(06-22-2005) Steve Lillywhite Talks U2 -- Hotpress.com*

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Steve Lillywhite Talks U2

Hotpress.com is featuring an interview with U2 porducer Steve Lillywhite where he talks about his long working relationship with the band. Registration is required to read the complete article here but some highlights are below:

On his first time meeting the band:
But I remember thinking, ‘This is good, I should go and see them live’. I flew over to Cork and I was told I’d be met by a Mr McGuinness. I thought with the name McGuinness it would be someone with straw in his hair picking me up on a tractor. I mean, no offence, but Ireland in the late '70s was a very different place to Ireland now. So it was quite a shock when this guy said, (affects posh Anglo-Irish accent) ‘Hello Steve. Paul McGuinness here’. And he subsequently drove me about an hour to the gig from the airport, playing me constant U2 music, saying, ‘Isn’t that good?’ And it was quite obvious that it was good but not great; these were very rough recordings to be honest. And then it was one of those gigs where all the boys stood on one side of the room and all the girls stood on the other side. It was a great gig though. And I remember we went out for a drink afterwards and they were drinking red lemonade shandy. Now they drink the best champagne and stuff!

On "War:"
Making the War album was a very different kind of experience. I remember Bono being in the studio and just shouting at Edge: ‘Don’t be The Edge. Be Mick Jones!’ Trying to get elements of what The Clash had. But you know what – it was what the Americans wanted. It wasn’t made for America specifically, but it really did work there. ‘New Year’s Day’ was the record that they all wanted to play. When you make a record, certainly in those days, we found it very difficult to know what was going to be a radio song and what wasn’t. I couldn’t tell the difference between ‘New Year’s Day’ and ‘Surrender’. But now ‘Surrender’ is not anywhere near the set list, it's been forgotten. We spent days on that slide part… Edge was not so good on the slide in those days! We used Kid Creole & the Coconuts on that album, they were in town that day and we got them in to do backing vocals.

On "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:"
But this new album was slightly different because, in football terms, they felt they needed to switch things around for the second half. I came in and listened to a lot of the songs and I said, ‘It would be great if you could give us some more options. Why don’t you go away and write a couple more songs?’ Which, to be honest, to say that to U2, it’s a big thing to say, because they had their songs for the album. But I dunno, I just felt that some of them weren’t… it all sounded very good and worthy, and for anyone else it would’ve been a good record, but for U2, they have to have magic, and it didn’t feel so magical. But after that came ‘Miracle Drug’, ‘A Man And A Woman’, ‘Vertigo’, most of ‘All Because Of You’ as well. ‘Original Of The Species’ was pretty much as it was, but that song had been incubating for a long time – it had been around since the last album. In fact ‘Love And Peace (Or Else)’, I think Flood originally worked on that on the Pop album. Wait ’til you see that live – that song’s just turned into a monster. It used to tear me apart, certainly after October, it was like, ‘Oh god, why don’t you play one or two of these songs live – and then when we get to record them, we’ll sort of know how they go!’ Ever since the first album, they’ve never played anything live before recording it. Which can make things extremely difficult.
 
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