spanisheyes
Forum Moderator, The Goal Is Soul
New U2 Album and Exclusive Interview
U2 Q&A on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Q: "Vertigo" is very immediate, very at it… what's the mood we're looking for? What are you after?
Bono: Fear, paranoia — these are the type of things we wanted from "Vertigo." The album ends in quite an ecstatic place, so we wanted to start off with a little bit of electric shock treatment, and it's a club and you're supposed to be having the time of your life, but you want to kill yourself. It's a light little ditty.
Q: So where is "Vertigo"?
Bono: It's a dizzy feeling, a sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only one way to go. That's not a dictionary definition; that's mine. And in my head I created a club called Vertigo with all these people in it and the music is not the music you want to hear and the people are not the people you want to be with. And then you just see somebody and she's got a cross around her neck, and you focus on it — because you can't focus on anything else. You find a little tiny fragment of salvation there.
Q: At one point, the album was being described as a rock 'n' roll record, maybe that was by Bono early on. Did it move on from that, as it's still very guitar orientated, isn't it?
Adam: I don't think it did move on. I think it is a guitar record. I think "Vertigo," "Love and Peace or Else," "City of Blinding Lights," "All Because of You," I think they're all rocky tunes. A lot of them are a kickback, if you like, to our very early days. It's like, with each year, we've gathered a little bit more and that's what we are now in a way, what those songs are.
Q: Was it a difficult record to make? You have made some difficult records in the past.
Bono: Well, no, I thought that it was quite easy, because Edge kick-started the thing. So I thought, wow, that's great, I don't have to kick him. So he was off and running, and I thought, wow, maybe I'll have to run very fast to keep up with him. And the ending was amazing, when Steve Lillywhite came in and did his usual "do your job, songs only four minutes long, what's the problem" — the English common sense. That was a joyful noise we made unto the Lord. And it was the middle, I think, where things got a bit messy. We'd invested a lot of time and energy, and we weren't getting to magic. We were getting close to it, right up next to it, you could almost smell it, you could just about kiss it, but you couldn't get your lips to it. We had a fantastic producer, Chris Thomas, who was working with us — brilliant guy, worked with The Beatles, Roxy Music, Sex Pistols — and we were getting great guitar sounds, great things, but I think finally we must have driven him crazy. We wore ourselves out, if not him. We needed a new lease of life, so we brought in Steve Lillywhite, who we've made all our records with in some shape or form, most of them anyway, and it was like the second half of the Cup final, we changed a few of the team, got some fresh legs, out onto the pitch and off we went. So I don't remember it as a difficult record, just the middle bit.
Q: The album is called How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. This is an archetypically left field title for a U2 record. Is it what people think or is it not what people think?
Edge: The title How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was actually a title that Bono came up with very early on, and at the time we got excited about it. But then, as we started thinking more on it, we thought, it's too clumsy and it also could be misinterpreted and end up becoming an albatross for the project. It just wouldn't go away. We thought of various other titles, but none of them seemed right or interesting or appropriate, and so we're back to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It's still got all the awkward qualities that we at first were uncertain about, but for a reason we couldn't even begin to explain, it just seems like that's the title of the record. You have to get out of the way when that happens. If something is right, you just have to acknowledge it, even if you don't necessarily have a great explanation for why it's right.
Bono: You don't hear people talking about atomic bombs very much these days, do you? It comes from my father's lexicon. His generation would call it the atomic bomb; we call it weapons of mass destruction. But although everyone in the world is trying to figure out how to put the toothpaste back in the tube, i.e., once you have this knowledge available on the Internet, are we ever going to be safe? Even though that is a thought that's hanging in the air, in my head How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is about my father, Bob, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bob. He died a couple of years ago, and his demise set me off on a journey, a rampage, a desperate hunt to find out who I was. And that resulted in a lot of these songs, so it's a lot more personal than a political record, I think.
Q: Do you feel as though U2 as a band understand each other, you can almost read each other now? Or is it as difficult as ever?
Adam: I think it's as difficult as ever. I don't think that it ever suddenly becomes easy.
Q: What about playing together?
Adam: I guess as we've had no comparison, it seems as easy or as difficult as it's ever been. You still have to work as hard to complete things and sometimes it's just there. I think we just do what we do.
Q: Looking ahead, is it daunting to think that you've got to learn these songs now to tour them and also you've got to drop other songs when you play?
Adam: Most of these songs are quite easy to play. There's a couple in there that are going to be tricky, but a lot of them are going to really play for themselves, compared to what we had to do to play the songs off Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop. It's going to be quite nice to just get out there and play these songs with very little electronic embellishment.
Q: You've done quite a lavish booklet that comes with the record?
Bono: The music business doesn't know what to do at the moment, because people are downloading music and they don't feel like it's stealing. And, of course, music's no different than making a chair, being a plumber or carpenter or a mechanic. It's what you do, and there's a value on what you do. I'm not as uptight about this as some people, but I just think, make the CDs that people buy more interesting and they won't download as much. These little thin booklets… make it something extraordinary. We thought, why don't we put out a proper book, a real book and pour our lives of the last few years into it? So we've made nearly a million of them. It's a special edition and it's just trying to make a more important object. When The Beatles put out Sgt. Pepper's, it wasn't just a listening experience — it was a thing you held in your hands and opened, it was a gatefold, it had all these characters in it. So that inspired us to try to do something special with the packaging. It's not for everybody, but for those that get it, I hope they enjoy it.
Q: And all the band members have contributed in different ways?
Bono: Yes, Larry did photographs and paintings — funny in a way, as I didn't know that Larry was interested in painting — and they're very Zen, very un-Larry. You think of Larry as much more computive than a meditative person. He came up with some very beautiful simple paintings — windows or doors, I don't really know what they are, just these planes. Edge was just up all night, as he usually is anyway, on the Internet, pulling down some weird shit. The book follows the record, in that it starts out with fear and ends with faith. So in the fear half, Edge has got all kinds of information on how to tie up a prisoner in your own home, the art of the samurai sword, how to build your own bomb shelter. He's researched all kinds of phobias. Then when we get into the faithful half, he's found other things on trust. And I just took stuff that I'd been writing in my diary and my notebooks, from little writings, they're scrawls and very primitive art, little drawings of my dad and the occasional rude one, just to keep me amused. Adam always sees what everyone else misses, and he was aware that this was probably our last album in this studio, so he just went photographing all the little details of the album in the studio: the kitchen, the cooker, the effects pedals. He's just documented Hanover Quay. And I think in the end, when… the people have gotten used to it, they'll probably be the photographs that everyone wants.
U2 Q&A on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Q: "Vertigo" is very immediate, very at it… what's the mood we're looking for? What are you after?
Bono: Fear, paranoia — these are the type of things we wanted from "Vertigo." The album ends in quite an ecstatic place, so we wanted to start off with a little bit of electric shock treatment, and it's a club and you're supposed to be having the time of your life, but you want to kill yourself. It's a light little ditty.
Q: So where is "Vertigo"?
Bono: It's a dizzy feeling, a sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only one way to go. That's not a dictionary definition; that's mine. And in my head I created a club called Vertigo with all these people in it and the music is not the music you want to hear and the people are not the people you want to be with. And then you just see somebody and she's got a cross around her neck, and you focus on it — because you can't focus on anything else. You find a little tiny fragment of salvation there.
Q: At one point, the album was being described as a rock 'n' roll record, maybe that was by Bono early on. Did it move on from that, as it's still very guitar orientated, isn't it?
Adam: I don't think it did move on. I think it is a guitar record. I think "Vertigo," "Love and Peace or Else," "City of Blinding Lights," "All Because of You," I think they're all rocky tunes. A lot of them are a kickback, if you like, to our very early days. It's like, with each year, we've gathered a little bit more and that's what we are now in a way, what those songs are.
Q: Was it a difficult record to make? You have made some difficult records in the past.
Bono: Well, no, I thought that it was quite easy, because Edge kick-started the thing. So I thought, wow, that's great, I don't have to kick him. So he was off and running, and I thought, wow, maybe I'll have to run very fast to keep up with him. And the ending was amazing, when Steve Lillywhite came in and did his usual "do your job, songs only four minutes long, what's the problem" — the English common sense. That was a joyful noise we made unto the Lord. And it was the middle, I think, where things got a bit messy. We'd invested a lot of time and energy, and we weren't getting to magic. We were getting close to it, right up next to it, you could almost smell it, you could just about kiss it, but you couldn't get your lips to it. We had a fantastic producer, Chris Thomas, who was working with us — brilliant guy, worked with The Beatles, Roxy Music, Sex Pistols — and we were getting great guitar sounds, great things, but I think finally we must have driven him crazy. We wore ourselves out, if not him. We needed a new lease of life, so we brought in Steve Lillywhite, who we've made all our records with in some shape or form, most of them anyway, and it was like the second half of the Cup final, we changed a few of the team, got some fresh legs, out onto the pitch and off we went. So I don't remember it as a difficult record, just the middle bit.
Q: The album is called How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. This is an archetypically left field title for a U2 record. Is it what people think or is it not what people think?
Edge: The title How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was actually a title that Bono came up with very early on, and at the time we got excited about it. But then, as we started thinking more on it, we thought, it's too clumsy and it also could be misinterpreted and end up becoming an albatross for the project. It just wouldn't go away. We thought of various other titles, but none of them seemed right or interesting or appropriate, and so we're back to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It's still got all the awkward qualities that we at first were uncertain about, but for a reason we couldn't even begin to explain, it just seems like that's the title of the record. You have to get out of the way when that happens. If something is right, you just have to acknowledge it, even if you don't necessarily have a great explanation for why it's right.
Bono: You don't hear people talking about atomic bombs very much these days, do you? It comes from my father's lexicon. His generation would call it the atomic bomb; we call it weapons of mass destruction. But although everyone in the world is trying to figure out how to put the toothpaste back in the tube, i.e., once you have this knowledge available on the Internet, are we ever going to be safe? Even though that is a thought that's hanging in the air, in my head How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is about my father, Bob, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bob. He died a couple of years ago, and his demise set me off on a journey, a rampage, a desperate hunt to find out who I was. And that resulted in a lot of these songs, so it's a lot more personal than a political record, I think.
Q: Do you feel as though U2 as a band understand each other, you can almost read each other now? Or is it as difficult as ever?
Adam: I think it's as difficult as ever. I don't think that it ever suddenly becomes easy.
Q: What about playing together?
Adam: I guess as we've had no comparison, it seems as easy or as difficult as it's ever been. You still have to work as hard to complete things and sometimes it's just there. I think we just do what we do.
Q: Looking ahead, is it daunting to think that you've got to learn these songs now to tour them and also you've got to drop other songs when you play?
Adam: Most of these songs are quite easy to play. There's a couple in there that are going to be tricky, but a lot of them are going to really play for themselves, compared to what we had to do to play the songs off Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop. It's going to be quite nice to just get out there and play these songs with very little electronic embellishment.
Q: You've done quite a lavish booklet that comes with the record?
Bono: The music business doesn't know what to do at the moment, because people are downloading music and they don't feel like it's stealing. And, of course, music's no different than making a chair, being a plumber or carpenter or a mechanic. It's what you do, and there's a value on what you do. I'm not as uptight about this as some people, but I just think, make the CDs that people buy more interesting and they won't download as much. These little thin booklets… make it something extraordinary. We thought, why don't we put out a proper book, a real book and pour our lives of the last few years into it? So we've made nearly a million of them. It's a special edition and it's just trying to make a more important object. When The Beatles put out Sgt. Pepper's, it wasn't just a listening experience — it was a thing you held in your hands and opened, it was a gatefold, it had all these characters in it. So that inspired us to try to do something special with the packaging. It's not for everybody, but for those that get it, I hope they enjoy it.
Q: And all the band members have contributed in different ways?
Bono: Yes, Larry did photographs and paintings — funny in a way, as I didn't know that Larry was interested in painting — and they're very Zen, very un-Larry. You think of Larry as much more computive than a meditative person. He came up with some very beautiful simple paintings — windows or doors, I don't really know what they are, just these planes. Edge was just up all night, as he usually is anyway, on the Internet, pulling down some weird shit. The book follows the record, in that it starts out with fear and ends with faith. So in the fear half, Edge has got all kinds of information on how to tie up a prisoner in your own home, the art of the samurai sword, how to build your own bomb shelter. He's researched all kinds of phobias. Then when we get into the faithful half, he's found other things on trust. And I just took stuff that I'd been writing in my diary and my notebooks, from little writings, they're scrawls and very primitive art, little drawings of my dad and the occasional rude one, just to keep me amused. Adam always sees what everyone else misses, and he was aware that this was probably our last album in this studio, so he just went photographing all the little details of the album in the studio: the kitchen, the cooker, the effects pedals. He's just documented Hanover Quay. And I think in the end, when… the people have gotten used to it, they'll probably be the photographs that everyone wants.
