HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
[SIMG]http://forum.interference.com/gallery/data//585/11265uf-sml.jpg[/SIMG]
By Teresa Rivas
2006.04
"Poetry is a sort of homecoming."
-Line written by poet Paul Celan, a German-Romanian Jew who survived imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, that inspired the title for the song "A Sort of Homecoming"
Think back to 1984. No, not Orwell’s "1984," when a government went to war with leaders it once supported, and Big Brother had broad power to spy on its own citizens. No, not the fictional "1984" but the year 1984.
Apple had just introduced its first user friendly personal computer. The controversial writer Truman Capote, of "In Cold Blood" fame passed away, and Bob Geldof led Band Aid in the hit single "Do They Know It's Christmas," with proceeds helping famine-ravaged African nations, according to Infoplease.
That was also the year U2 released "The Unforgettable Fire." After the heady success of "War," the band wasted no time rushing back to the studio to begin work on a follow-up, but it wouldn't just be business as usual. After the release of the live album "Under a Blood Red Sky," the band wanted to recoup and find a new sound and direction instead of simply relying on the soapbox anthems it worried would become its stereotype. This was helped in no small measure by the work of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois who signed onto the loose jam sessions at Slane Castle, a paced and nurturing beginning to the recording that ended in a frantic frenzy that left a few of the songs less polished than the band would have liked. With less than two weeks before the start of the Unforgettable Fire Tour, Bono was forced to go ahead with the lyrics already written, despite his adamant reserve the band found itself forced under the wire yet again.
The mixed reviews for U2's fourth album may have reflected that hurried strain at the end. In his review of "The Unforgettable Fire" for Rolling Stone Kurt Loder wrote, "This is not a 'bad' album, but neither is it the irrefutable beauty the band's fans anticipated … The Unforgettable Fire seems to drone on and on, an endless flurry of chinkety guitar scratchings, state-of-the-art sound processing and the most mundane sort of lyrical imagery (barbed wire is a big concept). U2's original power flickers through only intermittently."
But not all the critiques were of this ilk. CMJ's New Music Report praised, "Blessed are the music makers: a truly unique guitarist, a fiery vocalist, and a rhythm section that can do just about anything."
The truth about "The Unforgettable Fire," though, is that maybe it's a little of both.
Bono explained the album's title to Record magazine in 1985, when asked if it was named after a collection of poetry by Hiroshima survivors. "That's right—in fact, it's more than that. The Unforgettable Fire is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and writings done by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were done by people of all age groups, from seven to 70 years old, by amateurs and professionals, and they are an art treasure in Japan. We had come into contact with them through the Chicago Peace Museum, because we were part of an exhibit in the museum in '83, the Give Peace A Chance exhibit. And the images from the paintings and some of the writings stained me, I couldn't get rid of them. Their influence on the album was a subliminal one, but I realized as the album was moving on, that this image of 'the unforgettable fire' applied not only to the nuclear winterscape of 'A Sort of Homecoming,' but also the unforgettable fire of a man like Martin Luther King, or the consuming fire which is heroin. So it became a multi-purpose image for me, but it derived from that exhibition."
"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was originally meant to be a warning to then-US president Ronald Reagan about the pride that Bono saw in his foreign policy and heavy-handed American hegemony. But then, instead of fighting fire with fire he took a cue from another man, with the quality in spades, as he told the New Musical Express in October 1984: "I originally wrote 'Pride' about Ronald Reagan and the ambivalent attitude in America. It was originally meant as the sort of pride that won't back down, that wants to build nuclear arsenals. But that wasn't working. I remember a wise old man who said to me, don't try to fight darkness with light, just make the light shine brighter. I was giving Reagan too much importance then I thought Martin Luther King, there's a man. We build the positive rather than fighting with the finger."
The song, the record's first single, would arguably become the most enduring off the album. Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders happened to be in town at the time, Niall Stokes says in "U2 Into the Heart," and dropped into the studio to lend her voice to the backup vocals, though she would only be credited as Mrs. Christine Kerr (at the time Hynde was married to Jim Kerr of Simple Minds) in the liner notes. Of course the religious imagery remains, though more tempered and sagely-distributed on the record, Stokes notes, "One man betrayed with a kiss."
In 1998 Edge told Q magazine that at first he was doubtful that the band should dabble in the tribute to the civil rights leader. "Because of the situation in our country non-violent struggle was such an inspiring concept. Even so, when Bono told me he wanted to write about King, at first I said, 'Whoa, that's not what we're about.' Then he came in and sang the song and it felt right, it was great. When that happens there's no argument. It just was."
But with the sublime comes the reality. "Wire" is about Bono's ambivalence to the drug culture that had captured some of his friends. "I'm probably an addictive person myself," Stokes quotes him as saying. "There is the fascination of death and of flirting with death that's part of heroin use."
Of course it wasn't the first time he had written about the siren song undercurrent of abuse in Ireland, but the juxtaposition after "Pride" is always a sobering one. But then again humanity is made up of extremes. As Bono told concert-goers in 1985 Los Angeles (as transcribed on The Three Sunrises), "You know, 'The Unforgettable Fire' ... in some ways ... is ... it can be ... An unlifting [sic] thing ... it can also ... It can also drag you down ... it can be a consuming force ... it can be the drug heroin ... It can be the song 'Wire.' "
The eponymous track of "The Unforgettable Fire" has echoes of that Holocaust horror but it's not bound to its remorse. The delicate beginning gives way to the breathy vocals, the vast and colorful carnival imagery, the warning of being pushed too far. Edge told Carter Alan in 1985 that he found it almost "classical." "I see it as a music piece rather than as a song. Bono, in a very unconventional way, explores numerous melodies over sections. Instead of repeating melodies—you know, verses and choruses, which is what everyone does—we've got three chorus melodies and two verse melodies. It has a certain symphonic feel for me because there are so many intertwining themes. I know we could have recorded it better but, I think, for all its flaws, I just see it as a great piece of music."
Adam Clayton agreed that despite the Holocaust inspiration, there was more to the life of the music, that they, like the paintings of survivors, were portraits of feeling. He told Neil Storey in the October 1984 issue of U2 magazine, "I don't think that by calling the album after that exhibition the similarity necessarily goes any further than just endorsing that. I don't think it's all album of songs about peace. I think just the feelings and the textures and the colours of those paintings, and the emotions, are the things that are transcending themselves onto the album, rather than any special message."
"Promenade" is another song of great departure from the angry energy of "War." The idyllic melody that mimics the sea in the song, the lulling voice and repetition of "radio" to the fade out ("and miles to go before I sleep") all evoke a calmer mood for the band. It is also shades of Bono's new life with wife Ali as the couple had recently moved to the seaside resort of Bray, their house overlooking the promenade of restaurants, hotels, theaters houses and pool halls, which all must have looked a curious and hushed blur from above.
Stokes reports that "4th of July" is one of the monikers of Eno's laidback reception of inspiration. Clayton and Edge began playing together during a break in recording, unaware the producer was even listening, let alone recording. "It was very much a live performance," Edge recalled. "There was no way we could mix it or re-do any of the instruments." While the song may seem an enigmatic way to celebrate Independence Day, Stokes suggests it was more of a "musical diary-entry" for that day in July. An impromptu rendition, a harmonious wink caught on tape.
"Bad" is another song born of improvisation in the studio, begun by Edge and recorded in about three takes so the spontaneous bits filter through onto the record, quirks and feelings that have spawned so many inspired live versions.
"This is a song about the city we grew up in," Bono said in a 1987 performance in Chicago. "A song about Dublin city. And a song about a drug called heroin that's tearing our city in two ... that's tearing the ... the heart out of the city of Dublin ... tearing the heart out of the city of Chicago. Rich people stuff dollars in the back of their pocket while poor men lie in gutters with needles stuck in their arms. Screw them, I say. This is a song about a friend of mine who was given on his 21st birthday enough heroin into his bloodstream to kill him. This is a song called 'Bad.'"
"It's about a guy we knew who ended up in a bad way because of heroin addiction," Edge elaborated in a 1998 interview with Q magazine. "Bono knew the family, he'd talked to the brothers about it. It was new for him as a lyricist, writing in the first person from someone else's point of view I don't think there's ever been a song about addiction that captures the feeling so vividly."
"Indian Summer Sky" was conceived in that most famous of asphalt jungles, Manhattan, during the War Tour. "A lot of cities in America are built on civilizations long since buried by the American," Bono told Hot Press in June 1985. "A friend of mine, a wise man I know, spent a lot of time within the city—it was Toronto, so cool and so shiny—and he felt extremely troubled and torn in two. There had been a lot of massacres of Red Indian people in that area and he felt in some way as if there were troubled spirits still there. What I was trying to get across was a sense of a spirit trapped in a concrete jungle—something like that. Again these are just glimpses, these songs. A lot of the subject matter is very impressionistic."
Bono's frustration with the carpet bagging work of biographer Albert Goldman, who attacked some of rock's greatest figures after their deaths when it was too late for them to defend themselves from his wild fabrications would be a theme in "Rattle and Hum's" "God Part 2." The "instant karma" an obvious reference to John Lennon, the latest of Goldman's victims. However, in "Elvis Presley and America" the subject is not the ex-Beatle, but The King, and Bono hoped to convey the real icon.
He told Hot Press, "it was partly a reaction to the Albert Goldman book which tried to portray him as the archetypal rock 'n' roll idiot, but the way he held the mike, the way he sang into the mike—this was a genius. But his decline just tore at me and when I picked up the mike, it was a completely off the wall thing and I just began to sing. And I think it does evoke that decline, the stupor, the period when—if you've seen the clips of him—he forgets his words and fumbles." Stokes recalls that Bono didn't want to release the song because it was such a raw rendition, with off the cuff lyrics and deviations, but Eno's hand is again evident in the freshness of the track.
When asked about Bono's unclear delivery, Clayton said it was at the heart of the song. "You can't work out what he's saying, right? Could anyone work out what Elvis Presley was saying? That is the whole point," he told the Bay Area Music Magazine in December 1984. "Elvis Presley was an inarticulate man, except when he was performing his art and he got behind the microphone and he sang with that voice and moved his body in that way. Then everyone thought, 'Wow, this is a very interesting guy—we want to interview him.' So you interviewed him, and everyone said, 'Oh, the guy's stupid.' He couldn't communicate in real life except when he was moving and singing, and I think the song says that. Evidently it says that, if everyone's so pissed off at it."
"It was becoming a trademark," Stokes writes of U2's inclination for ending albums with a moving, healing note. "Now that 'The Unforgettable Fire' was done, it was time for a spiritual and 'MLK' provided it. It was a lullaby, a song of reassurance and reconciliation. A song of hope."
By Teresa Rivas
2006.04
"Poetry is a sort of homecoming."
-Line written by poet Paul Celan, a German-Romanian Jew who survived imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, that inspired the title for the song "A Sort of Homecoming"
Think back to 1984. No, not Orwell’s "1984," when a government went to war with leaders it once supported, and Big Brother had broad power to spy on its own citizens. No, not the fictional "1984" but the year 1984.
Apple had just introduced its first user friendly personal computer. The controversial writer Truman Capote, of "In Cold Blood" fame passed away, and Bob Geldof led Band Aid in the hit single "Do They Know It's Christmas," with proceeds helping famine-ravaged African nations, according to Infoplease.
That was also the year U2 released "The Unforgettable Fire." After the heady success of "War," the band wasted no time rushing back to the studio to begin work on a follow-up, but it wouldn't just be business as usual. After the release of the live album "Under a Blood Red Sky," the band wanted to recoup and find a new sound and direction instead of simply relying on the soapbox anthems it worried would become its stereotype. This was helped in no small measure by the work of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois who signed onto the loose jam sessions at Slane Castle, a paced and nurturing beginning to the recording that ended in a frantic frenzy that left a few of the songs less polished than the band would have liked. With less than two weeks before the start of the Unforgettable Fire Tour, Bono was forced to go ahead with the lyrics already written, despite his adamant reserve the band found itself forced under the wire yet again.
The mixed reviews for U2's fourth album may have reflected that hurried strain at the end. In his review of "The Unforgettable Fire" for Rolling Stone Kurt Loder wrote, "This is not a 'bad' album, but neither is it the irrefutable beauty the band's fans anticipated … The Unforgettable Fire seems to drone on and on, an endless flurry of chinkety guitar scratchings, state-of-the-art sound processing and the most mundane sort of lyrical imagery (barbed wire is a big concept). U2's original power flickers through only intermittently."
But not all the critiques were of this ilk. CMJ's New Music Report praised, "Blessed are the music makers: a truly unique guitarist, a fiery vocalist, and a rhythm section that can do just about anything."
The truth about "The Unforgettable Fire," though, is that maybe it's a little of both.
Bono explained the album's title to Record magazine in 1985, when asked if it was named after a collection of poetry by Hiroshima survivors. "That's right—in fact, it's more than that. The Unforgettable Fire is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and writings done by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were done by people of all age groups, from seven to 70 years old, by amateurs and professionals, and they are an art treasure in Japan. We had come into contact with them through the Chicago Peace Museum, because we were part of an exhibit in the museum in '83, the Give Peace A Chance exhibit. And the images from the paintings and some of the writings stained me, I couldn't get rid of them. Their influence on the album was a subliminal one, but I realized as the album was moving on, that this image of 'the unforgettable fire' applied not only to the nuclear winterscape of 'A Sort of Homecoming,' but also the unforgettable fire of a man like Martin Luther King, or the consuming fire which is heroin. So it became a multi-purpose image for me, but it derived from that exhibition."
"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was originally meant to be a warning to then-US president Ronald Reagan about the pride that Bono saw in his foreign policy and heavy-handed American hegemony. But then, instead of fighting fire with fire he took a cue from another man, with the quality in spades, as he told the New Musical Express in October 1984: "I originally wrote 'Pride' about Ronald Reagan and the ambivalent attitude in America. It was originally meant as the sort of pride that won't back down, that wants to build nuclear arsenals. But that wasn't working. I remember a wise old man who said to me, don't try to fight darkness with light, just make the light shine brighter. I was giving Reagan too much importance then I thought Martin Luther King, there's a man. We build the positive rather than fighting with the finger."
The song, the record's first single, would arguably become the most enduring off the album. Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders happened to be in town at the time, Niall Stokes says in "U2 Into the Heart," and dropped into the studio to lend her voice to the backup vocals, though she would only be credited as Mrs. Christine Kerr (at the time Hynde was married to Jim Kerr of Simple Minds) in the liner notes. Of course the religious imagery remains, though more tempered and sagely-distributed on the record, Stokes notes, "One man betrayed with a kiss."
In 1998 Edge told Q magazine that at first he was doubtful that the band should dabble in the tribute to the civil rights leader. "Because of the situation in our country non-violent struggle was such an inspiring concept. Even so, when Bono told me he wanted to write about King, at first I said, 'Whoa, that's not what we're about.' Then he came in and sang the song and it felt right, it was great. When that happens there's no argument. It just was."
But with the sublime comes the reality. "Wire" is about Bono's ambivalence to the drug culture that had captured some of his friends. "I'm probably an addictive person myself," Stokes quotes him as saying. "There is the fascination of death and of flirting with death that's part of heroin use."
Of course it wasn't the first time he had written about the siren song undercurrent of abuse in Ireland, but the juxtaposition after "Pride" is always a sobering one. But then again humanity is made up of extremes. As Bono told concert-goers in 1985 Los Angeles (as transcribed on The Three Sunrises), "You know, 'The Unforgettable Fire' ... in some ways ... is ... it can be ... An unlifting [sic] thing ... it can also ... It can also drag you down ... it can be a consuming force ... it can be the drug heroin ... It can be the song 'Wire.' "
The eponymous track of "The Unforgettable Fire" has echoes of that Holocaust horror but it's not bound to its remorse. The delicate beginning gives way to the breathy vocals, the vast and colorful carnival imagery, the warning of being pushed too far. Edge told Carter Alan in 1985 that he found it almost "classical." "I see it as a music piece rather than as a song. Bono, in a very unconventional way, explores numerous melodies over sections. Instead of repeating melodies—you know, verses and choruses, which is what everyone does—we've got three chorus melodies and two verse melodies. It has a certain symphonic feel for me because there are so many intertwining themes. I know we could have recorded it better but, I think, for all its flaws, I just see it as a great piece of music."
Adam Clayton agreed that despite the Holocaust inspiration, there was more to the life of the music, that they, like the paintings of survivors, were portraits of feeling. He told Neil Storey in the October 1984 issue of U2 magazine, "I don't think that by calling the album after that exhibition the similarity necessarily goes any further than just endorsing that. I don't think it's all album of songs about peace. I think just the feelings and the textures and the colours of those paintings, and the emotions, are the things that are transcending themselves onto the album, rather than any special message."
"Promenade" is another song of great departure from the angry energy of "War." The idyllic melody that mimics the sea in the song, the lulling voice and repetition of "radio" to the fade out ("and miles to go before I sleep") all evoke a calmer mood for the band. It is also shades of Bono's new life with wife Ali as the couple had recently moved to the seaside resort of Bray, their house overlooking the promenade of restaurants, hotels, theaters houses and pool halls, which all must have looked a curious and hushed blur from above.
Stokes reports that "4th of July" is one of the monikers of Eno's laidback reception of inspiration. Clayton and Edge began playing together during a break in recording, unaware the producer was even listening, let alone recording. "It was very much a live performance," Edge recalled. "There was no way we could mix it or re-do any of the instruments." While the song may seem an enigmatic way to celebrate Independence Day, Stokes suggests it was more of a "musical diary-entry" for that day in July. An impromptu rendition, a harmonious wink caught on tape.
"Bad" is another song born of improvisation in the studio, begun by Edge and recorded in about three takes so the spontaneous bits filter through onto the record, quirks and feelings that have spawned so many inspired live versions.
"This is a song about the city we grew up in," Bono said in a 1987 performance in Chicago. "A song about Dublin city. And a song about a drug called heroin that's tearing our city in two ... that's tearing the ... the heart out of the city of Dublin ... tearing the heart out of the city of Chicago. Rich people stuff dollars in the back of their pocket while poor men lie in gutters with needles stuck in their arms. Screw them, I say. This is a song about a friend of mine who was given on his 21st birthday enough heroin into his bloodstream to kill him. This is a song called 'Bad.'"
"It's about a guy we knew who ended up in a bad way because of heroin addiction," Edge elaborated in a 1998 interview with Q magazine. "Bono knew the family, he'd talked to the brothers about it. It was new for him as a lyricist, writing in the first person from someone else's point of view I don't think there's ever been a song about addiction that captures the feeling so vividly."
"Indian Summer Sky" was conceived in that most famous of asphalt jungles, Manhattan, during the War Tour. "A lot of cities in America are built on civilizations long since buried by the American," Bono told Hot Press in June 1985. "A friend of mine, a wise man I know, spent a lot of time within the city—it was Toronto, so cool and so shiny—and he felt extremely troubled and torn in two. There had been a lot of massacres of Red Indian people in that area and he felt in some way as if there were troubled spirits still there. What I was trying to get across was a sense of a spirit trapped in a concrete jungle—something like that. Again these are just glimpses, these songs. A lot of the subject matter is very impressionistic."
Bono's frustration with the carpet bagging work of biographer Albert Goldman, who attacked some of rock's greatest figures after their deaths when it was too late for them to defend themselves from his wild fabrications would be a theme in "Rattle and Hum's" "God Part 2." The "instant karma" an obvious reference to John Lennon, the latest of Goldman's victims. However, in "Elvis Presley and America" the subject is not the ex-Beatle, but The King, and Bono hoped to convey the real icon.
He told Hot Press, "it was partly a reaction to the Albert Goldman book which tried to portray him as the archetypal rock 'n' roll idiot, but the way he held the mike, the way he sang into the mike—this was a genius. But his decline just tore at me and when I picked up the mike, it was a completely off the wall thing and I just began to sing. And I think it does evoke that decline, the stupor, the period when—if you've seen the clips of him—he forgets his words and fumbles." Stokes recalls that Bono didn't want to release the song because it was such a raw rendition, with off the cuff lyrics and deviations, but Eno's hand is again evident in the freshness of the track.
When asked about Bono's unclear delivery, Clayton said it was at the heart of the song. "You can't work out what he's saying, right? Could anyone work out what Elvis Presley was saying? That is the whole point," he told the Bay Area Music Magazine in December 1984. "Elvis Presley was an inarticulate man, except when he was performing his art and he got behind the microphone and he sang with that voice and moved his body in that way. Then everyone thought, 'Wow, this is a very interesting guy—we want to interview him.' So you interviewed him, and everyone said, 'Oh, the guy's stupid.' He couldn't communicate in real life except when he was moving and singing, and I think the song says that. Evidently it says that, if everyone's so pissed off at it."
"It was becoming a trademark," Stokes writes of U2's inclination for ending albums with a moving, healing note. "Now that 'The Unforgettable Fire' was done, it was time for a spiritual and 'MLK' provided it. It was a lullaby, a song of reassurance and reconciliation. A song of hope."
Last edited:
