All joking aside, I still take McGuinne$$' words over anything said by anyone else. One has to imagine he's the most pragmatic one in the U2 camp, and empty promises are just not the habit of a good businessman.
And there were two quotes, very clear, two months apart, the last one only six weeks ago. He doesn't blow casual smoke around, and that last quote was at an industry conference. Casually chatting to some journo in New Zealand could be argued as being one thing, but he wouldn't say "Hey global music industry! New U2 album coming in May!" unless he was anything other than very, very confident in that actually happening.
The silence is certainly scary, but going into a final wrap up/mixing phase certainly suggests that they got beyond their standard creative-commercial freak out phase with this. Which in turn would suggest that they have had it 'done' for some time now.
For them to successfully get beyond that stage, to have an album good to go and with essentially no option other than to release it within this very definite window, and then back out of it anyway, it could only be for one of two reasons:
- A very serious testicular issue, which I think would make the still highly-controversial-in-these-parts argument that U2 are effectively done as a creative force probably become a common agreement.
- This very latest Spider-man delay and the rumoured heavy Bono commitment to its resurrection mean that the kind of launch they feel comfortable with, or some other optimum-release-conditions thingy, is just not possible schedule wise. And I would think that Larry and Adam would abso-fucking-lutely
not be having that.