Site might be down
fna692002 said:
beLIEve, could you post the link to that @u2 article about Saints? Thanks!
Sure, but when I went to got to @u2 dot com, the link was down for some reason. Going back in my history I found the screen shot and just pasted the whole article, which was originally featured in the Times-Picayune newspaper. Keeping in line with the original thread, it's this song that I think is mildly affecting WITS chart position in the U.S., as it refuses to give way to WITS and is still being "started" in rotation by almost as many radio stations as are phasing it out. Ironically, I am actually looking forward to watching the Saints play football tonight in the Superdome...if they win, that crowd will bring the house down. Expect to hear the song early and often on the field and maybe even from the network...anyway, here's your request, enjoy:
Unlikely anthem speaks to a battered New Orleans
Times-Picayune, January 06, 2007
Dave Walker
NEW ORLEANS -- This city's recovery was a preoccupation for the national entertainment and news media this year -- from live Mardi Gras coverage to Spike Lee's HBO documentary to floodwall-to-floodwall coverage of the K-plus-one anniversary to Comic Relief 2006 -- but the local TV highlight of the year was a song written nearly 30 years ago by two teenage Scottish punk rockers.
Revived by arena rockers U2 and Green Day for the September reopening of the Louisiana Superdome, "The Saints Are Coming," originally recorded in 1977 by a scruffy band called the Skids, became an unlikely worldwide hit.
And, given the dour lyrics, an even more unlikely football fight song.
Played during local and network TV and radio broadcasts of New Orleans Saints games -- as well as inside the Superdome itself -- "The Saints" is a fundraiser for Music Rising, the charity founded by U2 guitarist the Edge and others to support flooded-out New Orleans musicians.
The stirring remake made its debut Sept. 25 during ESPN's Monday Night Football telecast of the Saints' home-opening defeat of the Atlanta Falcons.
Poydras Street is a long way from Dunfermline, Scotland, which is where Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson of the Skids wrote "The Saints."
According to recent published interviews with Jobson, the song was inspired by a friend who'd joined the British Army to escape life as a miner. The friend died fighting in Northern Ireland.
"The song was about a young boy making an imaginary phone call to his dead father," Jobson said in an e-mail interview. "It was inspired by the loss of a friend, but for me it's about the death of my father."
The original lyrics, confirmed by Jobson and reprinted with his permission:
Cried to my daddy on the telephone, how long now?
Until the clouds unroll and you come home, the line went
But the shadows still remain since your descent, your descent
The saints are coming, the saints are coming
I say no matter how I try, I realize there's no reply
The saints are coming, the saints are coming
A drowning sorry floods the deepest grief, how long now?
Until a weather change condemns belief, the stone says
The paternal guide once had his day, once had his day
The saints are coming, the saints are coming
I say no matter how I try, I realize there's no reply
The saints are coming, the saints are coming
Music producer Bob Ezrin, along with the Edge one of the founders of Music Rising, said "The Saints" was rerecorded after the NFL invited the charity to help organize entertainment for the Dome's reopening. The Edge suggested doing "The Saints Are Coming."
"I didn't know the song," Ezrin said, "but especially because of the double meaning of the song, it was perfect. The lyrics, which meant something entirely different 30 years ago, were so magical to what had happened in New Orleans, to the deeper feelings of the people of New Orleans."
The Edge asked his band, who had performed at halftime of the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans, and Green Day to participate.
"They just said, 'Of course we're going to do it,"' Ezrin said.
The Skids' version of "The Saints Are Coming" peaked just inside the United Kingdom's top 50. (A video of the impossibly young band lip-syncing the song is viewable at YouTube.com by searching for the band's name and the song title.)
The band found larger success with later singles and albums, but broke up in 1982. Adamson committed suicide in 2001.
The remake was recorded in Studio 2 at Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded most of their albums and where Pink Floyd cut Dark Side of the Moon.
The Edge invited Jobson to observe. Jobson said he was "amazed by how the lyrics were so pertinent to the tragic circumstances of Katrina. The words suggest asking for help but getting no reply. This is the way it looked to the rest of the world in New Orleans. We just couldn't believe that a government as powerful as the U.S.A. could be so woeful in its response. I am very proud that the bands have reinvented the song as both an act of anger and reconciliation."
The studio recording, supervised by producer Rick Rubin, captured "the edgy, raw, revolutionary side of Green Day and the reflective and poetic and emotional side of U2," Ezrin said. "So it's the perfect vehicle for the two of them."
The Superdome performance was built with "an emotional arc" centered on "The Saints," said Ezrin, who supervised the sound mix in an audio truck parked outside the Dome.
The pregame sequence began with local second-liners entering the field, accompanied by the Rebirth and New Birth brass bands.
Green Day played its song "Wake Me Up When September Ends," which had become a melancholy anthem during the month after the Gulf Coast's devastation.
Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong sang a snippet of "House of the Rising Sun" -- spiced with a Superdome reference -- then both bands thundered into "The Saints," supplemented by the brass bands.
U2's "Beautiful Day," with Bono localizing the introductory lyrics, ended the sequence.
"The electricity from inside the Dome was palpable," Ezrin said. "Outside in our truck, you could feel it. The performance was so emotionally honest and fluid, and so well-connected.
"Even watching it on the small screens in the truck, we had this feeling of taking a journey and having a catharsis. When 'Beautiful Day' came on, I broke into tears. I think everybody else in the truck did, too.
"Obviously, the performance made one focus on the fact that the New Orleans Saints were coming out, they were going to show up that night and they were going to kick some booty. They were going to make the city feel really great.
"But the other message of the song was that the saints, in the symbolic sense, were the people we needed to save the city, and they didn't come."
That double meaning is hammered home in the video for the studio remake (also viewable on YouTube) by Chris Milk, which combines footage of the Abbey Road recording session and the Superdome performance with a fantasy retelling of the post-Katrina tragedy in which the American military forces deployed in Iraq instead rescue flood-stranded New Orleanians.
Says a sign at the video's conclusion: "Not as seen on TV."
In the remake, the original's "paternal guide" line is rewritten:
"When the nightwatchman lets in the thief, what's wrong now?"
The studio version of "The Saints" remake has gone to No. 1 in several countries.
Both studio and live versions are popular online downloads. The studio version is included on the current U2 greatest hits CD and is nominated for a Grammy Award. U2 regularly performed "The Saints" on its recently concluded tour.
Sales of the song have presumably raised a ton of money for Music Rising, though nobody apparently yet knows how much. Ezrin said the money raised so far has provided new instruments for more than 2,000 local musicians. The next phase of the group's efforts will aid local church choirs and school bands.
"For something that didn't exist at all before early October of last year, we've accomplished an awful lot," Ezrin said. "I'm really proud of what we've been able to do."
© Times-Picayune, 2007