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Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
YouTube - U2 - Where The Streets Have No Name (Full Version - Live)
Bono: "'Where the Streets Have No Name,' that's more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP. Because it's a sketch -- I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a romantic location, I was trying to sketch a feeling.
"I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city, and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don't hold you down.
"An interesting story that somebody told me once, is that in Belfast, by what street somebody lives on you can tell not only their religion, but tell how much money they're making -- literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further you go up the hill the more expensive the houses become. You can almost tell what the people are earning by the name of the street they live on and what side of the street they live on. That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place where the streets have no name." (from "The Joshua Tree", Propaganda, Issue 5, January 01, 1987)
Bono: I love the idea of the song -- about taking someone on a journey, because that's what a concert is. It's saying to the audience, "Yes, we may be in a car park or a stadium or some other absurd place to listen to music but the music can take us somewhere else. It can transcend time and place." As a piece of music, it is near the very top of our stuff for me.
(from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
What's the hardest part of U2 to come to terms with?
Bono: "There were a lot of lyrics that were written in five minutes instead of five hours. I remember the Eighties for that. The first two lines of 'Where The Streets Have No Name' were just written on the mic -- 'I want to run, I want to hide / I waant to tear down the walls that hold me inside.' It's teenage poetry! The idea behind the song, the idea that you can transcend where you are, the idea of music as a sacrament, is so powerful, but it's this inane couplet..." (from "Plane Talk: Or, How U2 Reconquered America" by Dorian Lynskey, The Independent, July 21, 2001)
How do you achieve writing lyrics that are personal and yet are also universal?
Bono: At times, it has been humbling for me as a lyricist. In the 80's, often there were no re-writes. The very first lines that were written to accompany the melody were the ones that went on record. And looking back, I see a lot of unfinished songs. It annoys me sometimes that I look back and see a sort of inane couplet. I have to live with it. But they can also be very deep and powerful. Like the opening of "Where the Streets Have No Name." It is an extraordinary throwdown to an audience. If you see us in front of 100,000 people, and you ask, do you want to go on a journey to somewhere that none of us have ever been before, to that place where you forget yourself, and who you are, and where you can imagine something better? It's a spine-chilling moment for you as a singer, and for anyone in the audience. It is a real challenge. But it comes out on The Joshua Tree, as "I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down these walls that hold me inside." That is so sophomoric (laughs). But that is the way it came out. The lesson for me from the 80's was that sometimes the first words communicate the best. You realize, especially after the events of September 11, how unimportant it is to be smart. Or worse, smart-ass. To be true is all in pop music. Some of my favorite writers are clever with words. But the ones I go back to are the ones that are clever with ideas.
(from "Keeping The Peace" by Erik Philbrook, ASCAP Playback, November 28, 2001)
YouTube - U2 - I still haven't found what I'm looking for
Ultimately, the biggest issue facing U2 is whether a young, idealistic band can keep on its own creative and ethical track. But the Edge, like other members of the group, remains confident. Commenting on U2's recent hit single, he said, "'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' sounds like a song of defeat, but it's about hope and belief. God forbid if we ever found what we were looking for. What a horrible experience that would be."
(from "From Street Punks To Rock Idealists" by Nicholas Jennings, Maclean's, November 02, 1987)
MJ: Are you saying that what captures your fans' political imaginations is speaking to those doubts they have?
Bono: I think it's at least owning up to them. We're very clear, and it's very clear in our music that we don't have any answers. But that the questions are at least worth asking. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." How much mor clear can you make it? (from "Pure Bono" by Adam Block, Mother Jones, May 1989)
"Even I would have probably hated us then [by the time of R&H]," Bono concedes. "What was scary to me was that people who were criticizing us weren't really listening to the records. The records were not propagating any kind of 'men of stone' thing. The Joshua Tree is a very uncertain record. 'Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is an anthem of doubt more than faith. (from "U2 Finds What It's Looking For" by David Fricke, Rolling Stone, October 01, 1992)
Bono: The approach was influenced by the poetry of the Psalms, which I always love. To me, it's a lot like the blues -- where man was giving out to God. It's like David giving out to God, "Where are you when I need you?" That whole thing.
(from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
YouTube - u2-With or Without you(rattle and hum)
Bono: In "With Or Without You" when it says "and you give yourself away and you give yourself away" -- everybody else in the group knows what that means. It's about how I feel in U2 at times -- exposed. I know the group think I'm exposed and the group feel that I give myself away. And funny enough, Lou Reed said to me, 'what you've got is a real gift: don't give it away because people might not place upon it the right value.' And I think that if l do any damage to the group, it's that I'm too open. For instance, in an interview, I don't hold the cards there and play the right one because I either have to do it or not do it. That's why I'm not going to do many interviews this year. Because there's a cost to my personal life and a cost to the group as well. (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
TW: Another thing that we certainly need to do in music is discover new ways to write love songs. "With Or Without You" seems like a new kind of love song to me.
Bono: Thank you. That's kinda the way I feel about it. I've said it before, but to me there's nothing more radical, there's nothing more revolutionary than two people loving each other. One, 'cause it's so uncommon these days, and two, 'cause it's so difficult to do. (from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
Bono: On the "With or Without You" EP there are three songs that all deal with obsession [Walk To The Water, Luminous Times], with that kind of sexuality. I'd like to have done a whole side, a whole record, blue. That EP is something close. (from "Luminous Times" by John Hutchinson, Musician, October 01, 1987)
[...] Bono will argue that "the album is almost incomplete. 'With Or Without You' doesn't really make sense without 'Walk To The Water' or 'Luminous Times.' [...] (from "Band On The Run" by Bill Graham, Hot Press, December 17, 1987)
"With Or Without You" attacked the subject of personal relationships head on. It portrayed the singer as being torn between life without love on the one hand and life in an unworkable relationship on the other. "With or Without You" was the first evidence of Bono, in his role as singer, being on the receiving end of a one-sided partnership and taking an almost masochistic delight in it. Musical history has seen rock 'n' roll strap on its traditional macho trappings and look for a convenient site for conquest in a series of testosterone-fuelled one-night stands. U2 were more interested in the spiritual conflict that preceded them and the mental conflict that followed. They wanted fever. "With or Without You" furthered that direction and investigated the violence of love. Love is the closest emotion to hate, power the closest to submission and sadism the closest to masochism. Bono revealed that "it was interesting to me because I see it in myself and in other people around me. Love is a two-edged sword and I didn't want to write about romance because that doesn't interest me as much as the other side." [...] (from "U2 - A Conspiracy of Hope" by Dave Bowler & Bryan Dray, 1993)
Bono: There's a lot of stuff that goes through your head, and the songs can completely change their meanings. Something like "With or Without You" becomes about your audience. It's wild how a song can change. [...] (from "Band of the Year: Rock's Unbreakable Heart" by Alan Light, Spin, December 09, 2001)
"With or Without You" was the third track on The Joshua Tree, and another single. A nagging heartbeat of bass, a molten slick of the Edge's trademark "Infinite Guitar," and Bono's meditation on the sadomasochistic temptations of a love he both craves and fears. Scott Walker's ultra-bleak 1984 album Climate of Hunter was named as an influence, although live airings of the tune sometimes mutated into Joy Division's thematically similar "Love Will Tear Us Apart." "With or Without You" is probably the most personal statement on The Joshua Tree. In Rolling Stone Bono called it a "twisted love song" about "the violence of love, ownership, possession, all these things." (from "How The West Was Won" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 08, 2003)
YouTube - Bullet The Blue Sky (Rattle and Hum)
He [Bono] remembers it this way. Outside San Salvador, 30 or 40 miles up in the hills, mortars began to hit the village, and bombs cratered the hillside. Run. That was his first thought. And this was the second: Where? It was open all around. The ground shook. The farmers looked at the traveler from Ireland and smiled and pointed. They tried to be reassuring. "That is over there," they said. "We are over here." "I felt," says the traveler, thinking back in a safer place, "such a fool in the face of it. Those guys lived with it all their lives, and it meant nothing to them. But the fear I felt that day..." Just talking couldn't say it all. It would take a song. When Bono tears loose on U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky," you can still hear the ache of fear in his voice, the closeness of the memory. The song is immediate and passionate, a cry of conscience on an album full of oblique social speculation and spiritual voyaging. [...] (from "Band on the Run" by Jay Cocks, Time Magazine, April 27, 1987)
TW: I would say that "Bullet the Blue Sky" on The Joshua Tree has a real, kind of scary undercurrent.
Bono: Yeah... you know, how do you write about fear? How do you write about fear? I was trying to describe the fear I felt...
TW: This was in Central America?
Bono: Yeah, based on a situation I found myself in, in Salvador. You can imagine these campasinos, you know, these peasant farmers, as they look up into the air and they see these helicopters come over their village, or they see fighter planes. So I tried to use these images, these kind of primitive images.
(from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 Running To Stand Still live from Syracuse 1987
Bono: (referring to "Running To Stand Still") I heard of a couple both of whom were addicted and such was their addiction that they had no money, no rent, so that the guy risked it all on a run. All of it. He went and smuggled into Dublin a serious quantity of heroin strapped to his body so that there was on one hand, life imprisonment, on the other hand, riches. Apart from the morality of that, what interested me was what put him in that place. (Quotes the lyric) "You know I took the poison from the poison stream / Then I floated out of here." Because for a lot of people, there are no physical doors open anymore. And so if you can't change the world you're living in, seeing through different eyes is the only alternative. And heroin gives you heroin eyes to see the world with; and the thing about heroin is that you think that's the way it really is. That the old you, who worries about paying the rent, the old you who just worries, is not the real you.
(from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Bono: It was about a heroin problem in Dublin. The seven towers in the song is the place ["Ballymun Towers"] just behind where I grew up, what you call a housing project, with seven high towers. That would be in my personal Top 5. (from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
[...] "That title came from Bono's brother, who was in the computer business," [Daniel] Lanois recalls. "He said to Bono, 'I can't take this anymore -- I feel like I'm running to stand still.' He was referring to running this business just to pay the bills."
(from "The Making of U2's The Joshua Tree" by Matt Diehl, Rolling Stone, May 15, 1997)
YouTube - Red Hill Mining Town
Despite its American-sounding title, the track "Red Hill Mining Town" moves the focus of the LP at least slightly closer to home. Inspired by the 1984 miners' strike led by Arthur Scargill, it would seem to allude to coal board chairman Ian McGregor as the villain of the piece: "Through hands of steel/And a heart of stone/Our labour day has come and gone..." As Bono explains, the song -- which takes the name Red Hill from a mythical doomed pit village in a book written about the 1984 dispute [by Tony Martin] -- is actually about the breakup of a relationship under the strains of the strike. "I was interested in the miners' strike politically, but I wanted to write about it on a more personal level. A cold statistic about a pit closure and redundancies that follow is drastic enough on one level, but it never tells the full human story. I wanted to follow the miner home and write about that situation in the song. "The untold story of the coal strike is the number of family relationships that either broke down or were put under great strain. That was the final blow. Men would lose their pride in themselves and wouldn't be able to face their children or sleep with their wives." (from "Cactus World View" by Adrian Thrills, New Musical Express, March 14, 1987)
Bono: I told you in a nightclub about a year ago I was sick of being reasonable. I learnt to come out as an unreasonable man (laughs). I know what you're getting at and I know what other people are going to get at. "Red Hill Mining Town" is a song about the miners' strike and the only reference to lan McGregor (The British Coal Board Chairman) is "through hand of steel and heart of stone / our labour day is came and gone." People beat me with a stick for that but what I'm interested in is, seeing in the newspapers or on television that another thousand people have lost their jobs. Now what you don't read about is that those people go home and they have families and they're trying to bring up children. And those relationships broke up under the pressure of the miners' strike. Those men and women lost pride in themselves and that affects their sex lives, literally... (quotes again)... "the glass is cut, the bottle run dry, our love runs cold in the cabins in the night / We're wounded by fear, injured in doubt / I can lose myself but you I can't live without / Cos you keep me holding on." I'm more interested in the relationship at this point in time because I feel other people are more qualified to comment on the miners' strike. That enraged me -- but I feel more qualified to write about relationships because I understand them more than what it's like to work in a pit. (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Bono: [...] I was listening to the vocals of "Red Hill Mining Town" coming back in the mix and I was thinking, "Why does the singer sound like a rich man with pound notes stuffed in his pockets when it's a song about unemployment?" And the engineer was scratching his head. Dan Lanois walks in and says, "God almighty, stereo plate echo! I keep telling these people. They've been using it since they invented it not because it's right but because it's available." So he said, "Turn it off. Put it in mono and edge it to the left," and there it was again. (from "U2 Give Themselves Away" by Bill Graham and Niall Stokes, Musician, May 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 - In God's Country
TW: Rock'n'roll's such a music of emotion where, if there's an opportunity to express something, you kind of exalt that opportunity. Another song that sort of keys in with these kind of thoughts on The Joshua Tree is "In God's Country" where you sing, "We need new dreams tonight." Are there certain dreams that you see out there at this point in time that need to be encouraged?
Bono: There are not enough dreams. "In God's Country," I was talking about -- I didn't know whether I was writing about Ireland or America for awhile. Eventually I dedicated the song to the Statue of Liberty: "naked flame, she stands with a naked flame / I stand with sons of Cain, burned by the fire of love." I wanted to write about America and you know... the dream. The American dream. And I wonder: where are the people that will rise to the challenge? Y'know, where are the new dreamers? I think I was talking about at the time, you know, all these people saying (adopts American accent) "I'm a Marxist-Leninist, man" or y'know, "I'm into Reagan, Reaganomics"... These are all old, these are old ideologies, they're old, and I thought, put off the old, put on the new. Where are the new dreams -- where's the new dreamers? And "we need new dreams tonight" is the line. I wonder where they are. I want to see them. (from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 trip through your wires live from Paris 1987
[...] Bono will argue that "the album is almost incomplete. 'With Or Without You' doesn't really make sense without 'Walk To The Water' or 'Luminous Times.' And 'Trip Through Your Wires' don't make that much sense without 'Sweetest Thing.'" (from "Band On The Run" by Bill Graham, Hot Press, December 17, 1987)
YouTube - One Tree Hill
Bono: To do him [Greg Carroll] justice, you can't talk about him the way we felt. We met him in Auckland and there are five volcanic islands which make up Auckland and the tallest is One Tree Hill. And my first night in New Zealand, Greg took me to One Tree Hill. He'd worked around the music and media scene and Paul McGuinness thought this guy's so smart, we can't leave him here, let's take him with us to Australia. He'd been doing front of house for the promoter... [...] (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Brendan Fitzgerald [NME editor] first met Greg Carroll during his days as a drummer on Auckland's early-'80s band scene. He was a "super crew/roadie dude" who worked all the music venues and, unusually for a Maori, followed all the latest post-punk bands. "He used to have startling mohawk-style haircuts and dye jobs on his curly mop," recalls Fitzgerald, who swapped New Zealand for London in the late '80s.
"I remember him as a great guy to hang out with -- energetic, funny, enthusiastic, and really pro when he had a gig on. He was always working, and if he wasn't he'd be in the audience of whoever was playing. He loved music."
Carroll came to U2's attention during the band's Auckland rehearsals for their Unforgettable Fire tour. Bono needed a fearless, reliable roadie to keep him out of danger during his manic stage-diving episodes.
"The band were patchy on the opening nights," Fitzgerald remembers. "The Edge took the bass off Clayton at the start of '40' because the 'unsteady' bassist was more interested in waving his magnum of Moet about. But there was Greg getting amongst it, hands high over his head, feeding out the mic lead."
When they departed for Australia, U2 offered Carroll a full-time job. He seized the chance and soon became integral to the band. Check out their Live Aid set -- that's Carroll shadowing Bono's every step as he plunges into the crowd. In Dublin, he effectively became the singer's personal assistant and soul mate. He also began dating Katie McGuinness, sister of U2 manager Paul.
But then, early in July 1986, tragedy struck. "I heard about his death right after it happened," says Fitzgerald, who was still in New Zealand. "The wildfire story which did the rounds in Auckland was that he was in a Dublin pub with sundry U2 types when Bono asked him to nip out and bring his motorbike back from somewhere nearby. Greg readily set off and on the way back -- legend has it within sight of the pub -- he was run down on the bike and killed."
A devastated Bono, Larry, Ali, Katie McGuinness and others in U2's orbit flew out for the three-day maori funeral in Carroll's marae (home town) of Wanganui. The Joshua Tree was dedicated to Carroll, while the track "One Tree Hill" celebrates his memory and a landmark peak overlooking Auckland.
"New Zealand pioneer Sir John Logan Campbell built a memorial obelisk alongside it to commerate the Maori people as a dying race," Fitzgerald notes. "Maybe Greg told this hideous fact to Bono, who featured it in his lyrics for his Maori friend after he died. Who knows...?"
(from "How The West Was Won -- The Faces That Shaped The Joshua Tree" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 09, 2003)
YouTube - U2 Exit on The Old Grey Whistle Test 1987
[Bono introducing "Exit":] "Story about a religious man... who became a very dangerous man... when he misunderstood... the hands of love." (from "Rock's Hottest Ticket" bootleg, recorded at Rosemont Horizon, Chicago, Illinois, April 29, 1987)
Musician: To what extent did writing a bleaker album reflect personal experiences?
Bono: You could say this is forbidden ground for U2 because we're the optimistic group. But to be an optimist, you mustn't be blind or deaf to the world around you. "Running To Stand Still" is based on a real story. I don't even know what the act is in "Exit." Some see it as murder, others a suicide, and I don't mind. The rhythm of the words is nearly as important in conveying the state of mind. The album's real strength is that though you travel through these deep tunnels and bleak landscapes, there's a joy at the heart of it, and I can't explain it. (from "U2 Give Themselves Away" by Bill Graham and Niall Stokes, Musician, May 01, 1987)
The Joshua Tree hits its heart of darkness on "Exit," a barbed-wire murder ballad of sheared guitars, brooding silences and malevolent thoughts ripped from the mind of a maniac. Inspired by The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's celebrated book on serial killer Gary Gilmore, it marks the closest U2 have come yet to Nick Cave's glowering intensity.
"I can see where Nick Cave is coming from," Bono told NME. "There's a black beauty to his music, as William Burroughs put it. It's there in songs like 'Exit'... but ultimately, I do subscribe to the healing force of music. Woody Guthrie said that there's two types of music, one to live to and one to die to..."
These words would come back to haunt Bono four years later, in October 1991, when a disturbed young man called Robert Bardo told a Los Angeles court that "Exit" had driven him to murder actress Rebecca Schaeffer. A plea of insanity saved him from the death penalty. The "gospel of heaven and hell" indeed. (from "How The West Was Won" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 08, 2003)
YouTube - U2 - El Pueblo Vencera / Mothers Of The Disappeared (RARE)
Do you feel a lot of sympathy for America?
Bono: Well, I have a kind of love-hate relationship with America. I love the place, I love the people. One of the things I hate is that such a trusting people could have put their trust in a guy like Ronald Reagan. He may be a sincere man, but he is sincerely wrong in so many cases.
For instance, in South America. There is no question in my mind that the people of America through their taxes are paying for the equipment that is used to torture people in El Salvador. In my trip to Salvador I met with mothers of children who had disappeared. They have never found their children went or where their bodies were buried. They are presumed dead.
Actually, there's a song which may be on the new LP called "Mothers of the Disappeared." There's no question in my mind of the Reagan Administration's involvement in backing the regime that is committing these atrocities.
I doubt if the people of America are even aware of this. It's not my position to lecture them or tell them their place or to even open their eyes up to it in a very visual way, but it is affecting me and it affects the words I write and the music we make. (from "The Enduring Chill - Bono & the Two Americas", Propaganda, Issue 4, December 01, 1986)
Dave Fanning: Well there are two types of people going there [Irish, to America], I mean there’s the brain drain and then there’s everybody else’s friend, who goes along because they can’t get a job here, right? So if you have directed a lot of your songwriting towards American foreign policy or whatever, what about the next time around? Is there any way that you might direct it towards what’s happening in Ireland?
Bono: Well I just, America is something that I’m still, y’know, a little obsessed with. I, personally, I mean I would like to finish what I’ve started. And we’ve written some songs about Ireland, we’ve written songs about immigration, they’re just not ready to bring out yet. We’re working on them. But America hasn’t just affected our lives, it affects everybody’s lives. These missiles that are in Greenham Common and the missiles that they’ve planted in West Germany, this affects our life. Y’know, we have this dream that because we’re an island, we’re in the middle of the ocean between Europe and Russia and America, we’re not. We’re directly affected by what goes on in both those continents. And so we’ve a right to ask questions. And some of those questions, y’know, they don’t have easy answers. But we’ve a right to ask them in the first place. I must tell you a story about The Mothers of the Disappeared, which is the last track on The Joshua Tree. I wrote the song based on my experiences with the day I spent with the Madres, they’re called. They were set up by Archbishop Romero. Archbishop Romero was a fairly right-wing guy, a member of the Catholic Church, who was brought into Salvador to sort of quell the masses and stop them asking uncomfortable political questions; but when he saw the poverty, and when he saw the injustice of the state of Salvador he complained and gave out. And he eventually was gunned down while giving Mass in Salvador. They just walked in, and they just shot him down. But before he died he set up the Madres, which is the Mothers of the Disappeared. And I spent a day with them; you’ll see them if you go to see Oliver Stone’s film, "Salvador". (from Dave Fanning Show on RTE 2FM, radio interview, June 25, 1987)
YouTube - U2 SWEETEST THING IEM MATRIX AUDIO MIX TORONTO 2001-05-25
The song was allegedly written by Bono as an apology to his wife Ali Hewson for forgetting her birthday during The Joshua Tree sessions. [3] At Alison's request, proceeds from the single went to her favored charity, Chernobyl Children's Project International.
YouTube - U2 - Luminous Times (Hold On To Love) - U2mixer Video Remix
YouTube - U2 - Walk To The Water
YouTube - U2 - Spanish Eyes
YouTube - U2 - Deep In The Heart - My Video
The song that Marc [Coleman] engineered -- "Deep in the Heart" -- is very free form. It's unusual for U2.
Edge: That's exactly what it is. It's a bit like the "4th of July" of this record. With "4th of July" Adam and I were in this room playing and we didn't even know we were being recorded. It was the same with "Deep in the Heart."
Adam: It was actually recorded on a 4-track cassette machine. It was the only recorder set up.
Bono: "Deep in the Heart" was a simple three-chord song idea that I'd written on the piano, about the last day I spent in Cedarwood Road, in my family house. After I left and went out on my own my father was living there by himself, and there were a lot of break-ins. Heroin addiction in the area was up and kids needed the money. Anyway, my father decided to sell the little house, and before he moved out I went back there and thought about the place, which I'd known since I was small. I remembered a sexual encounter I'd had there -- "Thirteen years old, sweet as a rose, every petal of her paper thin... Love will make you blind, creeping from behind, gets you jumping out of your skin. Deep in the heart of this place..." The simple piano piece that I had was nothing like what these guys turned it into to, which is an almost jazz-like improvisation on three chords. The rhythm section turned it into a very special piece of music.
(from "Luminous Times" by John Hutchinson, Musician, October 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 - Silver & Gold
[Bono, in 1986:] "It's the first song that I've ever written that comes from somebody else's point of view. U2 songs are always from my point of view, but this is a departure into the third person. It's also the first blues-influenced song I've written. I play the guitar with my foot miked up the way that old bluesmen like Robert Johnson used to do. And I'm banging the side of my guitar with my knuckles to keep the rhythm. As the song goes on the tempo keeps getting faster and the mood more and more intense.
"The line that started the whole thing for me was one about a boxer, the idea of a prize fighter in his corner being egged on by a trainer. It's a sport that I've found increasingly interesting over the past year. I find a lot of aspects of it very sordid, a bit like cock fighting or something, but the image was very powerful for the song." (from "Undermining Apartheid" by Adrian Thrills, New Musical Express, June 18, 1986)
[Bono:] "Yeah, Silver and Gold... This song was written in a hotel room in New York city... 'Round about the time a friend or ours, Little Steven, was putting together a record of Artists Against Apartheid! ... This is a song written about a man... in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg... A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa... A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor... A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west, while they argue... and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu, and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa...
Am I buggin' you? I don't mean to bug ya...
Ok Edge, play the blues..." (from the Rattle And Hum album)
YouTube - U2 - Race Against Time
YouTube - U2 - Wave Of Sorrow
Bono: "'Where the Streets Have No Name,' that's more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP. Because it's a sketch -- I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a romantic location, I was trying to sketch a feeling.
"I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city, and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don't hold you down.
"An interesting story that somebody told me once, is that in Belfast, by what street somebody lives on you can tell not only their religion, but tell how much money they're making -- literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further you go up the hill the more expensive the houses become. You can almost tell what the people are earning by the name of the street they live on and what side of the street they live on. That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place where the streets have no name." (from "The Joshua Tree", Propaganda, Issue 5, January 01, 1987)
Bono: I love the idea of the song -- about taking someone on a journey, because that's what a concert is. It's saying to the audience, "Yes, we may be in a car park or a stadium or some other absurd place to listen to music but the music can take us somewhere else. It can transcend time and place." As a piece of music, it is near the very top of our stuff for me.
(from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
What's the hardest part of U2 to come to terms with?
Bono: "There were a lot of lyrics that were written in five minutes instead of five hours. I remember the Eighties for that. The first two lines of 'Where The Streets Have No Name' were just written on the mic -- 'I want to run, I want to hide / I waant to tear down the walls that hold me inside.' It's teenage poetry! The idea behind the song, the idea that you can transcend where you are, the idea of music as a sacrament, is so powerful, but it's this inane couplet..." (from "Plane Talk: Or, How U2 Reconquered America" by Dorian Lynskey, The Independent, July 21, 2001)
How do you achieve writing lyrics that are personal and yet are also universal?
Bono: At times, it has been humbling for me as a lyricist. In the 80's, often there were no re-writes. The very first lines that were written to accompany the melody were the ones that went on record. And looking back, I see a lot of unfinished songs. It annoys me sometimes that I look back and see a sort of inane couplet. I have to live with it. But they can also be very deep and powerful. Like the opening of "Where the Streets Have No Name." It is an extraordinary throwdown to an audience. If you see us in front of 100,000 people, and you ask, do you want to go on a journey to somewhere that none of us have ever been before, to that place where you forget yourself, and who you are, and where you can imagine something better? It's a spine-chilling moment for you as a singer, and for anyone in the audience. It is a real challenge. But it comes out on The Joshua Tree, as "I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down these walls that hold me inside." That is so sophomoric (laughs). But that is the way it came out. The lesson for me from the 80's was that sometimes the first words communicate the best. You realize, especially after the events of September 11, how unimportant it is to be smart. Or worse, smart-ass. To be true is all in pop music. Some of my favorite writers are clever with words. But the ones I go back to are the ones that are clever with ideas.
(from "Keeping The Peace" by Erik Philbrook, ASCAP Playback, November 28, 2001)
YouTube - U2 - I still haven't found what I'm looking for
Ultimately, the biggest issue facing U2 is whether a young, idealistic band can keep on its own creative and ethical track. But the Edge, like other members of the group, remains confident. Commenting on U2's recent hit single, he said, "'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' sounds like a song of defeat, but it's about hope and belief. God forbid if we ever found what we were looking for. What a horrible experience that would be."
(from "From Street Punks To Rock Idealists" by Nicholas Jennings, Maclean's, November 02, 1987)
MJ: Are you saying that what captures your fans' political imaginations is speaking to those doubts they have?
Bono: I think it's at least owning up to them. We're very clear, and it's very clear in our music that we don't have any answers. But that the questions are at least worth asking. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." How much mor clear can you make it? (from "Pure Bono" by Adam Block, Mother Jones, May 1989)
"Even I would have probably hated us then [by the time of R&H]," Bono concedes. "What was scary to me was that people who were criticizing us weren't really listening to the records. The records were not propagating any kind of 'men of stone' thing. The Joshua Tree is a very uncertain record. 'Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is an anthem of doubt more than faith. (from "U2 Finds What It's Looking For" by David Fricke, Rolling Stone, October 01, 1992)
Bono: The approach was influenced by the poetry of the Psalms, which I always love. To me, it's a lot like the blues -- where man was giving out to God. It's like David giving out to God, "Where are you when I need you?" That whole thing.
(from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
YouTube - u2-With or Without you(rattle and hum)
Bono: In "With Or Without You" when it says "and you give yourself away and you give yourself away" -- everybody else in the group knows what that means. It's about how I feel in U2 at times -- exposed. I know the group think I'm exposed and the group feel that I give myself away. And funny enough, Lou Reed said to me, 'what you've got is a real gift: don't give it away because people might not place upon it the right value.' And I think that if l do any damage to the group, it's that I'm too open. For instance, in an interview, I don't hold the cards there and play the right one because I either have to do it or not do it. That's why I'm not going to do many interviews this year. Because there's a cost to my personal life and a cost to the group as well. (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
TW: Another thing that we certainly need to do in music is discover new ways to write love songs. "With Or Without You" seems like a new kind of love song to me.
Bono: Thank you. That's kinda the way I feel about it. I've said it before, but to me there's nothing more radical, there's nothing more revolutionary than two people loving each other. One, 'cause it's so uncommon these days, and two, 'cause it's so difficult to do. (from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
Bono: On the "With or Without You" EP there are three songs that all deal with obsession [Walk To The Water, Luminous Times], with that kind of sexuality. I'd like to have done a whole side, a whole record, blue. That EP is something close. (from "Luminous Times" by John Hutchinson, Musician, October 01, 1987)
[...] Bono will argue that "the album is almost incomplete. 'With Or Without You' doesn't really make sense without 'Walk To The Water' or 'Luminous Times.' [...] (from "Band On The Run" by Bill Graham, Hot Press, December 17, 1987)
"With Or Without You" attacked the subject of personal relationships head on. It portrayed the singer as being torn between life without love on the one hand and life in an unworkable relationship on the other. "With or Without You" was the first evidence of Bono, in his role as singer, being on the receiving end of a one-sided partnership and taking an almost masochistic delight in it. Musical history has seen rock 'n' roll strap on its traditional macho trappings and look for a convenient site for conquest in a series of testosterone-fuelled one-night stands. U2 were more interested in the spiritual conflict that preceded them and the mental conflict that followed. They wanted fever. "With or Without You" furthered that direction and investigated the violence of love. Love is the closest emotion to hate, power the closest to submission and sadism the closest to masochism. Bono revealed that "it was interesting to me because I see it in myself and in other people around me. Love is a two-edged sword and I didn't want to write about romance because that doesn't interest me as much as the other side." [...] (from "U2 - A Conspiracy of Hope" by Dave Bowler & Bryan Dray, 1993)
Bono: There's a lot of stuff that goes through your head, and the songs can completely change their meanings. Something like "With or Without You" becomes about your audience. It's wild how a song can change. [...] (from "Band of the Year: Rock's Unbreakable Heart" by Alan Light, Spin, December 09, 2001)
"With or Without You" was the third track on The Joshua Tree, and another single. A nagging heartbeat of bass, a molten slick of the Edge's trademark "Infinite Guitar," and Bono's meditation on the sadomasochistic temptations of a love he both craves and fears. Scott Walker's ultra-bleak 1984 album Climate of Hunter was named as an influence, although live airings of the tune sometimes mutated into Joy Division's thematically similar "Love Will Tear Us Apart." "With or Without You" is probably the most personal statement on The Joshua Tree. In Rolling Stone Bono called it a "twisted love song" about "the violence of love, ownership, possession, all these things." (from "How The West Was Won" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 08, 2003)
YouTube - Bullet The Blue Sky (Rattle and Hum)
He [Bono] remembers it this way. Outside San Salvador, 30 or 40 miles up in the hills, mortars began to hit the village, and bombs cratered the hillside. Run. That was his first thought. And this was the second: Where? It was open all around. The ground shook. The farmers looked at the traveler from Ireland and smiled and pointed. They tried to be reassuring. "That is over there," they said. "We are over here." "I felt," says the traveler, thinking back in a safer place, "such a fool in the face of it. Those guys lived with it all their lives, and it meant nothing to them. But the fear I felt that day..." Just talking couldn't say it all. It would take a song. When Bono tears loose on U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky," you can still hear the ache of fear in his voice, the closeness of the memory. The song is immediate and passionate, a cry of conscience on an album full of oblique social speculation and spiritual voyaging. [...] (from "Band on the Run" by Jay Cocks, Time Magazine, April 27, 1987)
TW: I would say that "Bullet the Blue Sky" on The Joshua Tree has a real, kind of scary undercurrent.
Bono: Yeah... you know, how do you write about fear? How do you write about fear? I was trying to describe the fear I felt...
TW: This was in Central America?
Bono: Yeah, based on a situation I found myself in, in Salvador. You can imagine these campasinos, you know, these peasant farmers, as they look up into the air and they see these helicopters come over their village, or they see fighter planes. So I tried to use these images, these kind of primitive images.
(from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 Running To Stand Still live from Syracuse 1987
Bono: (referring to "Running To Stand Still") I heard of a couple both of whom were addicted and such was their addiction that they had no money, no rent, so that the guy risked it all on a run. All of it. He went and smuggled into Dublin a serious quantity of heroin strapped to his body so that there was on one hand, life imprisonment, on the other hand, riches. Apart from the morality of that, what interested me was what put him in that place. (Quotes the lyric) "You know I took the poison from the poison stream / Then I floated out of here." Because for a lot of people, there are no physical doors open anymore. And so if you can't change the world you're living in, seeing through different eyes is the only alternative. And heroin gives you heroin eyes to see the world with; and the thing about heroin is that you think that's the way it really is. That the old you, who worries about paying the rent, the old you who just worries, is not the real you.
(from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Bono: It was about a heroin problem in Dublin. The seven towers in the song is the place ["Ballymun Towers"] just behind where I grew up, what you call a housing project, with seven high towers. That would be in my personal Top 5. (from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
[...] "That title came from Bono's brother, who was in the computer business," [Daniel] Lanois recalls. "He said to Bono, 'I can't take this anymore -- I feel like I'm running to stand still.' He was referring to running this business just to pay the bills."
(from "The Making of U2's The Joshua Tree" by Matt Diehl, Rolling Stone, May 15, 1997)
YouTube - Red Hill Mining Town
Despite its American-sounding title, the track "Red Hill Mining Town" moves the focus of the LP at least slightly closer to home. Inspired by the 1984 miners' strike led by Arthur Scargill, it would seem to allude to coal board chairman Ian McGregor as the villain of the piece: "Through hands of steel/And a heart of stone/Our labour day has come and gone..." As Bono explains, the song -- which takes the name Red Hill from a mythical doomed pit village in a book written about the 1984 dispute [by Tony Martin] -- is actually about the breakup of a relationship under the strains of the strike. "I was interested in the miners' strike politically, but I wanted to write about it on a more personal level. A cold statistic about a pit closure and redundancies that follow is drastic enough on one level, but it never tells the full human story. I wanted to follow the miner home and write about that situation in the song. "The untold story of the coal strike is the number of family relationships that either broke down or were put under great strain. That was the final blow. Men would lose their pride in themselves and wouldn't be able to face their children or sleep with their wives." (from "Cactus World View" by Adrian Thrills, New Musical Express, March 14, 1987)
Bono: I told you in a nightclub about a year ago I was sick of being reasonable. I learnt to come out as an unreasonable man (laughs). I know what you're getting at and I know what other people are going to get at. "Red Hill Mining Town" is a song about the miners' strike and the only reference to lan McGregor (The British Coal Board Chairman) is "through hand of steel and heart of stone / our labour day is came and gone." People beat me with a stick for that but what I'm interested in is, seeing in the newspapers or on television that another thousand people have lost their jobs. Now what you don't read about is that those people go home and they have families and they're trying to bring up children. And those relationships broke up under the pressure of the miners' strike. Those men and women lost pride in themselves and that affects their sex lives, literally... (quotes again)... "the glass is cut, the bottle run dry, our love runs cold in the cabins in the night / We're wounded by fear, injured in doubt / I can lose myself but you I can't live without / Cos you keep me holding on." I'm more interested in the relationship at this point in time because I feel other people are more qualified to comment on the miners' strike. That enraged me -- but I feel more qualified to write about relationships because I understand them more than what it's like to work in a pit. (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Bono: [...] I was listening to the vocals of "Red Hill Mining Town" coming back in the mix and I was thinking, "Why does the singer sound like a rich man with pound notes stuffed in his pockets when it's a song about unemployment?" And the engineer was scratching his head. Dan Lanois walks in and says, "God almighty, stereo plate echo! I keep telling these people. They've been using it since they invented it not because it's right but because it's available." So he said, "Turn it off. Put it in mono and edge it to the left," and there it was again. (from "U2 Give Themselves Away" by Bill Graham and Niall Stokes, Musician, May 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 - In God's Country
TW: Rock'n'roll's such a music of emotion where, if there's an opportunity to express something, you kind of exalt that opportunity. Another song that sort of keys in with these kind of thoughts on The Joshua Tree is "In God's Country" where you sing, "We need new dreams tonight." Are there certain dreams that you see out there at this point in time that need to be encouraged?
Bono: There are not enough dreams. "In God's Country," I was talking about -- I didn't know whether I was writing about Ireland or America for awhile. Eventually I dedicated the song to the Statue of Liberty: "naked flame, she stands with a naked flame / I stand with sons of Cain, burned by the fire of love." I wanted to write about America and you know... the dream. The American dream. And I wonder: where are the people that will rise to the challenge? Y'know, where are the new dreamers? I think I was talking about at the time, you know, all these people saying (adopts American accent) "I'm a Marxist-Leninist, man" or y'know, "I'm into Reagan, Reaganomics"... These are all old, these are old ideologies, they're old, and I thought, put off the old, put on the new. Where are the new dreams -- where's the new dreamers? And "we need new dreams tonight" is the line. I wonder where they are. I want to see them. (from "Timothy White's Rock Stars", radio interview, June 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 trip through your wires live from Paris 1987
[...] Bono will argue that "the album is almost incomplete. 'With Or Without You' doesn't really make sense without 'Walk To The Water' or 'Luminous Times.' And 'Trip Through Your Wires' don't make that much sense without 'Sweetest Thing.'" (from "Band On The Run" by Bill Graham, Hot Press, December 17, 1987)
YouTube - One Tree Hill
Bono: To do him [Greg Carroll] justice, you can't talk about him the way we felt. We met him in Auckland and there are five volcanic islands which make up Auckland and the tallest is One Tree Hill. And my first night in New Zealand, Greg took me to One Tree Hill. He'd worked around the music and media scene and Paul McGuinness thought this guy's so smart, we can't leave him here, let's take him with us to Australia. He'd been doing front of house for the promoter... [...] (from "The World About Us" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press, March 26, 1987)
Brendan Fitzgerald [NME editor] first met Greg Carroll during his days as a drummer on Auckland's early-'80s band scene. He was a "super crew/roadie dude" who worked all the music venues and, unusually for a Maori, followed all the latest post-punk bands. "He used to have startling mohawk-style haircuts and dye jobs on his curly mop," recalls Fitzgerald, who swapped New Zealand for London in the late '80s.
"I remember him as a great guy to hang out with -- energetic, funny, enthusiastic, and really pro when he had a gig on. He was always working, and if he wasn't he'd be in the audience of whoever was playing. He loved music."
Carroll came to U2's attention during the band's Auckland rehearsals for their Unforgettable Fire tour. Bono needed a fearless, reliable roadie to keep him out of danger during his manic stage-diving episodes.
"The band were patchy on the opening nights," Fitzgerald remembers. "The Edge took the bass off Clayton at the start of '40' because the 'unsteady' bassist was more interested in waving his magnum of Moet about. But there was Greg getting amongst it, hands high over his head, feeding out the mic lead."
When they departed for Australia, U2 offered Carroll a full-time job. He seized the chance and soon became integral to the band. Check out their Live Aid set -- that's Carroll shadowing Bono's every step as he plunges into the crowd. In Dublin, he effectively became the singer's personal assistant and soul mate. He also began dating Katie McGuinness, sister of U2 manager Paul.
But then, early in July 1986, tragedy struck. "I heard about his death right after it happened," says Fitzgerald, who was still in New Zealand. "The wildfire story which did the rounds in Auckland was that he was in a Dublin pub with sundry U2 types when Bono asked him to nip out and bring his motorbike back from somewhere nearby. Greg readily set off and on the way back -- legend has it within sight of the pub -- he was run down on the bike and killed."
A devastated Bono, Larry, Ali, Katie McGuinness and others in U2's orbit flew out for the three-day maori funeral in Carroll's marae (home town) of Wanganui. The Joshua Tree was dedicated to Carroll, while the track "One Tree Hill" celebrates his memory and a landmark peak overlooking Auckland.
"New Zealand pioneer Sir John Logan Campbell built a memorial obelisk alongside it to commerate the Maori people as a dying race," Fitzgerald notes. "Maybe Greg told this hideous fact to Bono, who featured it in his lyrics for his Maori friend after he died. Who knows...?"
(from "How The West Was Won -- The Faces That Shaped The Joshua Tree" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 09, 2003)
YouTube - U2 Exit on The Old Grey Whistle Test 1987
[Bono introducing "Exit":] "Story about a religious man... who became a very dangerous man... when he misunderstood... the hands of love." (from "Rock's Hottest Ticket" bootleg, recorded at Rosemont Horizon, Chicago, Illinois, April 29, 1987)
Musician: To what extent did writing a bleaker album reflect personal experiences?
Bono: You could say this is forbidden ground for U2 because we're the optimistic group. But to be an optimist, you mustn't be blind or deaf to the world around you. "Running To Stand Still" is based on a real story. I don't even know what the act is in "Exit." Some see it as murder, others a suicide, and I don't mind. The rhythm of the words is nearly as important in conveying the state of mind. The album's real strength is that though you travel through these deep tunnels and bleak landscapes, there's a joy at the heart of it, and I can't explain it. (from "U2 Give Themselves Away" by Bill Graham and Niall Stokes, Musician, May 01, 1987)
The Joshua Tree hits its heart of darkness on "Exit," a barbed-wire murder ballad of sheared guitars, brooding silences and malevolent thoughts ripped from the mind of a maniac. Inspired by The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's celebrated book on serial killer Gary Gilmore, it marks the closest U2 have come yet to Nick Cave's glowering intensity.
"I can see where Nick Cave is coming from," Bono told NME. "There's a black beauty to his music, as William Burroughs put it. It's there in songs like 'Exit'... but ultimately, I do subscribe to the healing force of music. Woody Guthrie said that there's two types of music, one to live to and one to die to..."
These words would come back to haunt Bono four years later, in October 1991, when a disturbed young man called Robert Bardo told a Los Angeles court that "Exit" had driven him to murder actress Rebecca Schaeffer. A plea of insanity saved him from the death penalty. The "gospel of heaven and hell" indeed. (from "How The West Was Won" by Stephen Dalton, Uncut Magazine, September 08, 2003)
YouTube - U2 - El Pueblo Vencera / Mothers Of The Disappeared (RARE)
Do you feel a lot of sympathy for America?
Bono: Well, I have a kind of love-hate relationship with America. I love the place, I love the people. One of the things I hate is that such a trusting people could have put their trust in a guy like Ronald Reagan. He may be a sincere man, but he is sincerely wrong in so many cases.
For instance, in South America. There is no question in my mind that the people of America through their taxes are paying for the equipment that is used to torture people in El Salvador. In my trip to Salvador I met with mothers of children who had disappeared. They have never found their children went or where their bodies were buried. They are presumed dead.
Actually, there's a song which may be on the new LP called "Mothers of the Disappeared." There's no question in my mind of the Reagan Administration's involvement in backing the regime that is committing these atrocities.
I doubt if the people of America are even aware of this. It's not my position to lecture them or tell them their place or to even open their eyes up to it in a very visual way, but it is affecting me and it affects the words I write and the music we make. (from "The Enduring Chill - Bono & the Two Americas", Propaganda, Issue 4, December 01, 1986)
Dave Fanning: Well there are two types of people going there [Irish, to America], I mean there’s the brain drain and then there’s everybody else’s friend, who goes along because they can’t get a job here, right? So if you have directed a lot of your songwriting towards American foreign policy or whatever, what about the next time around? Is there any way that you might direct it towards what’s happening in Ireland?
Bono: Well I just, America is something that I’m still, y’know, a little obsessed with. I, personally, I mean I would like to finish what I’ve started. And we’ve written some songs about Ireland, we’ve written songs about immigration, they’re just not ready to bring out yet. We’re working on them. But America hasn’t just affected our lives, it affects everybody’s lives. These missiles that are in Greenham Common and the missiles that they’ve planted in West Germany, this affects our life. Y’know, we have this dream that because we’re an island, we’re in the middle of the ocean between Europe and Russia and America, we’re not. We’re directly affected by what goes on in both those continents. And so we’ve a right to ask questions. And some of those questions, y’know, they don’t have easy answers. But we’ve a right to ask them in the first place. I must tell you a story about The Mothers of the Disappeared, which is the last track on The Joshua Tree. I wrote the song based on my experiences with the day I spent with the Madres, they’re called. They were set up by Archbishop Romero. Archbishop Romero was a fairly right-wing guy, a member of the Catholic Church, who was brought into Salvador to sort of quell the masses and stop them asking uncomfortable political questions; but when he saw the poverty, and when he saw the injustice of the state of Salvador he complained and gave out. And he eventually was gunned down while giving Mass in Salvador. They just walked in, and they just shot him down. But before he died he set up the Madres, which is the Mothers of the Disappeared. And I spent a day with them; you’ll see them if you go to see Oliver Stone’s film, "Salvador". (from Dave Fanning Show on RTE 2FM, radio interview, June 25, 1987)
YouTube - U2 SWEETEST THING IEM MATRIX AUDIO MIX TORONTO 2001-05-25
The song was allegedly written by Bono as an apology to his wife Ali Hewson for forgetting her birthday during The Joshua Tree sessions. [3] At Alison's request, proceeds from the single went to her favored charity, Chernobyl Children's Project International.
YouTube - U2 - Luminous Times (Hold On To Love) - U2mixer Video Remix
YouTube - U2 - Walk To The Water
YouTube - U2 - Spanish Eyes
YouTube - U2 - Deep In The Heart - My Video
The song that Marc [Coleman] engineered -- "Deep in the Heart" -- is very free form. It's unusual for U2.
Edge: That's exactly what it is. It's a bit like the "4th of July" of this record. With "4th of July" Adam and I were in this room playing and we didn't even know we were being recorded. It was the same with "Deep in the Heart."
Adam: It was actually recorded on a 4-track cassette machine. It was the only recorder set up.
Bono: "Deep in the Heart" was a simple three-chord song idea that I'd written on the piano, about the last day I spent in Cedarwood Road, in my family house. After I left and went out on my own my father was living there by himself, and there were a lot of break-ins. Heroin addiction in the area was up and kids needed the money. Anyway, my father decided to sell the little house, and before he moved out I went back there and thought about the place, which I'd known since I was small. I remembered a sexual encounter I'd had there -- "Thirteen years old, sweet as a rose, every petal of her paper thin... Love will make you blind, creeping from behind, gets you jumping out of your skin. Deep in the heart of this place..." The simple piano piece that I had was nothing like what these guys turned it into to, which is an almost jazz-like improvisation on three chords. The rhythm section turned it into a very special piece of music.
(from "Luminous Times" by John Hutchinson, Musician, October 01, 1987)
YouTube - U2 - Silver & Gold
[Bono, in 1986:] "It's the first song that I've ever written that comes from somebody else's point of view. U2 songs are always from my point of view, but this is a departure into the third person. It's also the first blues-influenced song I've written. I play the guitar with my foot miked up the way that old bluesmen like Robert Johnson used to do. And I'm banging the side of my guitar with my knuckles to keep the rhythm. As the song goes on the tempo keeps getting faster and the mood more and more intense.
"The line that started the whole thing for me was one about a boxer, the idea of a prize fighter in his corner being egged on by a trainer. It's a sport that I've found increasingly interesting over the past year. I find a lot of aspects of it very sordid, a bit like cock fighting or something, but the image was very powerful for the song." (from "Undermining Apartheid" by Adrian Thrills, New Musical Express, June 18, 1986)
[Bono:] "Yeah, Silver and Gold... This song was written in a hotel room in New York city... 'Round about the time a friend or ours, Little Steven, was putting together a record of Artists Against Apartheid! ... This is a song written about a man... in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg... A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa... A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor... A man who has lost faith in the peacemakers of the west, while they argue... and while they fail to support a man like bishop Tutu, and his request for economic sanctions against South Africa...
Am I buggin' you? I don't mean to bug ya...
Ok Edge, play the blues..." (from the Rattle And Hum album)
YouTube - U2 - Race Against Time
YouTube - U2 - Wave Of Sorrow
The Joshua Tree too
That's a little TMI. Is that what "An Cat Dubh" is about, too?
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