Pete The Chop was a friend of Andrew Whiteway, one of the band's earliest management associates. "Andrew had great fun working with us and avoiding whatever he was supposed to be doing in Trinity College," Edge explains. "He had a couple of friends come over when we played London, and one of them turned out to be Pete The Chop. After the show he came up to us and said I think you should write a song about me. And so we did."
It was the most pop thing that U2 had ever written and when their manager, Paul McGuinness, heard the demo, he thought, "that's a hit single". The people at Island felt the same.
"We said, nobody's ever going to hear it," Bono recalls, "because it would bury the band. And Paul used to get very pissed off that we weren't releasing the song."
"It was very melodic," The Edge adds, "but not really very good."
"So eventually we minced it," Bono laughs. "We turned it around, played it backwards, just sort of fucked it in the ear, and called it 'Whatever Happened To Pete The Chop?'."
That, according to The Edge, was in the days when U2's albums were Top 30 but there was no sign of a hit single. "The new title was a reference to the record company guys who were always saying to Paul McGuinness, 'Whatever happened to "Pete The Chop?" Remember that hit song? (laughs)'."
Appropriately, 'Treasure' was the B-side of 'New Year's Day', the band's breakthrough single in the UK, which was produced by Steve Lillywhite and released in January 1983.
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