Is there a radio edit of Who's Gonna Ride.. temple bar mix?

[Zoots]

Okay so my car CD player is broken and I'm forced to listen to the radio on my way to and back from work! To my utter joy, I heard the beginning of Wild Horses Temple Bar Mix while driving home today. I've hardly ever heard this song on the radio and it's one of my favorite ever U2 songs so I was over the moon... until they totally castrated the middle 8. I consider it one of the most gorgeous middle 8s ever recorded and it was gone! Instead, they just endlessly repeated the chorus with a tiny bit of "don't turn around" and then fade. What is the point???

Ahhh the deeper I spin...

 

[david]

Isn't that edit on the single? There's like 3 versions of the song on the single. I believe one of them omitted the middle 8.

 

[Zoots]

I think you may be right. I guess it's the temple bar edit.

http://www.u2wanderer.org/disco/lyrics.php?id=353

The song loses half it's charm without the middle 8.

 

[lazarus]

Here's the real question:

Why was this tampered with in the first fucking place? They took a song that did a great job of mixing dark confusion with beautiful images, and turned it into a disposable pop tune.

When I listen to the album version and hear the distorted guitar in one ear and the violin in the other, it's a perfect intro to the tug-of-war mentioned above. This is another Edge divorce-inspired break up song, where the narrator can't let go of his desire, but realizes that the other person is causing him much pain. This recording should not be clean and polished, or do you think lines like "and you left my heart empty as a vacant lot/empty for any spirit to haunt" call for radio hit treatment?

To make matters worse, now the band now thinks it's appropriate for an acoustic sing-a-long.

Shameful.

 

[snowbunny00774]

oh my god zoots - this is enough to make you want to KILL RADIO am I right?!?!!?!?!

 

[Zoots]

oh my god zoots - this is enough to make you want to KILL RADIO am I right?!?!!?!?!

DIE RADIO DIE!!!!! KILL KILL KILL KILL!!!


Laz, I hear ya! The album version is perfect and there is no need for any temple bar mix.

 

[BVS]

Here's the real question:

Why was this tampered with in the first fucking place?

Radio, radio...

 

[Popmartijn]

Here's the real question:

Why was this tampered with in the first fucking place?

Because the band was never satisfied with the way the song turned out on the album. Hence the re-recording.

 

[ahittle]

Yeah, they thought it should've been a massive hit, but the album version was too murky for radio play. I don't mind the Temple Bar mixes, but I agree that the original is just about perfect for the song.

 

[Zoo_Fly]

The video version is a nice in-between. It has the darkness of the album version but that acoustic bit of the Temple bar version. That being said, yes, the original version is the best version in terms of what they intended for it and where it fits in on an album, but the others are good for radio.

Also, I've heard the album version on the radio here in Toronto as well as Kingston a few times, and I've never heard the temple bar version, so go figure....

 

[U2girl]

Because the band was never satisfied with the way the song turned out on the album. Hence the re-recording.

Steve Lillywhite worked on it for about a month and they thought the song was sounding too much like U2.

I like all versions: album, Temple bar, full band/acoustic live. (but the Adam+Larry acoustic on Vertigo, not the shortened, weak Zoo TV acoustic)

 

[nathan1977]

According to Bono, they also had a whole other set of lyrics that they threw out at the last minute.

 

[ahittle]

Steve Lillywhite worked on it for about a month and they thought the song was sounding too much like U2.

I like all versions: album, Temple bar, full band/acoustic live. (but the Adam+Larry acoustic on Vertigo, not the shortened, weak Zoo TV acoustic)

Too much like U2 before or after Lillywhite messed with it? I don't know how you could de-U2 this one...

And what a bridge!

 

[gman]

The middle eight should have been realeased on its own

 

[U2girl]

Too much like U2 before or after Lillywhite messed with it? I don't know how you could de-U2 this one...

And what a bridge!

I don't know that, but they felt like it was a U2 cover/parody band doing the song.

 

[Zoots]

I don't know that, but they felt like it was a U2 cover/parody band doing the song.

Hahahaha... Surrre! Make up your own altered history. Anything to show that Achtung is as mediocre as everything else! Gotta love the internet for the facts it delivers.

 

[U2girl]

It is a reported fact they disliked the song, because they felt it sounded like a U2 cover band.

This changes nothing about the quality of Achtung Baby, which wasn't even the issue.

 

[lazarus]

I'd imagine Into the Heart would be the best source here, if anyone has a copy lying around.

If they disliked the song so much, why put it on the album? Perhaps they didn't like the way it originally sounded, and had Lillywhite mess with it until it worked for them.

The Temple Bar mix doesn't mean they didn't like the album version, just that they felt they needed to pop it up a bit for radio play.

 

[U2girl]

Or maybe they're not that cynical and they just wanted a different take on the song.

 

[Popmartijn]

If they disliked the song so much, why put it on the album? Perhaps they didn't like the way it originally sounded, and had Lillywhite mess with it until it worked for them.

Here are some quotes over the years on that song. It indeed appears they never thought it lived up to its potential.

Into The Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song (1996)
'"Steve mixed it and he went for the sonic blast of it," Bono says. "It started out as one of those Scott Walker things but we felt it was too rich. Daniel probably felt that the way we went in the end was too FM. It's a song I feel we didn't quite nail on the record because there was another whole set of lyrics that were dumped and I wrote those quickly and off we went. But we did another version which was released as a single which was better."'

U2: A Decade Of Turmoil (Q magazine article November 2002)
'[...] although perversely, it was the most typically U2-ish tracks that were proving the most difficult. Producer Steve Lillywhite remembers the mixing of Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (notably absent from the forthcoming Best Of [1990-2000 - MJ]) as being especially testing.
"They hated that song," he says. "I spent a month on it and I still don't think it was as realised as it could've been. The Americans had heard it and said, That's your radio song there, because they were having trouble with some of the more industrial elements. It's almost like a covers band doing a U2 moment. Maybe we tried too hard."'

U2 By U2 (2006)
Adam: 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' was a very rough demo that we could never really improve on, so we kept going back to the original demo. There's something magical about it. It's a great torch song, with melody and emotion, but I don't think we ever captured it again and we have never really been able to play the song live. Sometimes you get songs like that. They have so much promise but it's as if you can't open the tin, you can't get in at them.
Edge: It is not that we can't play the song live, it's more that it doesn't come alive. I remember Bono playing the original STS demo to Jimmy Iovine. Bono was explaining to Jimmy about House music, this new dance movement that was taking off at that time. Jimmy heard the demo of 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and said, "You're banging on about House music? That's house music! You write a song like that, you get to live in a house like this!"

 

[Zoots]

Seems to me like they didn't really try to make it work Live. It could have been a monster stadium hit like how they make it look in the video.

 

[trevgreg]

it never sounded "that bad" to me when they tried doing it live during the ZooTV years, but I can see how they felt it was missing a little something (if anything, the acoustic version live only lessened it even more, imo).

nevertheless, it's a great track, so I don't get what all the complaining is about personally...

 

[U2girl]

U2: A Decade Of Turmoil (Q magazine article November 2002)
'[...] although perversely, it was the most typically U2-ish tracks that were proving the most difficult. Producer Steve Lillywhite remembers the mixing of Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (notably absent from the forthcoming Best Of [1990-2000 - MJ]) as being especially testing.
"They hated that song," he says. "I spent a month on it and I still don't think it was as realised as it could've been. The Americans had heard it and said, That's your radio song there, because they were having trouble with some of the more industrial elements. It's almost like a covers band doing a U2 moment. Maybe we tried too hard."'

Thanks, Popmartijn. I knew I saw this Lillywhite quote before.