Here is what 'Into The Heart' says about October.
"Clearly this was one of The Edge's most brilliant moments of inspiration to date. The guitarist remembers it as a song that could have gone places, but Bono was bereft of further lyrical inspiration and they didn't have the time necessary to squeeze out whatever sparks might have been flickering. They decided to put it out as it was. His memory does the controlled power and beauty of the unfinished track a grave injustice. U2 happily admit that songs frequently come together by accident: this was an example of that process at its happiest.
Not that that is such an appropriate metaphor in the context. In fact, 'October' is suffused with an other-worldly sadness and resignation that undoubtedly taps into the tangled emotions that were driving the band just then, and that risked driving them apart. On the run-up to recording 'October', Bono, The Edge and Larry were living out in Portrane, beside the beach on the north coast of Dublin, with the Shalom group. Bono was baptised in the sea in Portrane, and they were living in a caravan in a field there. They were praying a alot and fasting. the Edge describes it as an incredibly intense time spiritually, during which he wrestled at length with his conscience about whether or not, as a Christian, he could continue to play in a rock 'n' roll band.
The three Christian members of the band had been under a lot of pressure from other members of Shalom group to quit, that they had to choose one way or the other. It was on the beach in Portrane that The Edge broke the news to Bono that he might be leaving the band. If The Edge was going, Bono decided that he would too - that they'd break up the band. The Edge asked for two weeks, to give him time to go away and consider his position. When he came back he had decided that being a Christian in a rock 'n' roll band involved a contradiction alright - but one he could live with.
"'October'... it's an image," Bono told a Dutch television interviewer, Kees Baar, in 1981. "We've been through the '60s, a time when things were in full bloom. We had fridges and cars, we send people to the Moon and everybody thought how great mankind was. And now, as we go through the '70s and '80s, it's a colder time of the year. It's after the harvest. The trees are stripped bare. You can see things and we finally relaize that maybe we weren't so smart after all, now that there's millions of unemployed people, now that we've used the technology we've been blessed with to build bombs for war machines, to build rockets, whatever. So 'October' is an ominous word, but it's also quite lyrical."
As extrapolations go, it makes some kind of sense. The title came first: it was what Bono wanted to call the album. The Edge hadn't played the piano in years but he had a real feel for it and he began to pick out this pure melody, underpinned with simple chords. The group wanted him to find what they called ice notes: clear, shimmering, crystalline things that would be hard but beautiful. 'October' was the result, and while Bono may have seen it as a grand statement about eternal verities, its nakedness in fact said as much about the crises the band had been going through, both personal and Creative.
'October' captures U2 in a moment of supreme vulnerability, and is all the more compelling as a result. There may indeed have been a bigger, more complete song there to be written. But sometimes, as U2 would find again and again, these things are best left to find a life of their own.
And a meaning."
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good luck!
