the artists whose re-

they had been by ZooTV and Achtung Baby.

cords they’d sampled. One solution was to await

But, as even Larry was to admit, this period of

Larry’s full recovery and have him and Adam

overcomplicated but under-thought over-reaching

mimic the rhythm loops that had underpinned

would yield the single greatest moment of U2’s

the recordings thus far. Practically it worked, but

career.

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CHAPTER

12

pop Larry’s back was not the only physical problem with which U2 were contending. In the early days of the band, only Adam smoked. But by the time he had given up as part of his program of cleaning up his act, the other three had taken up cigarettes, to which

O P P O S I T E PAG E A N d B E L O W :

U2 emerge from their 40-foot-tall motorized mirror-ball lemon—that it would sometimes stall, trapping the four inside, was not the PopMart tour’s only Spinal Tap element.

Bono had progressed from his more flamboyant vice of cigars. Though he defended smoking as he claimed it lent his voice a smoky timbre, he later admitted that at times he was losing power and range; nor did it help that U2’s new studio was near a dusty concrete factory. With so many songs at such different stages of development, from recording to remixing, U2, Flood, Howie B, and additional producer Steve Osborne were spread between Hanover Quay Studio and their old standby, Windmill Lane, so a speedboat was purchased to cut down shuttle time between the two. As if the focus wasn’t already diffused enough, the band also decamped to record in Miami, the capital of hedonism with its own hot dance scene. All of these issues, as well as the band’s efforts to develop songs while also

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And also the first time they had used it, to hear music before it was officially released. Within three years the internet would be revolutionizing the way the world found and listened to music, transforming it as a business and turning the economics of even the world’s biggest bands like U2 upside down. For now, U2 responded to this leak— which felt to them like a compliment to the hunger of their audience for their new work—by officially releasing “Discothèque” ahead of schedule in February 1997. It was a bold and punchy introduction to U2’s new world, its A B OV E : dJ, musician, and producer Howard Bernstein, aka Howie B, an important U2 collaborator on the Passengers and the troubled Pop albums. B E L O W : Pop’s first single, “discothèque.”

promotional video a throbbing, strobing, glittering mirrorball of jokey hedonism, the band camping it up both as macho men on the sexual prowl and as the gay disco-era band the Village

retro-fitting them to digitally generated and sampled backing tracks, which was overcompli-

People of “Y.M.C.A.” fame. Many U2 fans, especially in the U.S. heart-

cating an already difficult task, were being

land outside the big cities on the coasts, shared

contended with in the face of an immovable

Larry’s unease at what looked, sounded, and felt

deadline to complete the album in time to re-

like not just a flirtation, but a full-on fling with

lease it before a major tour on which a vast

the hedonistic, insubstantial world of Madonna,

amount of money was riding. The band had also set the stakes even higher by linking the album and tour in another high-concept statement, which raised fans’ expectations that they were in for not just a magnum opus, but an intellectual and artistic revelation. The first the world would hear of what U2 were doing would indeed make history, even if wasn’t kind of history that the group had intended or expected. In October 1996 a thirty-second excerpt of a new song, “Discothèque,” was leaked on the internet. Two months later the whole thing followed. For many music fans, this was the first they had heard of this thing called the internet.

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turning its back on the sincere, street-level likes of Pearl Jam and, indeed, the U2 of the 1980s. Larry was reassured by the silver-tongued Bono that it was all great fun and helped lift the burden of earnestness that, the singer felt, had held U2 back as a band from developing in any direction it chose. Indeed, “Discothèque,” which sold far better in fashion-led, dance-oriented territories like the UK than in the United States, was just the start. If you felt that the U2 you knew and loved were

A B OV E : U2 announce their PopMart tour on February

beginning to slip away from their stalwart fans in

12, 1997, at a news conference held at a Kmart discount store in New York City.

search of a groovier, hipper, more frivolous and better-looking audience who were so well off they

album charts in thirty-five countries, including

could afford to laugh at the very idea of work and

the United States. But the commercial bubble

money, then the album provocatively titled just

burst just as quickly as the disappointed word of

Pop—as in the music for little girls not big boys,

mouth depressed further sales.

as in what a bubble does once it reaches a certain size—seemed unwelcome proof.

Clocking in at nine seconds over an hour, Pop, if listened to attentively, is an album of gloomy,

Pop—along with PopMart, the tour that

even haunted introspection and unanswered

started with further unwelcome symbolism in

appeals to an enigmatic God, yet it masquerades

Las Vegas in April 1997—was, of course, not just

as a thrill-ride of sexy, adrenaline-high spirits.

a package, but an entire concept—a concept that

Whereas U2’s best songs had clarity of yearning

wanted to have it both ways. This was to be a

emotion in even the most ambivalent of lyrics,

weighty artistic declaration about globalised

on Pop the substance and style fought it out

marketing, about ephemera, about passing

noisily and confusingly. Despite even Larry since

sensation rather than lasting worth—the sizzle

defending the songs (but admitted the band ran

but not the steak.

out of time to record and mix them ideally), very

And it was the sizzle of U2’s celebrity, the thrilling taster of the first single, and the vast fan base that had been anticipating a major new album for four years, that put Pop at the top of

few of them became staples of the live show after the PopMart tour. Nor did the PopMart tour carry all before it as had done the ZooTV tour. With no way to follow that triumph except by going even bigger and

“Pop was of

more spectacular, the production was designed

course not just a package, but an entire concept . . .”

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as a stadium show from the start, projecting to the furthest fans with a prototype LED video screen the size of a five-story building, with considerable flexibility and a cost of $7 million.

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A B OV E : Released on March 3, 1997, Pop went to

the top of the charts in 35 countries, including the United States, but sales quickly dropped. R I G H T: The PopMart tour set paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to the themes of consumerism and pop culture.

Among the images projected on the screen was an animation of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 pop art painting Whaam!, a pastiche of a comic book frame, complete with giant-sized Ben-Day dots. Not for stage designers Willie Williams and Mark Fisher a mere disco-style mirrorball either, but rather a 40-foot motorized silver lemon—as in the Zooropa song—which would convey the band around the stage for encores. That it would sometimes stall, trapping the four inside, was not the only Spinal Tap element; present, too, on stage was an equally gigantic olive on a cocktail stick. Literally overarching the whole stage was, in response to a Bono whim, a gigantic McDonald’sstyle golden arch, which many fans, perhaps reasonably enough, assumed was a statement

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“Higher ticket

prices added to the impression that U2 were no longer the people’s band.”

that U2 were at the very least sponsored by the burger empire, rather than it being a supersized ironic comment about hyper-consumerism, fastfood culture, and so on. When U2 had announced the tour at a New York branch of Kmart, that, too, was widely interpreted as corporate endorsement rather than satire. Had U2 in fact accepted corporate sponsorship, they might well have used the money to subsidize ticket prices. But in the event, U2 charged around $50 a ticket, about twice what they had for the ZooTV tour. In America, this added to the impression that U2 were no longer the people’s band but were instead indulging in an overblown rock-star ego trip, which dented sales; Tampa Stadium in Florida (then known as Houlihan’s Stadium), for example, was barely a quarter full on November 10, 1997, while even in more dance-friendly Europe U2 struggled to halffill Cologne’s Butzweilerhof back in July of the same year. That the band came on stage gowned and bodyguarded as if they were boxing champions accentuated the suspicion of rampant egomania, while early-tour technical hitches with the screen and lemon also worked against the spell U2 needed to cast. As the tour progressed from its gremlinriddled and under-rehearsed first night in

L E F T: despite PopMart’s Village People disco aesthetic, U2 were still a working rock band on stage.

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Las Vegas—where in addition the desert air had shredded Bono’s voice—it improved. The new songs went down much better after the band rearranged them for live performance. But, given that the major media outlets had reported on that underwhelming opening night, U2 were fighting a losing battle over the course of the ninety-three dates to rectify the widespread belief that the band had jumped the shark. Nor did it help that, despite time-consuming remixes, none of the songs from Pop that were released as singles set the charts alight, which inhibited their exposure on the radio and MTV. In the end, though, despite PopMart’s colossal artistic and logistic ambition, and less than colossal audience response in U2’s familiar markets of Europe and North America, for the band the whole ordeal became justified when they played Mexico—despite an ugly confrontation with President Zedillo’s security goons which left U2’s own security head, O P P O S I T E PAG E A N d R I G H T: Parodying hard-body chic, muscle costumes camouflaged waistlines approaching forty. A B OV E : The “Last Night on Earth” single from Pop and a PopMart tour program.

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“. . . If I had to

spend twenty years in the band just to play that show. . . it would have been worthwhile.” –Larry Mullen Jr.

and TV audience photos of their missing loved ones, with Bono challenging General Pinochet to reveal the resting place of their remains. The tour ended on March 21, 1998, on a high note, with U2 delighted to accept the African National Congress’s invitation to play a show in the new, democratic post-apartheid South Africa. But for U2 the tour had reached an even greater peak six months earlier when, following a show in Reggio Emilia, Italy, to an estimated 150,000 people, they had crossed the Adriatic to make good on a promise they had made four years before: to play Sarajevo. On September 23, 1997, in the shell-torn Kosevo Stadium—with the Serbian Army repelled by NATO and the United Nations forces Jerry Mele, severely injured—and then, still

and peace restored to the city—as the crowd

further south, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The

sang along to every song, covering for Bono who

Mexico City shows yielded the PopMart: Live

had lost his voice that morning, U2 catalyzed a

performance video, while the fervor of the

huge collective celebration of survival and

South American audiences polarized into both

rebirth among the ruins.

cheers and boos when, at the Estadio Nacional in

Five years later, U2 were interviewed by fans

Santiago, Chile, U2 played the song “Mothers of

for a radio broadcast, and all agreed that this

the Disappeared,” inviting mothers of the vic-

was the show in their entire career that meant

tims of Chile’s military junta to show the crowd

most to them. Larry, uncharacteristically, was the most eloquent: “An experience I will never forget

A B OV E : Pop’s singles “Staring at the Sun” and “If

God Will Send His Angels.” O P P O S I T E PAG E : Adam’s PopMart “banana” bass was designed by Jerry Auerswald, a master luthier from Germany.

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for the rest of my life. If I had to spend twenty years in the band just to play that show . . . it would have been worthwhile.”

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CHAPTER

13

u2000 Although the world was their playground, U2 never forgot that they were an Irish band, and their roots kept pulling them back. In 1996 their early mentor, the music journalist Bill Graham, died, as did their close friend in the Australian rock

O P P O S I T E PAG E : After the ZooTV and PopMart extravaganzas, the new millennium saw U2 getting back to rock-band basics. B E L O W : The Elevation tour is all about the music and the Edge’s Gibson Explorer.

band INXS, Michael Hutchence. But in the following three years there would be new life too, with Sian and Levi born to the Edge and Morleigh Steinberg, Ava to Larry and Ann Acheson, and Elijah Bob Patricious Guggi Q to Bono and Ali Hewson. After three decades of violence, a peaceful end to the Northern Ireland Troubles was in sight as the millennium wound down. Much like in Bosnia, it needed peace brokers from outside Ireland to help create incentives and a framework for the peace process, and as in South Africa, peace would come at the price of a great deal of compromise and forgiveness of atrocity and injustice.

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A B OV E : On May 19, 1998, Bono persuaded the leaders

Agreement, to share power and end armed

of the two main political, sectarian-based parties in Ireland, David Trimble (Protestant, right) and John Hume (Catholic, left), to appear together on stage at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall for a concert to promote a YES vote in the referendum to share power and end armed conflict in Northern Ireland. Also pictured are the Edge and Tim Wheeler of the rock group Ash (second from right).

conflict. Bono and the Edge summed up the hopes of many when they performed the Beatles’ song “Don’t Let Me Down.” When, three months after the referendum “yes” vote, a breakaway faction of the IRA tried to sabotage the peace process by blowing up the center of the Northern Ireland town of Omagh,

In almost a restaging of the famous photo at

170

twenty-nine civilians, including children of several

the 1978 One Love concert, when Bob Marley

faiths, were killed, and more than 200 were in-

joined the hands of Jamaica’s deadly political

jured. So horrified were even hardline partisans of

rivals Edward Seaga and Michael Manley, Bono

both sides by this atrocity that it softened rather

persuaded the leaders of Northern Ireland’s two

than hardened the last of the resistance to the

main political parties, David Trimble (Protestant)

peace process.

and John Hume (Catholic), to appear together on

Though the gesture of performing “Don’t

stage at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in 1998 for

Let Me Down” was more important than the

a concert to promote a “Yes” vote in the refer-

performance, Bono’s voice wobbled audibly

endum on what was known as the Good Friday

throughout. A specialist took a look at a swelling

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on his vocal cords and, until a biopsy gave him the all-clear, there were fears that it could be a cancerous tumor. Bono’s father, Bob Hewson, was not so lucky when checked for suspected cancer, and his health gradually deteriorated in the new millennium.

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“For the first time in years, U2 were in full agreement about the kind of music they wanted to make.”

With Adam and Bono turning forty in 2000, the transition from youth to middle age reinforced

were recruited, the material the six of them

the need for a reassessment of U2’s career. Even

quickly worked up in jam sessions was not

the “Hats” had been forced to agree that Pop and

promising. But when the Edge started bringing

PopMart had overdosed on pointy-headed concepts

in bits and pieces he had been working on by

of irony, turbo-capitalism, and musical disguise,

himself, the basis of what would become the

not fully connecting with the fans who had enthu-

song “Kite” caught fire, especially when Bono

siastically met them halfway with the earlier and

found that he could suddenly reach notes with a

better-executed Achtung Baby and ZooTV.

power and control he hadn’t had for years.

The new plan, then, was to strip it back

Learning their lesson from the Pop sessions

to the guitar, bass, drums, and voice of

and refusing to be rushed, U2 worked at their

foundational U2. Though Eno and Daniel Lanois

own Hanover Quay Studio, recording music with

L E F T: Bono and Bob Geldof meet Pope John Paul II outside Rome on behalf of the Jubilee 2000 antipoverty campaign on September 23, 1999.

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inequitable trade deals and loans made to corrupt Third World leaderships, committing their people to repayment and poverty without ever having enjoyed any benefits, poor countries, especially in Africa, were and are deep in hock to rich ones and their representative bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bono, who had been involved in relief efforts on stage, record, and on the ground since 1984, felt strongly that the Jubilee 2000 initiative struck to the heart of the structural problem, and that he and the people he could mobilize through his status and advocacy could make a far greater difference than continuing merely to lurch from one emergency relief effort to the next. The rest of the band fully concurred with Bono’s belief, and agreed that they would record around the time he needed to work the a spontaneous, ensemble feel, but they weren’t

phones, knock on doors, and speak up for the

shy of subtly employing in the background the

cause, with the year 2000 feeling so propitious

modern, digital tools that they had thrust into the

for initiating such a huge change in the way the

foreground of their previous few albums.

world worked. Starting with the U.S. president,

For the first time in years, then, U2 were in

Clinton, then working round other major political

full agreement from the start about the kind

leaders as well as the pope, and not shirking the

of music they wanted to make and how they

task of trying to chip away at the resistance of

would get there. But nothing with U2 is ever that

such vested interests as can be found in the U.S.

simple. With the Cold War over and the world, so it seemed, less divided than it had ever been on issues of ideology, religion, and race, the issue for the new millennium was widely seen as the gap between the rich nations and the poor, and how to close it. Founded by the retired British academic Martin Dent in the early 1990s, Jubilee 2000 was a coalition of churches, youth groups, NGOs, trade unions, and other organizations lobbying for the cancellation of Third World debt. After decades of

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“Bono devoted

himself to both diplomacy and mastering the issues so his meetings wouldn’t just be photo opportunities.”

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Republican Party and the senior ranks of the IMF and other international financial bodies, Bono devoted himself to both shuttle diplomacy and

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L E F T: Milla Jovovich on the cover of the The Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack. B E L O W : The U2 single “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” about INXS singer Michael Hutchence’s suicide.

mastering the issues to an intricate degree so that in his meetings with the truly powerful he

the twin principles of the Edge’s guitar, long

could make the case rather than just be palmed

relegated during U2’s industrial/electronica/

off with a photo opportunity.

sampladelic decade, and swelling, up-thrusting

Nor was that the only distraction from the job

emotion, which likewise had seemed obscured

of recording the new U2 album. Bono had been

by layers of irony and ambiguity of late. Adam

developing a movie concept with the German

and Larry had no qualms about returning to the

director Wim Wenders since 1987 and, at last, it

core of what had made U2 so hugely popular in

was hitting the screen. Titled The Million Dollar

the first place, and the Edge was also keen

Hotel, starring Jeremy Davies, Mel Gibson, and

to get back to basics, hotly arguing for the

Milla Jovovich, it was a stylized modern film noir

restoration of his signature guitar sound on

romance set in Los Angeles, with U2 among the

his old Gibson Explorer on the song “Beautiful

acts providing the soundtrack, including “The

Day” in the face of Bono’s worry that it was a

Ground Beneath Her Feet,” with the lyrics taken

regressive move. The Edge won his point with

from the novel of that title by Salman Rushdie.

what he played, an audible upgrading of his

The eclectic chemistry of musical, literary, and

earlier six-stringed sound and style last heard in

filmmaking talent failed to bring out the best

all its unprocessed, plangent glory on a new U2

in any of them. Though atmospheric, both the

record back in 1983. Using new technology and

movie and soundtrack were low on incident and box-office action, with the film recouping only $60,000 of its estimated $8 million budget. The rest of the band, meanwhile, were not only writing and recording but, in Adam and Larry’s case, joining Bono and the Edge in acquiring property in the South of France; Larry in particular had his hands full with a growing family—shortly after the forthcoming album’s release, his partner, Ann, also gave birth to their second daughter (and third child), Ezra. Back in Dublin, the four plus the production duo of Eno and Lanois were making progress based on

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A B OV E : U2 receive the freedom of Dublin from Mayor Mary Freehill on March 18, 2000.

the skills they had acquired over the years

the whole album and naming the tour that

legitimized even for Bono the project of rebooting

followed, the song “Elevation” was about

the classic U2 blueprint for the new millennium.

nothing in particular except the feeling U2 at

In the end, it’s either in the grooves or it isn’t, and, far more even than such earlier peaks as

If the band had to choose a one-word mission

War and The Joshua Tree, the album the band

statement, if not “exaltation” or “transcen-

were making with the working title of “U2000”

dence,” “elevation” is that word.

was a masterpiece of poignancy yet exhilaration,

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their very best deliver with a unique intensity.

Lyrically, “Elevation” is not the only song

even euphoria, and rich, weighty yet spacious,

that leaves a lot of room for the listener to fill in

airborne guitar rock. Summing up the mood of

the gaps to find their own personal meaning. As

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“‘When I Look at the World’ is a meditation from a hospital waiting room…”

ever, Bono helped out by explaining in interviews the inspiration behind each lyric. The song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” imagined the heart-to-heart Bono wished he’d had with Michael Hutchence to shake him out of his suicidal mood. “In A Little While” is a song of love to Ali; poignantly, it was the last song Joey Ramone of U2’s early punk inspirations the Ramones listened to as he lay dying of lymphoma, as Bono would tell live audiences in touching tribute to one of U2’s foundational inspirations. “Kite” is a tale of dads and kids, with Bono’s thoughts on his own father, slowly sinking as cancer got him in its grip; “When I Look at the World” is a meditation from a hospital waiting room, his father’s illness recalling the death of Bono’s mother sixteen years before. “Peace on Earth” was a bitter lament for the dead of the Omagh bombing, with Bono mentioning many by name and writing to their families in the hope that they wouldn’t mind. “Walk On” was inspired by the dissident Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest at the time and therefore unable to attend the ceremony awarding her the Freedom of the City of Dublin, which is where her co-honorees U2 first heard of her. Her spirit of self-sacrifice particularly struck a chord with Bono, and a lyric from the song would give the eventual title the whole album: All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

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T O P : Bono’s Honorary Freedom of the City of Dublin

document. A B OV E : The U2 single “Walk On,” inspired by fellow honoree, the dissident Burmese political leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

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With its songs of farewell and atmosphere of flying unburdened into the future, the cover aptly caught U2 in a typical U2 moment: at an international airport, Charles de Gaulle in Paris, as designed by one of Bono’s favorite architects, Paul Andreu. Almost out of frame, the digital clock records what Bono joked was “God’s telephone number,” J33-3, referring to the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 33, verse 3: “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” On October 9, 2000, the forthcoming album’s first track, “Beautiful Day,” was released as a single, and instantly made it to the top of the charts in Australia, Canada, and the UK— though only to No. 21 in the United States. But three weeks later, on a wave of critical acclaim, the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind went straight to No. 1 in thirty-two countries, its chart peak of No. 3 in the United States offset by a A B OV E : U2 celebrate their multiple wins at the 2000

Grammy Awards for their single “Beautiful Day” ( A B OV E R I G H T ).

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long run of sales as single after single did well, and the Elevation tour was 2001’s top-grossing must-see rock event. In short, the early peak

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A B OV E : For the Elevation tour’s return to arena “intimacy,” a heart-shaped catwalk projected from the main stage,

enclosing a VIP section for fans and allowing the band to circulate.

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then bubble-burst pattern of Pop was reversed

of the planned Elevation tour had the potential

as sales built after a strong start into an even

to be a chastening experience too. Where

stronger long tail.

PopMart had struggled to fill every stadium,

The year 2001, however, would be when even

depressing both the bottom line and U2’s spirits,

the most heart-warming, redemptive triumph

the Elevation tour took one step back, to arena

would have a pall cast over it. And that went for

level, the kind of medium-sized venues the band

the rest of the world as well as U2.

hadn’t played since the first legs of the ZooTV tour nine years before. For U2 this was a return

Re-Applying foR the job of best bAnd in the woRld

to intimacy, where even fans at the back of the house could see the band, and vice versa. So, in a boldly counterintuitive theatrical masterstroke, U2 and their regular production

“We’re re-applying for the job of the best band

designers, Willie Williams and Mark Fisher,

in the world,” was Bono’s catchphrase of 2001. It

decided to get as much out of the way between

was a chastened acknowledgement that with Pop

band and fans as possible. Indeed, the essence

and PopMart the world had found U2 wanting.

of the show was, Let there be light. Defying the

Though the immediate success of All That

convention demanding that the house lights

You Can’t Leave Behind—whose songs won

dim and stage lights kick in just as the act hit

three Grammy Awards that March of 2001, and

the stage to intensify the dramatic transition

four more a year later—put U2 right back on top,

from the real world to fantasy and magic, U2

if indeed they had ever lost that status, the scale

would take the stage fully illuminated by the house lights, thrilling the fans with the clear sight that this was really them, the stars as real people going enthusiastically to work with their microphones, guitars, drum kit, and amplifiers. Only halfway through the first song in the set, “Elevation,” would the house lights cut out to give way to the stage lighting, effectively creating two moments of magic at the start of the show rather than the usual one. The stage lighting itself started modestly, intensifying as the show progressed over the course of some two hours, a wall of L.E.D. screens suddenly blazing into life being another theatrical coup that ratcheted the energy levels and drama still higher. L E F T: Stark lighting and screen effects added to the Elevation tour’s sense of drama. O P P O S I T E PAG E : The Elevation tour program.

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effects. Even their stage costumes were barely dressier than what they might have worn to a bar. The dramatic highlight of the show was the first encore. With the tour starting while the Columbine High School massacre remained raw in the national memory, video footage, including that of the movie-star National Rifle Association advocate Charlton Heston, reintroduced the band to the stage where they played “Bullet the Blue Sky” as a chilling plea for gun control. Bono’s rap referenced the murder of John Lennon in New York, which had so upset the band on their North American tour some twenty years before. But it was a slow death that loomed in the background of the tour’s opening months. Bob Hewson was in hospital and would not be Vast scrims placed around as much of the

coming out. Bono would fly straight from the

arena wall space as could be found would take

tour’s summer dates in Europe to be at his

monochrome video projections of each band

bedside, the gloom of those months alleviated

member and towering shadows of the band cast

by the May birth to Ali of the fourth Hewson

by stark white uplights. And ZooTV’s B-stage

child, John Abraham. In the early hours of

concept was given a twist, in the form of a heart-

August 21, the singer’s father died, but Bono was

shaped catwalk projecting from the main stage,

determined that the show that night would go

enclosing a privileged section of fans and

on, and he poured his grief into his performance

allowing the band to circulate rather than merely

at London’s Earl’s Court Arena while the other

traverse back and forth.

three watched his back.

Such innovations of intimacy in big arenas

Aside from those summer months in Europe,

would not have been possible without, firstly,

the Elevation tour was a North American affair.

reliable radio transmitters from microphones

While the band took five weeks’ break after

and instruments to the amplification system, so

two vast homecoming shows at Dublin’s Slane

doing away with restrictive leads and cables,

Castle, tinged with sadness at being back in

and, secondly, in-ear radio-microphones,

the city where Bono’s father had died just

allowing the band to hear themselves, so doing away with the old front-stage monitor “wedges,” which had done the job since the late 1960s. Through it all, the audience’s focus was kept on the band, their power as four rock musicians enhanced rather than masked by lighting and stage

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“I am saying we are

great. I’m not saying I’m great. There’s a difference . . .” –Bono

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days before, the events of September 11, 2001, changed the world. Should U2 carry on with the tour? Though the band had never been shy of criticizing U.S. government policy, they had always counted the American people as friends, with three of the band owning apartments in New York. So they decided that yes, the show would go on. The tickets for the second North American leg sold out at once. Meanwhile, sales of the album surged afresh, as if its sense of loss and farewell spoke deeply to Americans at this moment of national trauma. U2’s artist friend Catherine Owens created a work where the names of the dead and missing of 9/11 scrolled on screen as the band played “Walk On.” Three nights at Madison Square Garden just six weeks after 9/11 were particularly cathartic for the band and audience, not least because there was such a strong tradition of Irish-Americans in the New York City police and fire departments, which had suffered such losses in the line of duty. Having made such a powerful connection to the mood of the city, U2 were the right act to connect to the nation at its first opportunity to join again in something other than collective grief, at the traditional Super Bowl halftime show in February 2002. At Louisiana’s Superdome in New Orleans, U2 had less than twelve minutes, and they seized this moment just as they had at Live Aid seventeen years before. Though his voice was slightly frayed, Bono was inspired as his energy and commitment reached out to both the thousands in the stadium and the millions L E F T: It’s back to the basics for Adam in dress and bass guitar. O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono and the Edge butt heads at the Mellon Arena, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in May 2001.

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“U2 had less

than twelve minutes to perform in New Orleans, and they seized this moment . . .”

at home, opening his jacket to reveal the stars and stripes as its lining in an uplifting climax of a performance where the names of the 9/11 dead scrolled skywards to the chiming of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” As for U2’s original intention when touring All That You Can’t Leave Behind of “re-applying for the job of the best band in the world,” it was a mission that had got swept up in the whirlwind of events. But if anyone was still asking if U2 had got the job at the end of this death-haunted yet triumphant tour, who would have denied them?

A B OV E : U2 pay tribute to the victims of 9/11 during

their halftime performance for Super Bowl XXXVI at Louisiana’s Superdome. O P P O S I T E : Bono shows his stars and stripes. R I G H T: The Elevation 2001: Live from Boston DVD.

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CHAPTER

14

bomb foR some eighteen months U2 pottered about. Not that the downtime between the end of a tour and the start of a whole new cycle with album recording sessions was wasted. Still buzzing from the Elevation tour, which had proved both so cathartic—with Bono’s father dying then 9/11 overwhelming the tour and giving it extra force and meaning—and so redemptive for U2 as a band after the hubris of Pop and

O P P O S I T E PAG E : Guerilla

marketing for U2’s The Best of 1990–2000 album on the side of the UK’s Houses of Parliament, London, in November 2002. B E L O W : The “Electrical Storm” single was a new recording for the “Best of” compilation.

PopMart, the four decamped to Monte Carlo in the south of France with half a mind to start recording their next album straight away in a former night club they had rented whose basement space had an acoustic they all liked. In the event, the momentum of the Elevation tour and leftover material from All That You Can’t Leave Behind did not amount to enough energy and mass to create a whole new album. But U2 did record two new songs, “Electrical Storm,” and, in response to a commission from director Martin Scorsese for his new movie Gangs of New York starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Hands That Built America.” Both songs were produced— in the Eno style of providing a fresh approach

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profitable CD to the pirate economy of the illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing digital download, and then to the legal digital download based on such systems as Apple’s iTunes, with streaming a development still lying in the future. The record industry’s peak year was 1999, when sales, mostly of CDs, approached $15 billion. The decline from this summit was steep, with sales for 2008, including legal digital downloads, totaling some $9 billion. With their fan base stretching back to people, like themselves, now in their forties who had grown up with the album as the center of their musical life, U2 fared better in the new millennium than newer acts whose younger fans had no firm attachment to the album format and were eager to embrace new technology, with its scope to acquire a vast A B OV E : The buffalo on the album cover echo David

library of music downloads for free, without

Wojnarowicz’s image that was used on the sleeve for the “One” single benefitting AIDS research.

a cent going to the artist or record company. Even so, year by year, U2 were to find their album sales falling. Children of the album era as

to technology, textures, and the mix—by the

they were, U2 would never stop regarding the

London-born William Orbit (né Wainwright),

album as the core statement of their creativity.

whose hit records with Madonna and Blur had

Fortunately for their aspirations as money-

impressed U2.

makers, they were already a legendarily

Both songs were included on the 2002 stopgap album release, The Best of 1990–2000, which followed 1998’s stopgap release The Best of

186

spectacular live act, and in the future the show was to become their core business. For Bono, however, the struggles of the poor

1980–1990; each came with an optional extra

simply to survive were proving more pressing

CD of B-sides from singles, and each album did

to him. Jubilee 2000 was a start, and the

extremely well commercially, though the second

momentum of that project inspired Bono and his

less well than the first. This was not so much

colleagues to found a new organization with a

a reflection on the relative merits of each

wider agenda for rescuing Africa from poverty.

collection, or of U2’s popularity (which was

Called DATA, this new lobbying group called for

surely greater in 2002 than in the 1998 aftermath

action on D for debt cancellation, A for AIDS,

of PopMart), as it was on the accelerating

which had reached epidemic levels in the conti-

transformation of the record industry from a

nent, T for trade reform, with the goal of rebal-

business based on mass sales of the highly

ancing Africa’s exports to wealthy countries back

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“It’s an amazing thing to think that

ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly.” –Bono

A B OV E : Bono’s equation for fighting poverty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,

Massachusetts, in December 2005.

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to levels last seen in the 1970s, and A for Africa, home to the most desperately poor nations in the world. Heralded by a Time magazine cover asking “CAN BONO SAVE THE WORLD?” and showing the singer revealing his Old Glory jacket lining from the Super Bowl show, he went on a globe-trotting lobbying offensive, which most notably included the U.S. president whose father, George Bush Sr., Bono had tried and failed to reach by phone on the ZooTV tour ten years earlier. Though in many respects the policies of the second President Bush administration were not to U2’s taste (and Bono’s fellow members were not happy that he allowed a photo of them together to be publicized, which might have suggested the group’s endorsement of his presidency), the U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice got behind the project, and the $15 billion package President Bush announced in 2003 to fight AIDS abroad was an achievement in which Bono could take a great deal of credit. Not only had he advocated to the mightiest in the land, but also during that December of 2002 he had hit the road with other activists and fellow musicians, including American country duo the Judds, to campaign among the people whose taxes, in the end, would pay for it all. With the Edge taking time out to marry Morleigh Steinberg, work on the new U2 A B OV E T O P : Bono graces the cover of Time for a

second time on March 4, 2002; the first time was with the band in 1987. A B OV E : U2’s hit single “Vertigo” from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono and the Edge on The Today Show to promote The Gangs of New York soundtrack in December 2002.

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album would not commence until 2003, and the starting point was a guitar riff the Edge came up with at his home in Malibu. Workingtitled “Full Metal Jacket,” this viciously swaggering riff, of which James Williamson of

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Iggy and the Stooges might have been proud, would eventually explode on rock radio all over the world as the song “Vertigo.” The key word here, however, is “eventually.” Though they had now been recording together for a quarter of a century, U2 had never found it easy to resolve the group’s conflicting chemistries of “Hats” and “Haircuts,” between a dynamic guitarist who can hear the hits in his riffs and a

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“Bono could

take a great deal of credit for the $15 billion package President Bush announced to fight AIDS abroad.”

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A B OV E : U2 performing at the Special Olympics opening ceremony, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland, on June 21, 2003.

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R I G H T T O P : The book The Best of Propaganda: 20 Years of the Official U2 Magazine was published in 2003. R I G H T M I D D L E : Recorded during the Elevation tour, the rare U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle CD was released only to U2.com members in 2007. R I G H T B O T T O M : The 2004 hit single by the British dance group LMC that sampled U2’s “With or Without You.”

more passive rhythm section who need more to go on, plus a notoriously seat-of-his-pants singer-lyricist who cannot be relied upon to judge whether a song still needs further melodic, harmonic, and lyrical cooking or is already burnt to a crisp. Agreeing that they wanted to go further down All That You Can’t Leave Behind ’s road of guitar-based but tuneful rock, they hired a new set of ears as producer: Chris Thomas, who in the 1970s had given the art-rock of Roxy Music punch and clarity and the ranting punk of the Sex Pistols musical shape and, again, punch and clarity. But each of those acts, and also the Pretenders, among the many others with whom he had crafted hit records, would arrive at the studio with songs already written. That was never the way U2 worked, and the legendary British producer, who had cut his teeth as an EMI engineer with the Beatles and Pink Floyd, struggled with U2’s nebulous, rudderless composing and recording habits. After months of work where the only thing all parties could be sure they agreed on was that it wasn’t working, they called the whole thing off and Chris Thomas went home. As for the “Full Metal Jacket” guitar riff, it added lyrical flesh to become “Native Son,” protesting the highly controversial trial and life imprisonment of the Chippewa political activist Leonard Peltier for the murder of two FBI agents in 1975. Then Bono decided he could not see

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“A simple quick

fix like larger recording rooms with better natural light and views lifted the mood and creativity levels.”

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O P P O S I T E PAG E , T O P : The band rehearsing in their

Dublin studio in 2004. O P P O S I T E PAG E , B O T T O M : The single “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” written for Bono’s father.

himself singing the song live in that form, so it changed shape to become “Shark Soup,” and then “Viva La Ramone,” from which came the Spanish, Ramones-style count-in “Uno, dos, tres, catorce!” (1, 2, 3, 14!) Another nod to their punk rock past was Bono’s call “Hello, Hello,” which all New Wave fans would know from Public Image’s first, self-titled single of 1978. After much chopping and changing of verses, choruses, and storylines, U2 typically settled on the song’s final incarnation as “Vertigo,” inspired by a tatty German nightclub whose atmosphere—fearful giddiness rather than euphoria—would translate dramatically to the stage and connect to risk-taking youth rather than politically conscious middle-age. While the concepts of U2 as songsmiths and as a collective political consciousness seemed indivisible in the mid-1980s, two decades on there was a growing separation. So in January 2004, after months of unsatisfactory recording with Chris Thomas from

A B OV E : Garret “Jacknife” Lee, the Irish producer and

mixer whom U2 called in as a fresh pair of ears when 2004’s recording sessions needed inspiration.

which survived only Bono’s song written for his father, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” (the song “One Step Closer” would also ponder that prickly relationship), Steve Lilywhite

natural light and more stimulating views, lifted

was called in to get the sessions back on track.

the mood and creativity levels.

He not only understood how U2 composed and

For a fresher pair of ears, U2 called in the

recorded—experimentally, and in constant need

Irish producer and mixer Garret “Jacknife” Lee,

of outside creative input and deadlock-breaking

whose mixes of several U2 songs sparked new

ideas—but his appraisals and guidance were

ideas, even if the band did not accept everything

trusted by the band. A simple quick fix such as

he did. Also back in the producer’s chair was

moving the band from the smaller to the larger

Flood, who helped U2 work up a melody that had

of Hanover Quay’s recording rooms, with better

started life as the song “Scott Walker” on the Pop

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song “Miracle Drug,” inspired by the award-winning Irish poet Christopher Nolan, who had followed the four future U2 members into Mount Temple school despite being severely disabled and only able to start writing thanks to a drug that allowed him to nod his head and guide a “unicorn” pointer. The concept of the miracle drug then expanded to Bono’s wider preoccupation with AIDS treatment in Africa. “Crumbs from Your Table” was more focused on this issue, condemning the Catholic church and other Christian organizations that would not help. Phrased so elliptically one could easily mistake the song for a bitter takedown of a former lover, not for the first time it was a song that needed Bono’s explanation in subsequent sessions, had been rejigged and then abandoned once again on the All That You Can’t Leave Behind

interviews to be correctly understood. Likewise “Love and Peace or Else,” another

sessions, and now would finally crystallize as

Biblically hued song addressing the mood of post-

“City of Blinding Lights.” It is a classic U2 song of

9/11 dread that also—sharing the honor with the

epiphany, bottling the spirit of innocence and

Cold War relationship between Bono and his father

everything to live for that had motivated the band

(“Atomic Bob,” jested the singer)—inspired the

decades previously, as Bono was reminded of

album’s title: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

when he saw an Anton Corbijn photograph of

Far less freighted with meaning, “All Because

the band’s first helicopter trip in 1982, which then

of You” was U2’s power-chording tribute to the

triggered the even earlier memory of his first visit

Who, the four-piece rock band who invented the

to London with Ali to try to drum up interest in his

marriage of visceral excitement and spiritual

group. Typical, too, of Bono’s grasshopper creative

quest back in the 1960s. Inspired by another

spirit that the chorus was inspired by seeing the

classic group, Thin Lizzy, “A Man and a Woman”

emotion-drenched faces of the Madison Square

is the album’s slow-burn romance, Bono’s

Garden fans just weeks after 9/11; it all fitted

flirtatious tribute to Ali and glimpse into their

together in the spirit of poetry rather than strict

marriage of complementary characters.

logic. As ever with U2’s best songs, the sum was greater than the parts, its overall feeling commending the song to President Obama, who used it in the musical program of both of his inauguration ceremonies. Another such imaginative leap lay behind the

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A B OV E : January 20, 2009: U2 performing at We Are

One: the Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, on January 18, 2009. O P P O S I T E PAG E : “City of Blinding Lights” was a favorite track of Barack Obama’s on the campaign trail. O P P O S I T E B E L O W : “All Because of You,” U2’s power-chording tribute to the Who.

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Finally finished in July 2004, during sessions that extended to Los Angeles and brought in even more pairs of ears, including Nellee Hooper, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Carl Glanville, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, with its sleeve’s reversion to the punchy, distressed monochrome and blocky red graphic style of Boy and War, was above all a statement of rock-art aggression—aggression with a moral purpose. Once again, U2 were fighting for peace.

shock And Awe How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb would not be released until November 2004 in order to catch the Christmas market, which was very important

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A B OV E : Bono and his U2-branded iPod. O P P O S I T E PAG E : To promote the release of How to Dismantle an Atomic

Bomb, U2 filmed a video on a flatbed truck traveling through New York City to the Brooklyn Bridge, where the band performed a secret show recorded for an MTV special and the EP Live from Under the Brooklyn Bridge.

back then when most music was still bought on

everyone’s attention was elsewhere. Had the CD

CD in stores. The delay created one last drama

been uploaded to the internet, the fortune the

when, at a press photo session in France months

album had cost and which it expected to make

before release, the Edge’s CD of the songs,

many times over when commercially released

which he was using to help him decide his view

would have gone up in smoke as fans wouldn’t

on the album running order and on which tracks

have been able to resist downloading it for free.

should be released as singles, was stolen while

The record company called in the industry’s

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L E F T: The U2-branded iPod launched in 2004 and had the band members’ signatures engraved on the back. B E L O W : The Complete U2 “digital box set.” O P P O S I T E PAG E : The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album cover.

hush-hush anti-piracy unit which, working with international police agencies, combed the internet, but nothing was found. U2 and their record company could breathe again. So, too, could Apple. Bono was looking to

their albums and singles, plus live, rare, and

the future and could see the death of the CD on

previously unreleased material from 1978 to

the horizon as music fans increasingly chose to

2004, totaling 446 songs.

listen to music on the new generation of digital

Piggy-backed on such a huge marketing

hard drives and smartphones; the rest of the

campaign, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

band, however, vetoed his hopes of getting a

matched the success of All That You Can’t Leave

deal with a major cellphone corporation but were

Behind, selling some 10 million copies and beat-

happy to go with Apple, a cool brand whose

ing its predecessor’s seven Grammy Awards by

iPod had music at its heart rather than as an

two. That any act, especially in their third decade

add-on. Apple launched their 2004 models with

of success, could still sell albums on such a scale

a $20 million advertising campaign using U2’s

was unparalleled. But Bono was right: despite

“Vertigo,” with the band paid a royalty based on

worldwide CD sales bouncing back in 2004

sales of U2-branded iPods. U2 also released, via

thanks to growing populations, spreading

“Bono was looking to

the future and could see the death of the CD on the horizon . . .”

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Apple’s iTunes Store, The Complete U2—all

prosperity, and price cutting, the tipping point away from the CD album, U2’s specialty, toward the individual download was very near. U2 would also be promoting the album the old-fashioned way, with a gigantic world tour. With the four band members all in their

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mid-forties now, a two-hour rock show

U2 return to the New Wave guitar-rock format and

presented a greater physical challenge than

aesthetic of their early years, so the Vertigo tour

ten years before. Pacing the performance was

welcomed back to the live set such youthful tunes

vital, yet the fans expected nonstop action. U2

as “The Electric Co.,” “40,” “Into the Heart,” “The

decided to solve this problem two ways.

Ocean,” “An Cat Dubh,” “Party Girl,” and “Out

The first was purely musical. An upside to

of Control.” Yes, U2 had history now—where

being veterans was that they now had a consid-

once they were the young challengers inducting

erable repertoire of songs, including many early

veteran legends into the Rock and Roll Hall of

classics they hadn’t played live for years as they’d

Fame; in March 2005 it was their turn, with Bruce

been superseded in the set by new numbers.

Springsteen doing the honors.

Just as How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, even more than All That You Can’t Leave Behind, saw

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U2’s second answer to the question of how to keep the fans boiling with excitement for

“How to

Dismantle an Atomic Bomb won NINE Grammy Awards and sold some 10 million copies.”

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two hours a night was to let the lighting take the strain. As ever, Willie Williams and Mark Fisher designed the sets and stage production, taking advantage of the strides that had been made in L.E.D. technology since the PopMart tour. Sticking to the discipline of only showing images of the band in black and white so that the eye was not inevitably compelled screenwards away from the real thing, as would have been the case in color, the electronic backdrop mostly stuck to words and imagery more abstract than figurative. The key concept was the word “Coexist,” the “C” being the Islamic crescent, the “X” the Jewish star of David, and the “T” the Christian cross. As the Vertigo tour traveled the world, U.S. forces and their allies were in Iraq and Afghanistan, and though Bono was at one with

of previous generations of rock fan, cell phones

President Bush on fighting AIDS in Africa, he did

could create a powerful effect if thousands could

not pretend to go along with U.S. policy in the

be coordinated, which is what Bono did while

Middle East and the general rhetoric of crusade.

performing the song “One,” cajoling the crowd

Larry had made his views plain when he joined

into signing up en masse by phone to DATA’s ONE

an anti-war march in Dublin. Though the

campaign to “make poverty history.”

messages were as serious as those of PopMart had been flippant, the L.E.D. screen presentation

often spotted studying his watch impatiently,

designed by artist Catherine Owens was

gave rise to an urban myth that refuses to die.

spectacular, a shock-and-awe bombardment

Scotland’s Glasgow has a long-standing

for peace, just as the first U.S. air strikes on

reputation for its crowd heckling performers, and

Baghdad had been for war.

the story goes that at the Hampden Park stadium

By 2005 and 2006, the fans were bringing their own light show. Replacing the cigarette lighters

“Larry was often

spotted studying his watch impatiently, which gave rise to an urban myth that refuses to die . . .”

200

This section of the show, where Larry was

show in 2005, Bono began slowly clapping his hands and asked the crowd to join him. “Every time I clap my hand another child in Africa dies,” he announced. Came the shout from the crowd: “Well stop fucking clapping, then!”  Though there was a new stage routine where Larry advanced along the now-traditional ramp into the heart of the keenest fans to play the floor-tom and crash cymbal along to “Love and

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Peace or Else,” and though Bono would still duet with the girl plucked from the front and also play the bull (his star sign: Taurus) to the Edge’s elegant matador (his guitar the cape), there was noticeably less human dynamism on stage. But

201

“The Edge’s seven-

year-old daughter Sian fell suddenly very ill and had to be hospitalized.”

so blinded by the lights were the crowd (and “City of Blinding Lights” opened many of the

Yet it all nearly didn’t happen at all. A month

five-legged tour’s 131 dates) that no one felt

after the album release and just as tour tickets

short-changed.

were about to go on sale, the Edge’s seven-year-

Indeed, whereas the Elevation tour ensured

old daughter Sian fell suddenly very ill and had to

sellout shows by sticking to arenas for an

be hospitalized. Ready to call the whole thing off,

average crowd of just over 19,000, apart from

U2 handed the decision to the Edge to make with

two North American arena legs, the Vertigo tour

his family. With her condition needing months of

returned to the stadiums, averaging attendances

treatment, Sian’s wellbeing was the paramount

of almost twice its predecessor.

concern. But she encouraged her father to go to work as usual, and Morleigh agreed. The tour was hastily rescheduled to allow plenty of time for the Edge to fly back to the family home in Los Angeles, the tour’s opening arena dates all being no more than two hours’ flying time away. A year into the world tour, Sian’s condition again gave cause for concern, and scheduled Australasia, Japan, and Hawaii dates were postponed until the end of 2006. One knock-on effect of the downsized tour was that the band suffered a PR disaster when they promised all new members tickets while relaunching their U2.com Website. With scalpers

O P P O S I T E PAG E : The

Vertigo tour program. L E F T: The Vertigo 2005:

Live from Chicago DVD. I N S E T: A Vertigo tour concert ticket to see the hometown band.

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joining just to take advantage of this offer,

remembered what Bono had forgotten: the

demand for tickets greatly exceeded the now

song had been inspired by Poland’s Solidarity

reduced supply, with fans blaming the band for

independent trade union movement.

the scalpers’ profiteering.

Three days before, U2 were not recalling

But where the internet really benefited the

history but making it afresh. That summer the

show was unofficially, in the viral stunts the fans

leaders of the world’s most powerful eight

themselves pulled on the band, most

nations gathered in a golf resort in Scotland

spectacularly in Chorzów, Poland, on July 5,

for the G8 summit. It was the ideal opportunity

2005, when U2 played New Year’s Day and the

to lobby on behalf of DATA, the Make Poverty

entire Silesian Stadium coordinated to wave red

History campaign, and the Global Call to Action

and white items, presenting to the band’s as-

Against Poverty for the biggest package of

tonished gaze a huge Polish flag. The fans had

support for the poorest of the world, backed by

A B OV E : President George W. Bush, Bono, Laura Bush, and Bob Geldof meeting to discuss Africa at the G8

Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, on July 6, 2005.

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all the people-power Bono and his old mentor

A B OV E : Bono introducing Paul McCartney at Live 8 in

Bob Geldof could mobilize. Bono would later fly

Hyde Park, London, on July 2, 2005.

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to Gleneagles and successfully harangue the leaders, from President Bush down, to sign up to

worldwide. Live Aid was the model but

a vast commitment to the poor worldwide, mostly

this would be even bigger, with concerts

in Africa.

simultaneously held in ten major cities, a

Any reluctance from the G8 leaders would be softened by the sound of music and sight of

globally televised campaign of moral pressure. So, shortly after 2 p.m. on July 2, 2005, in

thousands of young voters supporting the cause,

London’s Hyde Park, almost exactly twenty years

with millions more watching and contributing

after Live Aid—when U2 had their breakthrough

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A B OV E ( L E F T ) : Bono and his wife, Ali, promoting fair trade T-shirts at a textile factory in Butha Buthe, Lesotho, in May 2006. A B OV E ( R I G H T ) : Bono introducing Paul McCartney at Live 8 in Hyde Park, London, on July 2, 2005.

wrote and sang that line as a Beatle—and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was their magnum opus. Within forty-five minutes of the song being sung, a CD of the performance had been uploaded to iTunes and set a world record

moment into worldwide household fame as

for the fastest-selling online song of all time,

a rock band who really cared, as a rock band

with proceeds going to the associated charities.

whose singer would do almost anything to

Sir Paul McCartney then left the stage for

connect emotionally with the crowd—they did it

U2 to do their set, including a magical moment

all over again. This time they opened the show,

in “Beautiful Day” when doves of peace were

with the most famous opening line of any rock

released from the stage to flock spectacularly

album: “It was twenty years ago today . . .” But

for the helicopter cameras, and Bono sang a

it wasn’t Bono singing. He was a bystander on

snippet of “Blackbird” in further tribute to the

stage as his band backed the man who originally

Beatles and their message of peace and love.

“. . . a CD of the performance had been

uploaded to iTunes and set a world record for the fastest-selling online song of all time . . .”

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A B OV E : U2 rehearsing for the 48th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, in

February 2006; the band won Grammys in all eight categories in which they were nominated.

“We’re not looking for charity. We’re looking for

four-and-a-half-million fans. Such had been the

justice,” Bono said, as he explained how just a

ticket demand that hundreds of thousands of disap-

little money could save a life and create a future

pointed fans would have to wait until next time.

in Africa. “This is your moment too. Make history

It would be two-and-a-half years before U2

by making poverty history.” Within the hour of a

would tour again. But it would be over four years

performance so full of significance and meaning,

between How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and

U2, their crew, and equipment were helicoptered

their next album. As U2 were to discover, you

to the nearest Royal Air Force base and flown to

could lose half your listeners on record

Vienna for a stadium show that very night.

yet almost double your fans in the flesh. The

Eighteen months later, the Vertigo tour finally wound down in Honolulu, having been seen by over

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rock world was changing, but U2, despite vicissitudes, would remain on top.

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CHAPTER

15

Horizon At some profound but possibly subconscious level, U2 must hate the long-winded, experimental, and incremental way they write and record. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why, having made the error of recruiting as initial producer for the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album sessions a man who expected the act to arrive in the studio with fully written, studio-ready

O P P O S I T E PAG E : The Edge celebrating his forty-sixth birthday at the VIP Room in St. Tropez, France. B E L O W : The Edge and Rick Rubin during the 18th Annual Rock & Rock Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

songs, for their next album they made the very same mistake. The veteran Brit Chris Thomas was the first victim of mutual mismatching, and the second was the extravagantly bearded American eccentric Rick Rubin. His whole approach was to work with an act who had lapsed into a comfort zone and no longer producing their best, and push and push that act in the studio until their performances, often raw and unadorned, brought back to the surface the burning essence of their genius. Springing from the U.S. hardcore punk scene in the early 1980s, he made a name for himself in thrash metal, hiphop, and a new generation of eclectic, funky rock bands, his most prominent productions being for Run-D.M.C., Slayer, the Beastie Boys, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it was his productions of Johnny Cash’s award-winning, career-renaissance albums

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“Hard work,

however, could not overcome the misunderstanding between band and producer . . .” on Rubin’s American label that commended him to U2. Slightly younger than U2, he nonetheless had the status of a guru of record production: he could make something special happen. For months between the Vertigo tour’s Latin America dates in early 2006 and the delayed Australasia and Pacific dates starting in November, U2 were hard at work in their South of France retreat and London’s famed Abbey Road studios with their production guru. Hard work, however, could not overcome the fundamental mutual misunderstanding between band and producer. U2 were never adequate, self-contained music makers who only needed a catalyst and guide like Rubin to draw out of them their best performances of pre-written songs for distillation into elementally uncluttered, highproof recordings. What they needed were experienced, eclectic studio heads to bounce ideas off and go on a musical adventure together, from rough sketches to building layer upon layer of texture and sonic novelty. And then, almost inevitably, U2 would call in the trusted Steve Lilywhite to sort through, tweak, A B OV E : The Edge with his second wife, Morleigh Steinberg,

at the Music Rising auction on April 21, 2007, to aid Gulf Coast musicians after Hurricane Katrina; his cream Gibson Les Paul Custom guitar sold for a record $240,000, and Bono’s signed Irish Falcon Gretsch guitar brought $187,500.

and mix the results until as many songs as possible sounded like hit records. Though their months with Rubin yielded very little U2 wanted to release, they were upbeat about the experience. What resulted, they claimed, was an improved version of U2’s past.

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But U2 were not ready to recycle their past, however intensely well. They wanted to keep going into the future. Of the songs that saw the light of day, the first, in collaboration with California’s nouveaupunk band Green Day, was a cover of the 1970s Scottish punk band Skids’ song “The Saints Are Coming.” A month before its release as a single in October 2006, U2 and Green Day performed it together live before the New Orleans Saints versus Atlanta Falcons game, the first in the Louisiana Superdome since it was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina the previous year. This live performance later went on sale online to benefit Music Rising, the Edge’s charity with producer Bob Ezrin to make good New Orleans’

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A B OV E T O P : U2 with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green

Day performing their cover of The Skids’ “The Saints Are Coming” on September 25, 2006, at the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans. (ABOVE) The Music Rising– benefit single of the live performance of “The Saints Are Coming.”

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L E F T: The U218 Singles compilation album with two new songs produced by Rick Rubin. B E L O W : The “Window in the Skies” single.

lost musical instruments and music projects. The second Rick Rubin production, “Window in the Skies,” is standard-issue U2, a hit single in several countries and, along with the Green Day collaboration, one of two new songs on 2006’s best-selling stopgap compilation album, U218 Singles. “Window in the Skies” B-side was another duet. A year before, U2 had backed R&B star Mary J Blige’s version of “One”; here, with only minor vocal intervention from Bono, they rebooted veteran Canadian poet-songsmith Leonard Cohen’s hilariously self-mocking “Tower of Song,” with the original artist taking sly, rumbling vocal center stage. Meanwhile, not for the first time, after months down a blind alley, U2 had an album to get back on track. In reaction to Rubin’s back-to-basics approach, U2 linked up again with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as full-blown musical collaborators rather than mere producers. They all flew off to that short-haul destination where European rock musicians from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin onward have headed when they have felt the need to soak up some exotic atmosphere to spice up their rock ’n’ roll—North Africa. The ancient walled city of Fez in Morocco

“They may be the

only good anthemic rock band ever. Certainly they’re the best.” –Chris Martin (Coldplay), Rolling Stone magazine.

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hosted 2007’s World Festival of Sacred Music, held every three years since 1994. In May that year Bono was invited, and brought along the rest of U2, plus Eno and Lanois. For the festival’s fortnight they rented, on the edge of the medina, the Hotel Riad el Yacout’s central courtyard (plus surrounding accommodation) and turned it into a makeshift recording studio, with birds darting

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overhead, carpets covering the stone floor, and decorated pillars and palms dwarfing the amplifiers and other gear. With the festival’s Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu devotional music ringing in their ears, the six musicians jammed away, Larry on an electronic kit at Eno’s insistence, the standard acoustic kit tending to drown out quieter sounds in such a setting. In the fortnight the six of them recorded numerous A B OV E : Bono joins Mary J. Blige to perform

her version of “One” ( A B OV E ) at the 2006 Grammy Awards.

sketches—“spines,” they called them—for fleshing out later in Dublin, and, in the event, London and New York too.

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A B OV E : Three generations of rock guitar gods trade licks at the premiere of the documentary “It Might Get

Loud” at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival (from left: Jack White, Jimmy Page, and the Edge).

With the band at a happier time than when they started Achtung Baby in Berlin, the Fez

meandering but “synthetic,” as if the exotica

sessions had the same purpose of creating

was added rather than innate.

a new musical mood and mindset through

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much of the Fez music sounded not only

One of four songs surviving almost intact

immersion in an unfamiliar environment. And

was “Moment of Surrender,” an almost

like Berlin’s sessions, much of what was re-

spontaneous group composition recorded in a

corded was scrapped or retooled beyond

single take in U2’s gospel mode, with a rolling

recognition, the problem being that when they

groove and the gentlest hint of North African

got home and reviewed what they had cut,

ululation and orchestral allspice. As “Bad” and

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“Running to Stand Still” had done before it, the song addresses drugs and the moment of surrender being when the addict admits helplessness. For Eno and Lanois, this was the one song that most fulfilled Bono’s ambition of creating an album of “future hymns.” Also developed from Fez, the song “No Line on the Horizon” would both open and title the whole album to come, after it had first been mooted as two mini-albums titled “Daylight” and “Darkness.” The song is typical of the whole album in that, like Pop before it, lots of intriguing ideas and hooks buzz around in search of one really strong musical idea to give the whole song a memorable shape and momentum. Bringing forth from his box of lyrics songs that tried out detailed scenarios and personas (having, he said, worn himself out as subject matter), Bono also had a feast of one-liners and couplets in search of a something he really wanted to say, and in search, too, for pieces of music where they formed a convincing fit. The song “No Line on the Horizon” had lines with which T. Rex’s Marc Bolan might have been pleased, but, bolted onto the music, they could only be sung with the stresses on all the wrong words, fatally weakening the effect. Song after song is fascinating in detail yet struggles to lodge in the mind, the sum of the parts being much greater than the whole. Another anti-drugs song, “Unknown Caller,” boasts a terrific guitar solo by the Edge—he had been spending time with Jimmy Page while making the rock guitar documentary It Might Get Loud, and the Led Zeppelin guitarist’s inspiration shows— and “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” has the lyrical stamp of the incurable addict of great pop songs, which Bono certainly is. The first

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T O P : Guitar porn on the “It Might Get Loud” movie poster. A B OV E : The “Get on Your Boots” single.

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“That death

and war should have inspired Bono to his best moments would have been no surprise . . .”

215

enters the mind of a war correspondent trying to find moral order in bloodshed and hatred. That death and war should have inspired Bono to his best moments would have been no surprise to veteran U2 followers. The fatal illness and death of Bono’s father had fired him up, along with the rest of the band, to revisit their youthful post-punk roots in the previous two

single, “Get on Your Boots,” nodded to both Bob

albums, whose attack, simplicity, and tunefulness

Dylan’s 1965 proto-rap “Subterranean Homesick

connected with 10 million paying listeners on

Blues” and the Beatles’ “Run For Your Life” of

each occasion. But without that strong, galvaniz-

the same year. Indeed, most of the album was

ing emotion to energize and shape the three (as a

a mash-up of moments that called to mind U2’s

minimum) blockbuster songs possessed of every

record collection rather than something they

previously top-selling U2 album, the band and

needed to get off their chests.

their collaborators fell victim to their weakness

All the better for sticking to a simple idea was “White as Snow,” where Bono restrains himself from over-emoting the reverie of a dying soldier in Afghanistan to a melody adapted from the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Closing the album, the no less affecting “Cedars of Lebanon”

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O P P O S I T E PAG E A N D B E L O W : Thousands of fans block London’s Regent Street when U2 perform live and unannounced from the rooftop of the BBC on February 27, 2009, to promote their No Line on the Horizon album release; the twenty-minute set included “Get On Your Boots,” “Beautiful Day,” “Vertigo,” and “Magnificent.”

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for over-complication. Like Pop before, No Line

in the media and on the internet with the credit

on the Horizon’s sales started strongly but fell

crunch of 2008 and the near-collapse of the Irish

away sharply, selling only half of its two

economy in an ocean of debt run up in the now-

predecessor’s individual totals.

burst property bubble.

There were postmortems at the time, with the

When, after many delays, No Line on the

African influence, the declining CD market, and

Horizon was released in February 2009, there

the fading of interest in the very idea of the big-

were millions who might have asked themselves

statement rock album all blamed for the drop-off

if, in exchange for an album seemingly short

in sales. Mentioned, perhaps only behind closed

of songs you can’t live without, they really

doors, was the damage to their reputation that

wanted to part with a portion of their fully taxed

the band had started to suffer in 2006 with the

income to add to the coffers of artists who

revelation that they now sheltered millions of

seemed as keen to avoid contributing to the

dollars from Irish taxation by incorporating their

wider welfare of their country as they were to

publishing business in the Netherlands. Not only

demand that others share their taxed income

did this issue not go away, but it was intensified

with the world’s poor.

BELOW: Bono and former Vice President Al Gore at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2008.

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B E L O W : U2 perform at the 60th Cannes

Film Festival to promote their groundbreaking 3-D concert movie U2 3D (LEFT). B O T T O M : At Cannes with U2 3D ’s director, Catherine Owens, U2’s art director since the 1992 zooTV tour.

Nor, when tackled on the subject, did Bono help his cause with evasions and a flimsy argument about U2 doing no more than playing the Irish government’s own game of tax competitiveness. What he never talked about was the Irish government’s habitual corrupt misspending of public funds and U2’s regular contribution of millions of dollars to people even poorer than the poorest Irish child. But who you did and didn’t share your income with, of course, was not a choice available to most Irish citizens.

“. . .their

reputation started to suffer in 2006 with the revelation that they now sheltered millions from Irish taxation . . .”

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With accusations of epic hypocrisy hanging

modest by their standards since The Joshua Tree

over their heads, on the back of an album that

in 1987, No Line on the Horizon’s five million sales

was at best only a qualified success, and in the

made it one of the biggest albums of 2009,

teeth of the worst economic recession since the

reflecting the dwindling of album sales across

1930s, U2 once again announced they would be

the board in recent years. The music industry as

setting off on a world tour in 2009. But would the

a business had now firmly shifted from the

world want to know?

recording to the live event and all its spin-off moneymaking opportunities. No Line on the Horizon had been dedicated

ClAw

to one of the original Island Records team, Rob

In March 2008 U2 signed a twelve-year deal

Partridge, who had died at the end of 2008, with

with Live Nation, which included the global event

all four band members attending the charming

giant controlling the band’s merchandise,

publicity boss’s London funeral in a privileged

sponsorships, and official Website. Though

pew at Golders Green Crematorium; this author

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“No Line on the

Horizon had been dedicated to one of the original Island Records team, Rob Partridge, who had died at the end of 2008 . . .”

was one of many media friends also paying their respects behind them. An era was over: Island was now no more than a subsidiary imprint of Universal Records, a shrinking giant that looked up to the likes of Live Nation in the music business. When the band announced in corporate-speak their U2 360º tour on their Live Nation–controlled U2.com Website in March 2009, the key selling point was a great view at a great price. The clue to how this would be done lay in the tour’s title. Even though U2 had extended the stage into the crowd in the past, the configuration had been conventional: at one end of a rectangle lay the stage, and fanning out to fill the middle and other three sides stretched the audience—for the furthest of whom the band might as well have been ants. But this was to be a stadium rock show in the 360º mold, with the furthest fans that much closer to the band in the middle of the field of play. Siting the stage in the middle also increased the capacity of each venue by around a fifth, hence generating much-needed extra revenue for a tour whose ordinary running costs amounted to $750,000 daily for crew wages and rental on some 200 trucks transporting hundreds of tons of staging and other equipment, merchandise, and everything else needed to

O P P O S I T E PAG E : U2 join Baaba Maal on stage at the Shepherds

Bush Empire, London, in May 2009 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Island Records. A B OV E : The U2 360˚ opening night at Camp Nou stadium, Barcelona, Spain, on June 30, 2009.

make a giant tour happen.

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A B OV E : U2 under the Claw on their 360˚ tour stop at Wembley Stadium, London. O P P O S I T E PAG E : The band headlining the Glastonbury Festival, Somerset, England, in 2011.

The key to making this work was the stage set

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the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang tour. The Claw

known as the Claw. Such was the time needed

was a four-legged—or four-pincered—solid steel

to erect it, take it down again, and transport it

structure housing its own sound system,

to the next show—the high-pressure hydraulic

thus lifting the amplification as well as the

system enabling such speedy assembly and

lighting and high-definition video screens clear

dismantling had to be specially invented—that

from where they would otherwise impede the

the tour needed three of them, costing nearly

audience’s view. Inspired by the now vintage

$20 million each. At 164-feet tall, the Claw

spaceship-style Theme Building at LAX (Bono

ensured the show was twice the height of the

being a connoisseur of airport architecture) and

previous record for a music event set, held by

reminiscent of David Bowie’s stage for 1987’s

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Glass Spider tour, the Claw futuristically styled a pragmatic solution to the problem of poor sight lines and distance from the crowd that all stadium shows had to contend with. The Claw’s circular walkway enclosed the most privileged ticket holders, over whom soared four gantries like wheel spokes arched back to the cen-

221

“. . . in May 2010,

Bono sustained severe ligament and disc damage in his back, causing some paralysis. . .”

tral stage hub, above which was suspended the giant tapered cylinder of the lighting and video screen complex. In itself, this movie mothership, whose searchlights beamed into the sky like extra-terrestrial beacons, provided the dynamic spectacle that compensated for Bono’s waning athleticism now that he was fifty. Though Bono had suffered accidents and wear and tear before on tour, in May 2010 he sustained severe ligament and disc damage in his back, causing some paralysis, while training for the third leg of the tour. An emergency operation in

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Munich followed by two months of rehabilitation meant that 2010’s summer stadium dates in North America had to be postponed until 2011, as did U2’s appearance at the UK’s annual Glastonbury Festival. Bono made a full recovery, and the band looked on the bright side by promising that fans attending the second North American trek of the tour would hear a bunch of new songs, some proposed for No Line on the Horizon’s successor, others written by Bono and the Edge for the troubled Broadway rock musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Black leather jacket and pants only partially appeared to trim a few pounds from a figure getting stockier by the year, but—unlike Spider-Man or, indeed, Batman, whose theme song “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” returned to the set for the first time since 1997—Bono’s priority was no longer bounding up lighting rigs but

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rather keeping his voice strong across a two-hour-plus set. U2 by now had a far bigger songbook of classics the fans demanded to hear than had been the case twenty years before. As on the Vertigo tour, on any given night U2

O P P O S I T E PAG E : Bono and the Edge promote their Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (OPPOSITE BELOW) on the Late Show with David Letterman on July 18, 2011. A B OV E : Playing their vintage guitars, U2 are now a veteran band, steeped in history.

would pick to play just under half of a

sponsorship from BlackBerry phones), both

prepared repertoire of some sixty songs, with no

hardcore and casual U2 fans knew that this was

two consecutive set lists being the same. It was

not a tour to be missed, and the band sold out

a tour of slightly fewer shows (110 compared to

every venue.

Vertigo’s 131) but far bigger crowds (attendance

And just to wind up the number-crunching

per U2 360º show averaging 66,110 compared to

on a tour named after a number, by the time the

Vertigo’s 35,259).

U2 360º tour’s final encore—“40” and the Bible’s

Promised a spectacle the like and scale of

Aaronic Blessing—rang out over Moncton, New

which the world had never seen before, and

Brunswick, in Canada on July 30, 2011, it had

with loads of tickets available at low prices,

been seen by an astonishing 7,272,046 people and

reflecting a world in the grip of recession

grossed $736,421,584 in ticket sales alone, making

(subsidizing the ticket prices, U2 overcame their

it on both counts the biggest music tour of all time.

previous fastidiousness to accept corporate

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As each tour differed from the last in its scale,

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A B OV E : The 360˚ tour hits Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey, in September 2009. O P P O S I T E PAG E T O P : The U2 360˚ tour program. O P P O S I T E PAG E B O T T O M : The “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” single.

production design, and set list, so did its artistic

circle. Time and again, the contrast is made

subtext, with Bono pacing the show into three

between the individual—alone, vulnerable,

emotional modes, from youthful innocence in

confused—and the strength which that individual

search of epiphany, then the transitional song,

can draw from one’s common humanity, from

“I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,”

being part of a stadium crowd singing and feel-

performed with blitzing lighting and video

ing as one, a congregation on a massive scale.

effects like a cosmic birth, following which songs where the individual engages with the

“Space Oddity”—David Bowie’s eerie 1969 hit

world continue until the end of the set, with the

record of an astronaut stranded in space with no

encores being a coda of raw vulnerability.

way home, and then accompanying the fans to the

Finding that intimate connection in a stadium

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With the PA introducing U2 to the sound of

exits at the end of the show with Elton John’s 1972

of over 90,000 people with the audio-visual tools

hit “Rocket Man,” where a Mars-bound astronaut

of shock and awe would seem impossible, but

bids his family farewell—the Claw mothership

U2 were and are past masters at squaring this

itself helped dramatize that contrast of loneliness

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and immensity. In a coup harking back to the Zoo

225

Shock and awe, sound and spectacle—the U2

TV tour’s link to besieged Sarajevo, a prerecorded

360º tour most certainly supplied these on an

video linkup with the crew of the International

unmatched scale. But it supplied something more:

Space Station was shown on the European leg

in a world feeling ever more the plaything of pow-

of the tour. On the first North American leg, crew

erful elites, a world where digital interconnectiv-

member Frank De Winne was shown singing

ity interfaces everyone with one another

part of “In a Little While,” and during the second

to make reality feel weightless and fantasy feel

leg astronaut Mark Kelly dedicated the song

real, U2 and the U2 audience supplied a real,

“Beautiful Day” to his wife, U.S. Congress

human need, a community of hearts beating as

member Gabrielle Giffords, who was badly

one. Even if only for one night.

wounded in the 2011 Tucson shooting. Generally, the show’s momentum was seldom jeopardized, with Bono’s appeals on behalf of good causes focusing on Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s democratically elected leader in 1990 who was held under house arrest by the ruling military junta. With fans invited to download and print out masks of her face from U2.com and don them in solidarity when the band played the song written for her, “Walk On,” U2 kept her face and name in front of thousands every night, mobilizing the pressure that contributed to the junta’s decision to finally free her in November 2010, just before the start of the tour’s Far East and Australasia leg. This was about more than one person’s freedom. Immune to embarrassment and reveling in the fans’ energy he inspired with his unstinting, brazenly hammy performances and then fed off in a virtuoso loop to take everybody even higher, Bono believes in working the crowd—and the bigger the better—into a united epiphany of feeling that banishes loneliness and helplessness, that mobilizes a mass moral force to free prisoners, to feed the starving, to bring justice, peace, and love to the world, to move mountains.

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L E F T: U2 performing “Ordinary Love” at the Academy Awards on March 2, 2014. The Oscar-nominated song is from the movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

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PH OTOg raPHy C r E D ITS Unless otherwise noted below, all memorabilia (album covers, posters, ads, etc.) was graciously provided by Patrice Bruhat at u2-discography.com. Introduction, U2 and Bruce Springsteen © Theo Wargo/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 1, U2 and Bruce Sprinsteen at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame © Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images Page 5, Adam Clayton © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images Page 6, Malahide c/o Zenit Creative Commons Page 7, Bono © Virginia Turbett/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 8, the Edge © Virginia Turbett/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 8, Larry Mullen, Jr. © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images Page 9, David Bowie © Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images Page 10, U2 early portrait © Martyn Goddard/REX USA Page 11, Phil Chevron of the Radiators from Space © Denis O’Regan/Getty Images Page 11, Rory Gallagher album © GAB archive/Redferns/Getty Images Page 13, 1977 ticket to “Live Rock Concert” c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 14, Bonavox store © Joho345/ Creative Commons Page 15, the Virgin Prunes © Mike Laye/Corbis Page 16, 1978 ad for “Pop Group ‘78” c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 17, the Horslips © Gem/ Redferns/Getty Images

Page 19, U2 in tour van © Martyn Goddard/REX USA Pages 20–21, U2 portrait in band’s London flat © Martyn Goddard/ REX USA Page 22, U2 portrait circa 1980 © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 23, on stage in Dublin © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 24, Adam playing Fender Precision © Colm Henry Page 26, Bono performing onstage © Steve Richards/REX USA Page 27, Bono and the Edge backstage © David Corio/MOA/Getty Images Page 28, on stage at the Sense of Ireland Festival © David Corio/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 28, the Edge, Bono, and Adam backstage © David Corio/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 29, U2 performing onstage with an animated Bono © David Corio/Redferns/ Getty Images Page 30, Bono sees the light © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 31, U2 on a hotel roof © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 32, Bono takes a breather © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 36, Bono’s handwritten lyrics c/o Gary Finch Page 37, Bono crowdsurfing at the Lyceum © Philip Grey/Lebrecht/ Corbis Page 37, U2 at the Lyceum © Philip Grey/Lebrecht/Corbis

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Page 38, Bono performing © Dean Messina/Frank White Photo Agency Page 39, U2 portrait with Adam on the phone © Virginia Turbett/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 40, U2 in the snow © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images Page 41, Bono onstage © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images Page 42, Adam Clayton, Rock on the Tyne © Barry Plummer Page 42, the Edge, Rock on the Tyne © Barry Plummer Page 42, Bono, Rock on the Tyne © Barry Plummer Page 42, Larry Mullen, Jr., Rock on the Tyne © Barry Plummer Page 45, U2 portrait © Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images Page 46, 1981 ticket c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 46, U2 photo shoot © Colm Henry Page 47, U2 outdoor photo shoot © Colm Henry Page 48, U2 in stairwell © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis Page 49, early U2 portrait © Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images Page 50, the Edge, Bono, Larry, and Adam © L. J. van Houten/REX USA Page 51, Bono in boots waving flag © Rob Verhost/Redferns/Getty Images Page 52, Bono on The Tube waving flag © Erica Echenberg/Redferns/ Getty Images Pages 54–55, Bono on The Tube © ITV/REX USA

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PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Page 57, Bono waving the Irish flag at the US Festival © Neal Preston/ Corbis Page 59, Bono at US Festival © Dean Messina/Frank White Photo Agency Pages 60–61, U2 at the US Festival © Dean Messina/Frank White Photo Agency Page 61, Bono and Ali at US Festival © Ebet Roberts/Redferns/ Getty Images Page 62, U2 concert tickets c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 63, the Edge and Bono performing © Linda Matlow/ REX USA Page 64, on tour in Sydney, Australia portrait © Peter Carrette Archive/Getty Images Page 66, Brian Eno circa 1984 © Ray Stevenson/REX USA Page 67, Slane Castle © Ramsey Cardy/Getty Images Page 68, U2, the Edge, and Brian Eno © Colm Henry Page 70, Bono draped in Irish flag © Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images Page 71, The Unforgettable Fire tour program c/o Joshua Eubanks Page 71, fan club items c/o Dave Perry Page 72, Bono putting out fires in Sydney © Bob King/Redferns/ Getty Images Page 73, the Edge in Sydney © Peter Carrette Archive/Getty Images Page 73, ticket for a 1984 London show c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 74, Adam Clayton and Bono © Richard Young/REX USA Page 75, Bob Geldof prepares to feed the world © Richard Young/ REX USA Page 77, handwritten concert set list c/o Mark Stevens Page 77, the official U2 World Service fan club magazine c/o Dave Perry Page 78, Larry Mullen, Jr. in Milton Keynes, 1985 © Barry Plummer

Page 79, Bono in Milton Keynes, 1985 © Barry Plummer Page 80, Bono at Live Aid © Jacques Langevin/Sygma/Corbis Page 81, Bono and Bob Geldof © Peter Still/Redferns/Getty Images Page 81, Bono meets a fan at Live Aid © Barry Plummer Page 81, Bono at Live Aid © Barry Plummer Page 82, Steve van Zandt © Peter Carrette Archive/Getty Images Page 83, Single for “Sun City” c/o u2ticketstubs.com Page 84, Larry and Adam at the Self Aid festival © Ilpo Musto/REX USA Page 85, A Conspiracy of Hope press conference © Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images Page 87, Bono and Lou Reed © Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images Page 88, Band from behind in New Mexico © Neal Preston/Corbis Page 90, The Waterboys on The Tube © ITV/REX USA Page 91, the Edge portrait with guitar and tape machine © Neal Preston/Corbis Page 93, Daniel Lanois © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis Page 94, U2 and Paul McGuinness having a business meeting © Neal Preston/Corbis Page 95, U2 press conference for The Joshua Tree © Ebet Roberts/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 95, the Edge on the Joshua Tree tour © Ebet Roberts/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 96, Bono and the Edge on set for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” © Neal Preston/ Corbis Page 97, Bono and Adam in New Jersey, 1987 © John T. Comerford/Frank White Photo Agency Pages 98–99, Bono singing to the crowds in Rotterdam in 1987 © Lex van Rossen/MAI/Getty Images Page 100, Adam taking a break in Arizona © Neal Preston/Corbis

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Page 101, Bono and Dylan in 1987 © George Rose/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images Page 103, Director Phil Joanou in 1991 © ITV/REX USA Page 104, Bono leads the New Voices of Freedom choir © Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images Page 106, the Edge promo for Rattle and Hum © REX/Moviestore Collection/REX USA Page 106, Bono promo for Rattle and Hum © REX/Moviestore Collection/REX USA Page 107, Larry Mullen, Jr. promo for Rattle and Hum © REX/ Moviestore Collection/REX USA Page 107, Adam Clayton promo for Rattle and Hum © REX/Moviestore Collection/REX USA Page 107, the Edge and Bono promo for Rattle and Hum © Terry O’Neill/Getty Images Page 108, U2 on the set for “Desire” video in Hollywood © Terry McGinnis/Getty Images Page 110, Bono and B.B. King on the Lovetown tour © Bob King/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 110, Lovetown tour progam c/o Joshua Eubanks Page 111, the Edge and Bono in Paris, 1989 © Rob Verhost/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 112, U2 portrait circa 1990 © Terry O’Neill/Getty Images Page 113, people sitting on the Berlin Wall © Oliver Gerhard/ imageBROKER/Alamy Page 115, A Clockwork Orange London stage production © John Sherbourne / Associated Newspapers/REX USA Page 116, Progaganda magazine issue 14 c/o Thomas Jordan Page 117, East German Trabant car during a U2 video shoot © REX USA Page 117, Bono in cowboy hat, smoking, during video shoot © Charles Sykes/REX USA Page 118, Bono in sunglasses © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis Page 123, Bono filming himself © Al Pereira/MOA/Getty Images

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Page 124, U2 fan and bellydancer Christina Petro © ITV/REX USA Page 125, Bono onstage at Earls Court, London © Mick Hutson/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 126, Bono reaching out to the crowd in Atlanta © Neal Preston/ Corbis Page 127, Speedy’s pizza box c/o John Ballard Page 128, Bono at Giants Stadium, NY © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images Page 129, ZooTV passes c/o Brian O’Neal Page 129, ZooTV tour program c/o Thomas Jordan Page 130, Bono joins a Greenpeace-organized protest © Brendan Beirne/REX USA Page 131, Vogue cover featuring Bono and Christy Turlington c/o Thomas Jordan Page 132, Vote tour passes c/o Brian O’Neal Pages 132–133, R.E.M. and U2 perform together © Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis Page 134, Bono in MacPhisto costume and makeup © Kevin Cummins/Getty Images Page 135, Adam performing live in 1993 on the ZooTV Zooropa tour © Jim Steele/Redferns/Getty Images Page 136, the Edge and Adam performing in Rotterdam © Paul Bergen/Redferns/Getty Images Pages 140–141, U2 stage set at Wembley Stadium in London © Jim Steele/Redferns/Getty Images Page 142, Bono and Rushdie at Wembley Stadium in London © Brian Rasic/REX USA Page 143, Adam and the Edge rehearsing at Wembley Stadium © REX USA Page 144, Bono and Frank Sinatra © AFP/Getty Images Page 146, Bono and the Edge at the 51st Golden Globes © Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images Page 149, Larry at NYC’s Limelight © Steve Eichner/WireImage/ Getty Images

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Page 151, Bono in Sarajevo in 1996 © Roger Hutchings/In Pictures/ Corbis Page 152, Brian Eno, Bono, the Edge, and Pavarotti © Brian Rasic/ REX USA Page 154, Propaganda magazine issue 24 c/o Thomas Jordan Page 156, U2 emerge from the mirrored lemon ball © Rob Verhost/Redferns/Getty Images Page 157, U2 posing in San Diego © REX USA Page 158, Howard Bernstein, aka Howie B © Jim Dyson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Page 159, U2 announces POPmart tour at Kmart © Timothy A. Clary/ AFP/Getty Images Pages 160–161, the POP set © Brian Rasic/REX USA Pages 162–163, Larry, the Edge, and Adam performing during the POPmart tour © Steve Jennings/Corbis Page 164, the Edge in a cowboy hat and muscle shirt © Steve Trager/ Frank White Photo Agency Page 165, Bono in a muscle shirt © Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency Page 165, POPmart tour program c/o Thomas Jordan Page 167, Costumed Adam with his POPmart “banana” bass © Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency Page 168, U2 performing at Irving Hall in 2000 © Theo Wargo/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 169, Superbowl XXXVI halftime show © Kmazur/WireImage/ Getty Images Page 170, Bono and David Trimble © Gerry Penny/AFP/Getty Images Page 171, Bono and Bob Geldof meet John Paul II © Camilla Morandi/REX USA Page 174, U2 receive the freedom of Dublin from the Mayor © Ilpo Musto/REX USA Page 175, Bono’s Freedom of the City of Dublin document © Ilpo Musto/REX USA Page 176, U2 celebrating at the Grammy Awards in 2000 © Vinnie Zuffante/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Page 177, the Elevation tour’s heartshaped catwalk © Dave Hogan/ Getty Images Page 180, Adam performing in camouflage © Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency Page 181, Bono and the Edge butting heads in Pennsylvania © Steve Trager/Frank White Photo Agency Page 182, U2 pay tribute to the 9/11 victims © Kmazur/WireImage/ Getty Images Page 183, Bono shows off his stars and stripes © Kmazur/WireImage/ Getty Images Page 184, Running bison projected on the Houses of Parliament © Herbie Knott/REX USA Page 187, Bono at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts © Antonin Kratochvil/VII/Corbis Page 188, Time magazine cover featuring Bono c/o Thomas Jordan Page 189, Bono and the Edge on The Today Show © Kmazur/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 190, U2 performing at the Special Olympics opening ceremony © Stringer/Getty Images Page 191, The Best of Propaganda book c/o Thomas Jordan Page 192, U2 rehearsing in Dublin © Insight-Visual UK/REX USA Page 193, Garret “Jacknife” Lee © Ben Morris/Corbis Page 195, Bono at the Obama inauguration in 2009 © Greg Mathieson/REX USA Page 196, U2 filming a video on a flatbed truck in NYC © Kmazur/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 197, Bono holding his U2branded iPod © Noah Berger/ Bloomberg/Getty Images Page 198, U2-brand iPod launched in 2004 © Eric Vidal/REX USA Page 201, Vertigo ticket c/o Aaron Sams, U2wanderer.org Page 202, The Bushes, Bono, and Bob Geldof © Eric Draper/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 203, Bono introducing Paul McCartney at Live 8 © Keith Waldengrave/Mail on Sunday/REX USA

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

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PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Page 204, Bono and Ali promoting fair trade T-shirts © Kim Haughton/REX USA Page 205, U2 rehearsing for the Grammy Awards © K.Mazur/ WireImage/Getty Images Page 206, the Edge’s forty-sixth birthday © Foc Wan/WireImage/ Getty Images Page 207, the Edge and Rick Rubin © Theo Wargo/WireImage/Getty Images Page 208, the Edge and Morleigh Steinberg © K.Mazur/WireImage/ Getty Images Page 209, U2 with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day © K.Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images Page 211, Bono joins Mary J. Blige for her version of “One” © M. Caulfield/WireImage/Getty Images Page 212, Jack White, Jimmy Page, and the Edge at the Toronto International Film Festival © Malcolm Taylor/Getty Images Page 214, Fans throng Regent Street when U2 performs a live gig from the BBC roof © Mark Large/Associated Newspapers/ REX USA Page 215, Bono and U2 live from the roof of the BBC in 2009 © Mark Large/Associated Newspapers/REX USA Page 216, Bono and Al Gore at the World Economics Forum © Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images Page 217, U2 performs at the 60th Cannes Film Festival © Antonelli/ Laruffa/REX USA Page 217, Director Catherine Owens with U2 at Cannes Film Festival © Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Page 218, U2 join Baaba Maal onstage in 2009 © Brian Rasic/ REX USA Page 219, the U2 360º opening night at Camp Nou stadium in Spain © K.Mazur/WireImage Page 220, the Claw at Wembley Stadium © Andy Sheppard/ Redferns/Getty Images Page 221, Adam at Glastonbury in 2011 © Steve Black/REX USA

Page 221, U2 at Glastonbury in 2011 © Brian Rasic/REX USA Page 222, the Edge and Bono on Letterman © CBS Photo Archive/ Getty Images Page 222, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark final preview in 2011 © Andy Kropa/Stringer/Getty Images Page 223, Adam and the Edge playing vintage guitars in 2009 © John Davisson/Frank White Photo Agency Page 223, Bono performing in 2009 © John Davisson/Frank White Photo Agency Page 224, Larry and the Edge at Giants Stadium © Eleanor Reiche/ Frank White Photo Agency Page 226-227, U2 performing at the 2014 Oscars © Adam Taylor/ABC/ Getty Images U2 Band Members – Gatefold Timeline Opening timeline photo, U2 portrait in rocky terrain © Neal Preston/ Corbis Adam wearing glasses in Belgium © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images Adam & Naomi Campbell announcing engagement © Today/ REX USA Adam performing during the Lovetown tour in Australia © Bob King/Redferns/Getty Images Adam performing at the Meadowlands Stadium in NJ © Mike Coppola/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images Bono looking pensive, backstage in Belgium © Virginia Turbett/ Redferns/Getty Images Bono performing at the Inglewood Forum on the Joshua Tree tour © George Rose/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images Bono rehearsing at the MTV Awards at Lincoln Center © KMazur/WireImage/Getty Images Larry cupping his face, backstage in Belgium © Virginia Turbett/ Redferns/Getty Images Larry in sunglasses on the Unforgettable Fire tour © Peter

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Carrette Archive/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images Larry playing the Tonight Show © Paul Drinkwater/NBCU/Getty Images The Edge in a bandana on the Lovetown tour in Australia © Bob King/Redferns/Getty Images The Edge holding a camera, backstage in Belgium © Virginia Turbett/Redferns/Getty Images The Edge performing at Glastonbury in 2011 © Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage/Getty Images The Edge in a cowboy hat at the MTV Awards in Rotterdam © Brian Rasic/REX USA U2 in the World – Gatefold Timeline 1960s & 1970s, Gary Powers with model U-2 play at the Senate © Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 1960s & 1970s, Bono stage diving at Cork Country Club © David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images 1960s & 1970s, British troops on Bloody Sunday © Bentley Archive/ Popperfoto/Getty Images 1980s, John Lennon © Getty Images 1980s, U2 portrait, outdoors © Steve Rapport/Photoshot/Getty Images 1980s, Bono and Bob Dylan performing together in Inglewood © George Rose/Hulton Archive 1990s, Blair, Mitchell, and Ahern celebrate the Good Friday Agreement © Dan Chung/AFP/ Getty Images 1990s, U2 at Sellafield protest © Photofusion/REX USA 2000s, U2 performing at the Oscars in 2014 © Adam Taylor/ABC/Getty Images 2000s, U2 and Green Day perform at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina © Kmazur/Getty Images Sport/Getty Images All reasonable attempts have been made to contact the copyright holders of all images.

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I N D EX Acheson, Ann 155, 169 Achtung Baby 113–22, 124, 127, 137, 139, 148, 155, 171, 212 Africa 75, 76, 77, 82–3, 85, 86, 166, 169, 172, 186, 188, 194, 203, 205, 216 AIDS 186, 188, 189, 194, 200 “All Because of You” 194, 195 “All I Want Is You” 106, 109 All That You Can”t Leave Behind 175, 176, 178, 182, 185, 191, 193, 198, 199 Amnesty International 83, 85, 109, 114 “An Cat Dubh” 35, 199 Andreu, Paul 176 “Angel of Harlem” 105, 106, 109, 126 “Another Day” 34 Apple 186, 197, 198 Auerswald, Jerry 166 Aung San Suu Kyi 175, 225 Automatic Baby 131, 132 Averill, Steve 15, 94 Avis, Meiert 49 “Bad” 68–9, 81, 93, 212 Band Aid 75, 76, 83, 85, 89 Barsalona, Frank 40, 41 Batman Forever 148 Beatles, The 40, 41, 58, 66, 76, 102, 107, 131, 170, 191, 204, 215 “Beautiful Day” 4, 173, 176, 204, 215, 225 Best of Propaganda: 20 Years of the Official U2 Magazine, The 191 Beyond the Clouds 150

Blackwell, Chris 22, 30, 43, 46, 67, 108 Blige, Mary J. 210 Bob Marley and the Wailers 33, 102, 170 “Bongolese” 17, 69 Bono (Paul Hewson) 1–227 passim Boomtown Rats 14, 15, 75 Bosnia 139, 140, 142, 169 Bowie, David 9, 67, 77, 115, 119, 138, 220, 224 Boy 35, 37, 40, 41, 44, 46, 56, 121, 195 “Boy/Girl” 25 Bradshaw, Albert 15 Brook, Michael 92 Brown, James 3, 129 “Bullet the Blue Sky” 94, 100, 108, 179 Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange 114, 115, 116, 148 Bush Sr., George 127, 129, 188 Bush Jr., George 188, 189, 200, 202, 203 Campbell, Naomi 131, 144 Captive 92 Carroll, Greg 73, 92, 93 Carter, Bill 140, 153 Carter, Jimmy 132 Cash, Johnny 105, 138, 207 Castro, René 109, 110 “Cedars of Lebanon” 215 Central America 92, 94, 109, 144 Chevron, Paul 12 Chile 86, 93, 109, 166 “City of Blinding Lights” 194, 201

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Clarence Hotel, Dublin 154 Clayton, Adam 1–227 passim Elevation: 2001: Live from Boston 182 Elevation tour 169, 176, 177, 178, 179–83, 185, 191, 201 “Elevation” 174–5, 178 “11 O’Clock, Tick Tock” 33, 34 “Elsinore” 119 Enniskillen bomb 103, 104 Eno, Brian 66–7, 68, 105, 115, 121, 124, 137, 138, 148, 150, 155, 171, 185, 195, 210, 211, 213 Evans, Dick 7, 11, 12, 15, 16 Ezrin, Bob 209 Fanning, Dave 25 Faraway, So Close! 138 Feedback 12–14 Feinstein, Diane 104 “Fire” 43 Fisher, Mark 160, 178, 200 Fleetwood Mac 95 Flood 93, 119, 155, 157, 193 “The Fly” 122, 135, 139 “The Fool” 14 “40” 53, 56, 63, 199 “4th Of July” 69 Frampton, Peter 12 Freehill, Mary 174 Frizell, Lefty 106 G8 summit, Gleneagles 202, 203 Gabriel, Peter 35, 85 Gallagher, Rory 11, 13 Gangs of New York 185, 188

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INDEX

Geldof, Bob 73, 75, 76, 79, 85, 86, 171, 202, 203 Gerrie, Malcolm 61 “Get on Your Boots” 213, 215 Ghost in the Shell 150 Giffords, Gabrielle 225 Glanville, Carl 195 Glastonbury Festival 220, 222 Global Call to Action Against Poverty 202 “Gloria” 44, 49, 50, 56 Godley, Kevin 124 Goldeneye 148 Golding, William: Lord of the Flies 18 Gore, Al 216 Graham, Bill 16–17, 25, 169 Grammy Awards 144, 176, 178, 198, 199, 205, 211 Greedy Bastards 24 Green Day 209 Greenaway, Peter 148 Greenpeace 129, 130 Griffith, Nanci 147, 148 “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” 173 Gulf War 121, 124 “The Hands That Built America” 185 Hannett, Martin 34 Hanover Quay 154, 157, 171–2, 193 Hanvey, Fionan (Gavin Friday) 6–7, 14, 15, 25, 86, 93, 139 “Hawkmoon 269” 106 Healey, Jack 83, 85 Hendrix, Jimi 119 Henek, Jim 65 Heston, Charlton 179 Hewson, Ali 13, 25, 37, 52, 61, 82, 86, 92, 109, 115, 169, 179, 194, 204 Hewson, Bob 6, 18, 27, 171, 179–80, 185, 194 “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” 148, 222 Hooper, Nellee 154, 155, 195 Horslips 17 Hothouse Flowers 90 How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb 188, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 205, 207 Howie B 154, 155, 157, 158 Howlin’ Wolf 105 Hurricane Katrina 208, 209

Hutchence, Michael 169, 175 Hype, The 14, 15, 16 “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” 4, 94, 95, 96, 105 “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” 56 “I Will Follow” 35, 56 “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” 213, 224 Iggy Pop 106, 115 “In a Little While” 175, 225 International Space Station 225 “Into The Heart” 35, 199 INXS 169, 173 Iovine, Jimmy 108 iPod, U2-branded 197, 198 IRA 51, 53, 69, 103, 170 Iraq war 200 Island Records 30, 33, 34, 43, 105, 107, 108, 218 It Might Get Loud 212, 213 “Ito Okashi” 150 J. Geils Band 50 Jagger, Mick 90, 125 “Jah Love” 114 Jam, The 13, 14 Jara, Victor 93 Joanou, Phil 102–3, 105 John Paul II, Pope 171, 172 John, Elton 224 Joshua Tree, The 82, 89, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 102–3, 106, 108, 109, 115, 122, 131, 139, 174, 218 Joy Division 34, 102 Jubilee 2000 campaign 171, 172, 186 Judds, The 188 Kelly, Mark 225 Khalique, Kal 81 King, B.B. 105 King, Ben E. 102 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 65, 68 “Kingdom Come” 114 Kitchen nightclub, Dublin 154 “Kite” 171, 175 Kubrick, Stanley 114 Lanois, Daniel 67, 68, 69, 93, 114, 115, 116, 171, 173, 195, 210, 213 “Last Night on Earth” 165 Led Zeppelin 58, 66, 119, 210, 213 Lee Hooker, John 90

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Lee Lewis, Jerry 105 Lee, Garret “Jacknife” 193 “Lemon” 138 Lennon, John 41, 58, 77, 102, 179 “Life on a Distant Planet” 14, 16 Lilywhite, Steve 34, 35, 45, 66, 90, 95, 121, 131, 193 Live Aid 75, 77–8, 79, 80, 81, 85, 180, 203 Live 8 203, 204 Live from Under the Brooklyn Bridge 197 Live Nation 218, 219 Lone Justice 109 Los Lobos 104 “Love and Peace or Else” 194, 200–1 Lovetown tour 109–10, 115 Lynott, Phil 24, 93 Lypton Villagers 14, 16, 18, 24, 35, 43, 52 Maal, Baaba 218 MacColl, Ewan 102, 131 MacColl, Kirsty 131, 208 “Magnificient” 215 Make Poverty History 200, 202, 203, 204, 205 Manson, Charles 102 Marley, Bob 102, 170 Martin Luther King Day 100, 103 Martin, Chris 102, 210 Martin, Peter 11, 12 McCartney, Paul 203, 204 McCormack, John 150 McCormick, Ivan 11, 12 McGuinness, Paul 17, 18, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 50, 83, 95, 102, 125, 145, 155 McKee, Maria 109 Mecham, Governor Evan 100 Mele, Jerry 165 Melkweg, Amsterdam 39 Melon: Remixes for Propaganda 154 Million Dollar Hotel 172, 173 Mills, Mike 132, 133 “Miracle Drug” 194 “Miss Sarajevo” 153 Mission Impossible 148 “Moment of Surrender” 212 Moody Blues, The 13 Moon, Keith 66 Morgan, Stuart 144–5

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Morrison, Van 89, 102, 201 Mothers of the Disappeared 86 “Mothers of the Disappeared” 94, 166 Mount Temple Comprehensive School 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 194 Moylett, Regine 17 MTV 43, 49, 50, 55, 131, 165, 197 Mullen, Larry, Jr. 1–227 passim Music Rising auction 208, 209 Mussolini, Alessandra 139 “Mysterious Ways” 3, 117, 126 Neville Brothers 114 New Musical Express (NME) 33–4, 59, 69 New Voices of Freedom choir 105 New Wave 14, 17, 27, 37, 43, 50, 92, 193, 199 “New Year’s Day” 55, 56, 202 Newmark, Adam 53 Nicholson, Jack 79–80 9/11 180, 182, 185, 194 No Line on the Horizon 213, 215, 216, 218, 222 “No Line on the Horizon” 213 No Romance 17 Nolan, Christopher 194 Northern Ireland 50–2, 70, 89, 103, 104, 169, 170–1, 175 “Numb” 138, 144 O’Herlihy, Joe 121 O’Sullivan, Aislinn 53, 62, 65, 69, 82, 104, 109, 114, 117 Obama, Barack 194 “Ocean, The” 199 October 45, 46, 49, 56 Omagh bombing 170, 175 “One Minute Warning” 150 One Step Closer” 193 “One Tree Hill” 92, 93 “One” 4, 116–17, 120, 121, 186, 210, 211 Orbison, Roy 101, 105, 120 Orbit, William 186 Original Soundtracks 1 150, 151, 153–4 Osborne, Steve 157 “Out of Control” 18, 25, 199 Owens, Catherine 125, 180, 200 Page, Jimmy 212, 213 Paramount 105 Partridge, Bob 218, 219

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“Party Girl” 199 Passengers 158 Pavarotti, Luciano 150, 152, 153 “Peace on Earth” 175 Peltier, Leonard 191 Pendergrass, George 105 Petro, Christiana 124, 126, 131 Petty, Tom 50 Pillow Book, The 148 Pink Floyd 23, 125, 191 Pod (Anthony Murphy) 14, 15, 43 Police, The 43, 85 Pop 156–67, 171, 178, 185, 193, 213, 216 “Pop Group ‘78” 16 PopMart tour 156–68, 169, 171, 178, 185, 186, 200 Porter, Cole 138, 144 Premier Talent Agency 40 Presley, Elvis 77, 105, 126, 153 “Pride (In the Name of Love)” 4, 65, 70, 81, 104 Producers, The 121 Propaganda 117, 154, 191 Radiators from Space, The 12, 14, 15 Ramone, Joey 175 Ramones, The 14, 15, 175, 193 Rat Salad 13 Rattle and Hum 108–9 Reagan, Ronald 82, 86, 90 Record Mirror 27, 28 “Red Hill Mining Town” 93 Red Hot + Blue 114 Reed, Lou 77, 87, 124 R.E.M. 77, 79, 131, 132, 133 Republican Party, U.S. 172–3 Rice, Condoleezza 188 Rich, Buddy 101 Richards, Keith 90 Riefenstahl, Leni 140 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 1, 4, 114, 199, 207 Rock the Vote 131, 132 Rolling Stone 65, 76, 102, 210 Rolling Stones 66, 90, 102, 121, 122, 124, 125, 139, 155, 210, 220 Rowen, Derek (Guggi) 6, 14, 15, 35, 86 Rowen, Peter 35, 56 Roxy Music 67, 191 Rubin, Rick 207, 208, 210 “Running to Stand Still” 93, 212 Rushdie, Salman 142, 173

“The Saints Are Coming” 209 Sand, Bobby 51 Sandinista government 86 Sarajevo 139, 140, 142, 153, 166, 225 “Save the Yuppie” 104 Schifrin, Lalo 148 Schumacher, Joel 148 Scorcese, Martin 185 “Scott Walker” 193 Self Aid festival, Dublin 83, 84 Sellafield 129, 130, 131 Sense of Ireland Festival, London 28, 30 Sex Pistols, The 24 “Shadows and Tall Trees” 18 Shalom Bible study and prayer group 24, 45, 52, 58, 82 “She’s a Mystery to Me” 101 Sheehan, Dennis 58, 66 “Sick Puppy” 116, 117 “Silver and Gold” 90 Simple Minds 37, 39, 62 Sinatra, Frank 101, 138, 144 Siouxsie and the Banshees 23, 35, 37 Slane Castle 44, 45, 67–8, 67, 68, 69, 89, 179 “Some Days Are Better than Others” 138 “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” 193 Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark 222, 223 Springsteen, Bruce 1, 4, 44, 58, 77, 83, 108, 199 “Staring at the Sun” 166 “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” 138 Steinberg, Morleigh 131, 169, 188, 208 Stewart, Nick 30 Stipe, Michael 132, 133 Stokes, Niall 25 “Stories for Boys” 25 Stranglers, The 14, 18 “Street Missions” 14, 16 “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” 173, 175 Sun City 90 “Sun City” 82, 83, 83, 89 “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” 4, 53, 53, 56, 63, 81, 103

INDEX

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INDEX

Super Bowl halftime show 180, 182, 188 Swan Silvertones 105 Television 13–14, 15, 16, 23 Tennell, Dorothy 105 Thatcher, Margaret 51, 82 The Best of 1990–2000 185, 186 Thin Lizzy 24, 44, 93, 194 Thomas, Chris 191, 193, 207 Three Tenors 151, 152, 153 “Three” 25, 25 360° tour 219–21, 222–3, 224–5 Time 100, 101, 113, 188 Today Show, The 189 “Tomorrow” 45 Townsend, Pete 3, 44, 67 Trimble, David 170 Tube, The 52 Turlington, Christy 131, 144 Turner, Tina 148 “The TV Song” 16 Under a Blood Red Sky 62 Unforgettable Fire, The 65, 67–8, 69–71, 73, 77, 90, 107 “Unforgettable Fire, The” 68 “Unknown Caller” 213 Until the End of the World 120 “Until the End of the World” 120 U2: albums see under individual album name; early incarnations of 1–31; Freedom of Dublin, given 174,

175; members see under individual member name; record deal, sign 30; songs see under individual song name; tax affairs 216, 217, 218; South of France, homes in 147, 173, 185, 207, 208; tours see under individual tour name U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle 191 U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky 62 U2 Magazine 77 U2.com 201–2, 219, 225 U218 Singles 210 “Van Diemen”s Land” 109 Van Zandt, Steve 82, 83 “Vertigo” 1, 188–9, 191, 193, 198, 205, 208, 215 Vertigo tour 200–2, 223 Virgin Prunes 15, 16, 18, 30, 93, 153 Vogue 131 “Walk On” 175, 180, 225 “The Wanderer” 138 War 52, 53, 56, 58, 61, 69, 102, 174, 195 War Child 142 Waterboys, The 90 We Are One: the Obama Inaugural Celebration 194, 195 “We Are the World” (USA for Africa) 77 Wenders, Wim 120, 138, 150, 173

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Wheeler, Tim 170 “When I Look at the World” 175 “When Love Comes to Town” 105, 109 “Where the Streets Have No Name” 4, 94, 182 White, Jack 212 Who, The 39, 41, 44, 66, 67, 114 “White as Snow” 215 Wickham, Steve 53 Wide Awake in America 77 Williams, Hank 104 Williams, Willie 124, 160, 178, 200 Williamson, James 188–9 Windmill Lane Studios 34, 45, 53, 67, 69, 157 “Window in the Skies” 210 Wings of Desire 138 “With or Without You” 3, 94, 95, 96, 191 Wojnarowicz, David 186 Wood, Ronnie 90 Youngline 15 “Your Blue Room” 150 Zooropa 136, 137, 138, 139, 148, 160 Zooropa tour 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139–45 ZooTV 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 135, 137, 140–1, 144, 145, 155, 159, 163, 169, 170, 171, 178, 179, 188

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U2 : R evolu tion is dedicated to the con vivia l memory of Rob Pa rtr idge .

aC k N Owl E Dg m E N T S The author’s thanks go to Régine Moylett, Barbara Carr, Bruce Springsteen, and Dave Marsh for their assistance in writing this book, to my old friend Barney Hoskyns for decades of U2-themed conversation, and most of all to my long-suffering editor Jeannine Dillon and her team.

a b O u T T H E au T H O r London-born journalist and author Mat Snow is the award-winning former editor not only of the world-renowned music magazine Mojo but also the hardly less prestigious soccer magazine FourFourTwo. A regular writer for the British music magazines New Musical Express and Q in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he has followed U2 since seeing them third on the bill at Manchester Polytechnic in May 1980. He continues to live in London with a daughter named after a Kinks song, a dog named after Dolly Parton, and a wife named Jax, but not after the New Orleans brewery.

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