1.Boy (1980); 2.October (1981); 3.War (1983); 4.The Unforgettable Fire (1986); 5.The Joshua Tree (1987); 6.Rattle and Hum (1988); 7.Achtung Baby (1991); 8.Zooropa (1993); 9.Pop (1997); 10.All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000); 11.How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004); 12.No Line on the Horizon (2009)
Boy
Released October 20, 1980, Length 42:14 , Label Island Records
1.I Will Follow 3:36
2.Twilight 4:22
3.An Cat Dubh 4:47
4.Into the Heart 3:28
5.Out of Control 4:13
6.Stories for Boys 3:02
7.The Ocean 1:34
8.A Day Without Me 3:14
9.Another Time, Another Place 4:34
10.The Electric Co. 4:48
11.Shadows and Tall Trees 4:36
Boy is the debut album from Irish
Recording and composition
Originally, Joy Division producer Martin Hannett (who also produced U2's "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" single) was supposed to produce U2's debut album, but was too distraught after the suicide of Ian Curtis. Boy was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin with Steve Lillywhite producing. Lillywhite first came to fame with his work on the 1978's debut single of Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Hong Kong Garden" which featured a peculiar hook played by a glockenspiel. U2, who already listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees, used Lillywhite's skills to add the distinctive glockenspiel part on "I Will Follow".
Much of the album's lyrics focus on thoughts and frustrations of childhood. Some songs, including "I Will Follow", focus on the death of Bono's mother when he was 14. "I Will Follow" was also widely perceived as a religious song affirming the band's Christian faith, though this was not confirmed until 2007 in an NME interview. The album also has overtones of sexuality.
Some of the songs, including "An Cat Dubh" and "The Ocean", were written and recorded in the studio. Many of the songs were taken from the band's 40-song repertoire at the time, including "Stories for Boys", "Out of Control", and "Twilight". The Edge recorded all the songs using his natural stained Gibson Explorer.
The final track on the album, "Shadows and Tall Trees", gives a nod to William Golding ’s novel Lord of the Flies ; it shares its name with a chapter from the book.
Release
Boy was originally released on October 20, 1980.
The boy on the cover is Peter Rowen (brother of Bono's friend, Guggi (Virgin Prunes), and now a renowned Irish photographer). He also appears on the covers of Three, War, The Best of 1980–1990, and Early Demos. The photographer, Hugo McGuiness, and the sleeve designer, Steve Averill (a friend of bassist Adam Clayton), went on to work on several more U2 album covers. The image was changed to a distorted picture of the band for the American and Canadian release, due to the record company's fears that the band would be accused of pedophilia. Sandy Porter is credited as the photographer for the American cover. However, the photo of Rowen appeared on the inner sleeve of the album in the US and Canada. In 2008, the artwork of the remastered editions was standardised worldwide to that of the 1980 UK release.
In 2008, a remastered edition of the album was released, featuring remastered tracks, along with B-sides and rarities. Three different formats of the remaster were made available.
Singles
"A Day Without Me" and "I Will Follow" were released as singles. "I Will Follow" peaked at #20 on the Mainstream Rock charts, becoming a hit on college radio and established a buzz surrounding the group's debut. The album was preceded by Three, a three-song EP with different recordings of "Out of Control" and "Stories for Boys", as well as a song called "Boy/Girl".
Reception
Boy's highest position on the Billboard 200 was #63, but after the success of U2's later material, it re-entered the American charts for a lengthier spell. In the United Kingdom it reached #52. Despite criticisms of their live shows as predictable and Bono using "too much echo", these early live shows nevertheless helped demonstrate U2's potential, as critics noted that Bono was a very "charismatic" and "passionate" showman, reminiscent of a young Rod Stewart. Boy is the only U2 album from which every song (as well as every B-side) has been performed live at least once. The album finished in 18th place on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1981 Pazz & Jop critics' poll.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 417 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Three years later, Uncut ranked the album number 59 on its list of the "100 Greatest Debut Albums".
The album's sexual overtones led to its enthusiastic acceptance by gays in American gay clubs shortly after its release. Bono commented on this phenomenon, saying, "First of all we started out and made Boy, which is a sexual LP, and we changed the cover in America to stop any concern there might be about paedophilia and the like, because it was our first album. But import copies got in and, as you know, in America a lot of music is broken in gay clubs and so we had a gay audience, a lot of people who were convinced the music was specifically for them. So there was a misconception if you like."
Released October 21, 1981, Length 41:05, Label Island
1.Gloria 4:14
2.I Fall Down 3:39
3.I Threw a Brick Through a Window 4:54
4.Rejoice 3:37
2.I Fall Down 3:39
3.I Threw a Brick Through a Window 4:54
4.Rejoice 3:37
5.Fire 3:51
6.Tomorrow 4:39
7.October 2:21
8.With a Shout (Jerusalem) 4:02
9.Stranger in a Strange Land 3:56
10.Scarlet 2:53
11.Is That All? 2:59October is the second album by Irish
Recording
After completing their Boy Tour in February 1981, U2 began to write new material. ("Fire" had already been recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas while U2 took a break from the Boy Tour.) They wrote part of October during an extended sound check at First Avenue in Minneapolis. The band entered the studio in July 1981 to recordOctober, but the album's recording sessions were complicated when the briefcase containing Bono's lyrics was stolen by fans after a show in Portland, Oregon. The band already booked studio time through the end of August and thus had to continue recording in spite of this, even improvising lyrics on some songs. Bono said of the recording process of October, "I remember the pressure it was made under, I remember writing lyrics on the microphone, and at £50 an hour, that's quite a pressure. Lillywhite was pacing up and down the studio... he coped really well. And the ironic thing about October is that there's a sort of peace about the album, even though it was recorded under that pressure. A lot of people found October hard to accept at first, I mean, I used the word 'rejoice' precisely because I knew people have a mental block against it. It's a powerful word, it's lovely to say. It's implying more than 'get up and dance, baby.' I thinkOctober goes into areas that most rock 'n' roll bands ignore. When I listen to the album, something like 'Tomorrow,' it actually moves me." The briefcase was eventually recovered in October 2004, and Bono greeted its return as "an act of grace".
Composition
The record placed an emphasis on religion and spirituality, particularly in the songs "Gloria" (featuring a Latin chorus of"Gloria, in te domine"), "With a Shout (Jerusalem)", and "Tomorrow". About the album, Bono declared in 2005: "Can you imagine your second album—the difficult second album—it's about God?".
The songs mainly refine U2's formula of riff-rockers with songs such as "Gloria" and "Rejoice", but the band also expanded its musical palette in a few ways. In particular, guitarist The Edge incorporates piano in songs such as "I Fall Down", "Stranger In a Strange Land", "Scarlet", and "October". "Tomorrow", a lament to Bono's mother, who died when he was young, features Uilleann pipes played by Vinnie Kildruff later of In Tua Nua. "I Threw a Brick Through a Window" was one of the band's first songs to highlight drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., while "Gloria" highlights bassist Adam Clayton as it features three styles of playing in one song (using a pick for the most part, playing with fingers during the slide guitar by The Edge, then a "slap & pop" solo towards the end).
"Is That All?" borrows the riff from "Cry", an older song the band has used as an introduction to "The Electric Co." live.
ReleaseOctober was released, appropriately, on October 12, 1981. Both of the album's two singles preceded the album's release; "Fire" and "Gloria" were released as singles in July and October 1981, respectively.
October was the start of U2's vision of the music video as an integral part of the band's creative work, as it was released during a time that MTV was first becoming as popular as radio. The video for "Gloria" was directed by Meiert Avis and shot in the Canal Basin in Dublin.
In 2008, a remastered edition of the album was released, featuring remastered tracks, along with B-sides and rarities. Three different formats of the remaster were made available.
Reception
Album sales indicate that October is the least popular of U2's studio albums, and it is frequently at the bottom of many U2 fans' lists and polls. Only one of the songs from October, the title song, was featured in the band's The Best of 1980–1990 collection, as a hidden track at the end of the album, although both it and "Gloria" were War
Released February 28, 1983, Length 42:03, Label Island
1.Sunday Bloody Sunday 4:38
2.Seconds 3:09
3.New Year's Day 5:38
4.Like a Song... 4:48
5.Drowning Man 4:12
6.The Refugee 3:40
7.Two Hearts Beat as One 4:00
8.Red Light 3:46
9.Surrender 5:34
10."40" 2:36War is the third studio album by Irish rock band U2, released on 28 February 1983. The album has come to be regarded as U2's first overtly political album, in part because of songs like "Sunday Bloody Sunday", "New Year's Day", as well as the title, which stems from the band's perception of the world at the time; Bono stated that "war seemed to be the motif for 1982."
While the central themes of their earlier albums Boy and October focused on adolescence and spirituality, respectively, War focused on both the physical aspects of warfare, and the emotional aftereffects. The album has been described as the record where the band "turned pacifism itself into a crusade."
War was a commercial success for the band, knocking Michael Jackson 's Thriller from the top of the charts to become the band's first #1 album in the UK. It reached #12 in the U.S. and became their first Gold-selling album there. In 2003, the album was ranked number 221 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
RecordingU2 began recording War on 17 May 1982. The band took a break soon afterwards, as newlyweds Bono and Ali honeymooned in Jamaica. It has been noted that it was not a typical honeymoon, as Bono reportedly worked on the lyrics for the upcoming album. The lyrics to "New Year's Day" had its origins in a love song Bono wrote for his wife, but the song was reshaped and inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement.
The album's opener, "Sunday Bloody Sunday", an ardent protest song, stems from a guitar riff and lyric written by The Edge in 1982. Following an argument with his girlfriend, and a period of doubt in his own song-writing abilities, The Edge — "feeling depressed... channeled [his] fear and frustration and self-loathing into a piece of music." Early versions of the song opened with the line, "Don't talk to me about the rights of the IRA, UDA". After Bono had reworked the lyrics, the band recorded the song atWindmill Lane Studios in Dublin. The opening drum pattern soon developed into the song's hook. A local violinist, Steve Wickham, approached The Edge one morning at a bus stop and asked if U2 had any need for a violin on their next album. In the studio for only half a day, Wickham's electric violin became the final instrumental contribution to the song.
During the sessions for "Sunday Bloody Sunday", producer Steve Lillywhite encouraged drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. to use a click track, but Mullen was firmly against the idea. A chance meeting with Andy Newmark (of Sly & the Family Stone) — a drummer who used a click track religiously — changed Mullen's mind.Mullen used the click track to stay in time for other songs on the album. Mullen said of the album in a 1983 interview, "I think the drumming has always been pretty simple, I don't think it needs to be flashy. For War I use a click track, something I haven't used before, it's a way of keeping time in my headphones. When I listened to the music in time with the click track I knew I had to bring it down to the real basics. Hopefully for the next LP it will be more complicated, I'll move on. I think of it as a musical progression for myself because I learned a lot recording this album, just about my own style and that's what I wanted to do. I think there is a definite style on War where there isn't on the previous albums."
The studio version of "40" was recorded right at the end of the recording sessions for War. Bassist Adam Clayton had already left the studio, and the three remaining band members decided they didn't have a good song to end the album. Bono, The Edge, and Mullen Jr. quickly recorded the song with The Edge switching off to both the electric and bass guitar. Bono called the song "40" as he based the lyrics on Psalm 40. In live versions of the song, The Edge and Clayton switch roles, as Clayton plays guitar and Edge plays the bass.
Three of the tracks featured backing vocals by The Coconuts, of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. In the words of Steve Lillywhite, "they just happened to be in Dublin on tour, so we hung out with them and they came in and sang on "Surrender." So it was sort of random - this serious Irish rock band having the Coconuts on their album."
The album was titled War for several reasons; in 1982, Bono said that the album was called War because "War seemed to be the motif for 1982," adding that "Everywhere you looked, from the Falklands to the Middle East and South Africa, there was war. By calling the album War we're giving people a slap in the face and at the same time getting away from the cosy image a lot of people have of U2." The Edge said that "It's a heavy title. It's blunt. It's not something that's safe, so it could backfire. It's the sort of subject matter that people can really take a dislike to. But we wanted to take a more dangerous course, fly a bit closer to the wind, so I think the title is appropriate."
Composition
The sound of War is arguably harsher than that of the band's other albums, with the possible exception of Achtung Baby. A major reason for this is that The Edge uses far less delay and echo than in previous and subsequent works.
| “ | A lot of the songs on our last album were quite abstract, but War is intentionally more direct, more specific. But you can still take the title on a lot of different levels. We're not only interested in the physical aspects of war. The emotional effects are just as important, 'the trenches dug within our hearts'. People have become numb to violence. Watching the television, it's hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction. One minute you see something being shot on The Professionals, and the next you see someone falling through a window after being shot on the news. One is fiction and one is real life, but we're becoming so used to the fiction that we become numb to the real thing. War could be the story of a broken home, a family at war. | ” |
"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is considered to be among the greatest political protest songs, and has remained a staple of U2's live concerts for 25 years.
"Seconds" is a song about nuclear proliferation, and the possibility that Armageddon could occur by an accident. The track contains a clip from the 1982 documentary Soldier Girls. The Edge sings the first two stanzas, making it one of the rare occasions on which he sings lead vocals.
In continuing the political motif of the album, "New Year's Day" is about the Polish solidarity movement. In 2004, Rolling Stone placed it as the 427th greatest song of all time. The song remains a staple of the band's live set, and is their third most frequently performed song behind "I Will Follow" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)".
"Like a Song..." was intended as a message to those who believed that the band was too worthy, sincere, and not "punk" enough.Bono speculated that the song's punk attitude would have made more sense in the 1950s and 1960s, as opposed to the "dressing up" of the genre in the early 1980s. "Like a Song..." was only played live once.
"Drowning Man" is the fifth track on the album. Its sound is a departure from the other tracks in War as it is a quiet, atmospheric song heavily influenced by the work of the Comsat Angels.It was never performed live, although there are also unconfirmed reports that it was performed at a concert in 1983.
Other songs concern topics such as prostitution ("Red Light") and love ("Two Hearts Beat as One").
Release
The album was first released on 28 February 1983.
The boy on the cover is Peter Rowen (brother of Bono's friend, Guggi). He also appears on the covers of Boy, Three, The Best of 1980–1990, and Early Demos. Bono described the reasoning behind the cover: "Instead of putting tanks and guns on the cover, we've put a child's face. War can also be a mental thing, an emotional thing between loves. It doesn't have to be a physical thing."
Singles
In January 1983, "New Year's Day" was released internationally as the album's lead single. The single reached the top ten in the UK, and was the first release by the band to reach the Billboard Hot 100. In March 1983, "Two Hearts Beat as One" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" were released as singles in different regions. "Two Hearts Beat as One", a single in the US, UK, and Australia, reached #18 on the UK Singles Chart; "Sunday Bloody Sunday", released in Germany and the Netherlands , reached #3 on the Netherlands ' charts. "40" was not released as a commercial single, but rather as a promotional single in Germany.
Reception
War became U2's first #1 album in the UK, supplanting Michael Jackson 's Thriller at the top of the charts. The album finished in 6th place on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1983 Pazz & Jop critics' poll. In 1989, Warwas ranked #40 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s". In 2003, the album was ranked number 221 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
War Tour
In support of the album, the band began touring on 1 December 1982. The first month of shows, referred to as the "Pre-War Tour", preceded the album's release and the bulk of the tour, and was meant to showcase and test the new songs in a live setting. The War Tour proper began on 26 February 1983 and lasted until 30 November of that year. In total, the band played 110 gigs to promote War. Performances often consisted of Bono waving white flags, a sight which became associated with the band after a memorable show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre was captured by the concert film Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky and shown on MTV. The band also released a live EP in 1983 entitled Under a Blood Red Sky (named after a lyric in "New Year's Day"), a compilation of live recordings from the War Tour.The Unforgettable Fire
Released October 1, 1983, Length 42:38, Label Island
1.A Sort of Homecoming 5:28
2.Pride (In the Name of Love) 3:48
3.Wire 4:19
2.Pride (In the Name of Love) 3:48
3.Wire 4:19
4.The Unforgettable Fire 4:55
5.Promenade 2:35
6.4th of July 2:12
7.Bad 6:09
8.Indian Summer Sky 4:17
9.Elvis Presley and America 6:23
10.MLK 2:31The Unforgettable Fire is the fourth studio album by Irish
Recording began in May 1984 at Slane Castle, where the band lived, wrote, and recorded to find new inspiration. The album was completed in August 1984 at Windmill Lane Studios. It features atmospheric sounds and lyrics that lead vocalist Bono describes as "sketches". Two songs feature lyrical tributes to Martin Luther King Jr . The Unforgettable Fire received generally favourable reviews from critics and produced the band's biggest hit at the time, "Pride (In the Name of Love)", as well as the live favorite "Bad", a song about heroin addiction. A 25th Anniversary edition of the album was released in October 2009.
The title is a reference to "The Unforgettable Fire" —an art exhibit about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The band saw the exhibit while in Japan during their recording the album.
Background
The band had recorded their first three albums with producer Steve Lillywhite, and rather than create the "son of War", they sought experimentation. Both Lillywhite and the band agreed that it was time for a change of producers and not to "repeat the same formula". The band had considered using Jimmy Iovine to produce a new record. However, they found their early musical ideas for the album to be too "European" for an American producer.They also considered approaching Conny Plank, whose previous credits included Can and Kraftwerk, and Roxy Music producer Rhett Davies.U2 feared that following the overt rock of their 1983 War album and War Tour, they were in danger of becoming another "shrill", "sloganeering arena-rock band ". The success of the 1983 Under a Blood Red Skylive album and the Live at Red Rocks video, however, had given them artistic—and for the first time—financial room to move. Following a show at Dublin's Phoenix Park Racecourse in August 1983, one of the final dates of the War Tour, lead vocalist Bono spoke in metaphors about the band breaking up and reforming with a different direction. In the 10th issue of U2 magazine, issued in February 1984, Bono hinted at radical changes on the next album saying that he couldn't "sleep at night with the thought of it all" and that they were "undertaking a real departure". As bassist Adam Clayton recalls, "We were looking for something that was a bit more serious, more arty."
Guitarist The Edge had a long appreciation of musician Brian Eno's work, and admired his ambient and "weird works". The band were also fond of his work withTalking Heads. Having never worked with music such as U2's, Eno was also initially reluctant. When the band played him Under a Blood Red Sky, his eyes "glazed over" at its overt rockness. Eno had brought along his engineer Daniel Lanois to his meeting with U2 intending to recommend Lanois work with the band instead. Eno's earlier doubts were resolved by Bono's power of persuasion and his increasing perception of what he called "U2's lyrical soul in abundance", traits which had become less evident on the rockist War album. Eno commented that the band were "constantly struggling against it as if as if they were frightened of being overpowered by some softness". Eno was impressed by how they spoke, which was not in terms of music or playing, but in terms of their contributions to the "identity of the band as a whole". Eno and Lanois eventually agreed to produce the record. Eno explained that he focussed on the ideas and conceptual aspects, while Lanois handled the production aspects. In Bill Graham's words, Eno's task was to "help them mature a new, more experimental and European musical vocabulary". Island Records boss Chris Blackwell initially tried to talk them out of hiring Eno, believing that just when the band were about to achieve the highest levels of success, Eno would "bury them under a layer of avant-garde nonsense". Nick Stewart, also of Island Records, said that at the time he thought they were "mad", but that the group's decision to stretch themselves and find an extra dimension became the "turning point in their career".
Recording and production
Randy Ezratty's company Effanel Music, who recorded U2 in Boston and Red Rocks the previous year, was hired with his (then unique) portable 24-track recording system. His equipment was set up in the castle's library with cables run into the adjacent ballroom where the band played. The generator powering the studio often broke down and most of The Edge's guitar parts were recorded with the amplifier outside on the balcony with plastic over it to shelter it from the rain. The ballroom turned out to be too large, so recording was moved to a library in the castle which was smaller, surrounded them by books, and provided improved sound quality. Barry Devlin and his film crew visited the castle to make a documentary for RTE-TV about the sessions. The 30-minute programme, The Making of The Unforgettable Fire was released in 1985 on VHS as part of the The Unforgettable Fire Collection.The songs "Pride (In the Name of Love)", "The Unforgettable Fire", and "A Sort of Homecoming" were worked up at Bono's house in a Martello Tower in Bray Co. Wicklow. Recording for the album began in early May 1984, with a month-long session at Slane Castle, County Meath. Windmill Lane Studios, where they had recorded their first three albums, had no live room, so instead, Slane was chosen as a venue where they could record and play live in rooms with good sound quality. The band and crew stayed in the castle, and living together during the sessions fostered a camaraderie.They chose the castle's Gothic ballroom, which was specifically built for music with a 30-foot high domed ceiling, and it provided a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. It proved so relaxed, that one day, the band went so far as to record naked. "We got into gaffer art", commented Bono.Their approach at Slane was that rather than use effects and reverberation to revitalise usual studio sound, they would do the opposite and use a live room to "tame...[their]...wild sound".
According to The Edge, Eno was more interested in the more unconventional material and didn't take much interest in "Pride (In the Name of Love)" or "The Unforgettable Fire". However, Lanois would "cover for him" such that the two balanced each other out. Much of the album was later recast in the Windmill Lane Studios, where they recorded from 6 June to 5 August. Keyboards were used for the first time on a U2 album, with a Fairlight CMIused to work up a number of songs, the textures of which were later filled out with strings and other orchestration. At Windmill, tension grew between the production team and the band when largely because the band "couldn't finish anything". Twelve days before the official finishing date, Bono announced he couldn't finish the lyrics, and the band worked 20-hour days for the final two weeks. Bono later said he felt songs like "Bad" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" were left as incomplete "sketches."
Composition
A far more atmospheric album than the previous War, The Unforgettable Fire was at the time was the band's most dramatic change in direction. It has a rich and orchestrated sound and was the first U2 album with a cohesive sound. Under Lanois' direction, Larry's drumming became looser, funkier and more subtle, and Adam's bass became more subliminal, such that the rhythm section no longer intruded, but flowed in support of the songs.
The opening track, "A Sort of Homecoming" immediately shows the change in U2's sound. Like much of the album, the hard-hitting martial drum sound of War is replaced with a subtler polyrhythmic shuffle, and the guitar is no longer as prominent in the mix. Typical of the album, the track "The Unforgettable Fire", with a string arrangement by Noel Kelehan, has a rich, symphonic sound built from ambient guitar and driving rhythm; a lyrical "sketch" that is an "emotional travelogue" with a "heartfelt sense of yearning". The band cite a travelling Japanese art exhibit of the same name as inspiration for both the song and album title. The exhibition, which the band attended in Chicago, commemorated the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, the open-ended lyric, which Bono says "doesn't tell you anything" do not directly reference nuclear warfare. Rather, the lyrics are about travelling to Tokyo.
The album's lyrics are open to many interpretations, which alongside its atmospheric sounds, provides what the band often called a "very visual feel". Bono had recently been immersing himself in fiction, philosophy and poetry, and came to realise that his song writing mission—which up to that point had been a reluctant one on his behalf—was a poetic one. Bono felt songs like "Bad" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" were best left as incomplete "sketches", and he said that "The Unforgettable Fire was a beautifully out-of-focus record, blurred like an impressionist painting, very unlike a billboard or an advertising slogan."
On "Wire" Bono tried to convey his ambivalence to drugs. It is a fast-paced song built on a light funk drum groove. The song shows the influence of Talking Heads, with whom Eno had worked. Much of the song was improvised by Bono at the microphone.The melody and the chords to "Pride (In the Name of Love)" originally came out of a 1983 War Tour sound check in Hawaii. The song was originally intended to be about Ronald Reagan 's pride in America's military power, but Bono was influenced by Stephen B. Oates's book about Martin Luther King, Jr . titled Let The Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr . and a biography of Malcolm X to ponder the different sides of the civil rights campaigns, the violent and the non-violent. Bono would revise the lyrics to pay tribute to King. "Pride" went through many changes and re-recordings, as captured in a documentary included on theThe Unforgettable Fire Collection video. "Pride" is the most conventional song on the album—Tony Fletcher of Jamming! magazine said at the time it was most commercial song U2 had written—and it was chosen as the album's first single.
The ambient instrumental "4th of July" came about almost entirely through a moment of inspiration from Eno. At the end of a studio session, Eno overheard Clayton improvising a simple bass figure and recorded it "ad hoc" as it was being played. The Edge happened to join in, improvising a few guitar ideas over the top of Clayton's bass; neither knew they were being recorded. Eno added some treatments and then transferred the piece straight to two-track master tape — and that was the song finished, with no possibility of further overdubs.
Bono tried to describe the rush and then come down of heroin use in the song "Bad".
"Elvis Presley and America" is an improvisation, based on a slowed-down backing track from "A Sort of Homecoming", that takes the album's emphasis on feeling over clarity to its furthest extreme. Another song, "Indian Summer Sky", was a social commentary on the prison-like atmosphere of city living in a world of natural forces.
The sparse, dreamlike "MLK" was written as an elegy to King.
Album and single releases
The Unforgettable Fire was released on 1 October 1984. The album took its name and much of its inspiration from a Japanese travelling exhibition of paintings and drawings at The Peace Museum in Chicago by survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The band spent a few days driving around Ireland with photographer Anton Corbijn looking for potential locations. The castle depicted on the cover is Moydrum Castle. The band liked the image's ambiguity and the Irish mysticism they saw in it. The photograph, however, was a virtual copy of a picture on the cover of a 1980 book In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland by Simon Marsden, for which U2 had to pay compensation. It was taken from the same spot and used the same polarising filter technique, but with the addition of the four band members.
"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was released as the album's lead single in September 1984, and it was at that point the band's biggest hit. It cracked the UK Top 5 and the U.S. Top 40 and would ultimately become the group's most frequently played song in concerts.
"The Unforgettable Fire" was released as the second single in April 1985. The song became the band's third Top 10 hit in the UK, reaching #6 on the UK Singles Chart and #8 on the Dutch singles chart, but did not perform as well in the U.S.
The Joshua Tree
Released March 9, 1987, Length 50:11, Label Island
1.Where the Streets Have No Name 5:38
2.I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For 4:38
3.With or Without You 4:56
4.Bullet the Blue Sky 4:32
5.Running to Stand Still 4:18
6.Red Hill Mining Town 4:54
7.In God's Country 2:57
8.Trip Through Your Wires 3:33
9.One Tree Hill 5:23
10.Exit 4:136
11.Mothers of the Disappeared 5:12
The Joshua Tree is the fifth studio album by rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel LanoisBrian Eno, and was released on 9 March 1987 on Island Records. In contrast to the ambientThe Unforgettable Fire, U2 aimed for a harder-hitting sound on The Joshua Tree within the limitation of strict song structures. The album is influenced by American and Irish roots music and depicts the band's love-hate relationship with the United States, with socially and politically conscious lyrics embellished with spiritual imagery. and experimentation of their 1984 release
Inspired by American tour experiences, literature, and politics, U2 chose America as a theme for the record. Recording began in January 1986 in Ireland, and to foster a relaxed, creative atmosphere, the group recorded in two houses, in addition to two professional studios. Several events during the sessions helped shape the conscious tone of the album, including the band's participation in A Conspiracy of Hope tour, the death of roadie Greg Carroll, and lead vocalist Bono's travels to Central America. Recording was completed in November and additional production continued into January 1987. Throughout the sessions, U2 sought a "cinematic" quality for the record that would evoke a sense of location, in particular, the open spaces of America. They represented this in the sleeve photography depicting them in American desert landscapes.
The album received critical acclaim, topped the charts in over 20 countries, and sold in record-breaking numbers. According to Rolling Stone, the album increased the band's stature "from heroes to superstars". It produced the hit singles "With or Without You", "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and "Where the Streets Have No Name". The album won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1988. The group supported the record with the successful Joshua Tree Tour. Frequently cited as one of the greatest albums in rock history, The Joshua Tree is one of the world's all-time best-selling albums, with over 25 million copies sold. In 2007, U2 released a 20th anniversary remastered edition of the record.
Before The Joshua Tree, U2 had released four studio albums and were an internationally successful band, particularly as a live act having toured every year in the 1980s. The group's stature and the public's anticipation for a new album grew following their 1984 record, The Unforgettable Fire, their subsequent tour, and their participation in Live Aid in 1985. U2 began writing new material in mid-1985 following the Unforgettable Fire Tour.
Band manager Paul McGuinness recounted that The Joshua Tree originated from the band's "great romance" with the United States, as the group had toured the country for up to five months per year in the first half of the 1980s. In the lead up to the album sessions, lead vocalist BonoNorman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver so as to understand, in the words of Hot Press editor Niall Stokes, "those on the fringes of the promised land, cut off from the American dream". Following a 1985 humanitarian visit to Ethiopia with his wife Ali, Bono said, "Spending time in Africa and seeing people in the pits of poverty, I still saw a very strong spirit in the people, a richness of spirit I didn't see when I came home... I saw the spoiled child of the Western world. I started thinking, 'They may have a physical desert, but we've got other kinds of deserts.' And that's what attracted me to the desert as a symbol of some sort."
In 1985, Bono participated in Steven Van Zandt's anti-apartheid Sun City project and spent time with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. When Richards and Jagger played blues, Bono was embarrassed by his lack of familiarity with the genre, as most of U2's musical knowledge began with punk rock in their youth in the mid-1970s. Bono realised that U2 "had no tradition", and he felt as if they "were from outer space". This inspired him to write the blues-influenced song "Silver and Gold", which he recorded with Richards and Ronnie Wood. Until that time, U2 had been antipathetic towards roots music, but after spending time with The Waterboys and fellow Irish band Hothouse Flowers, they felt a sense of indigenous Irish music blending with American folk music. Nascent friendships with Bob Dylan , Van Morrison and Richards encouraged U2 to look back to rock's roots and focused Bono on his skills as a songwriter and lyricist. He explained, "I used to think that writing words was old-fashioned, so I sketched. I wrote words on the microphone. For The Joshua Tree, I felt the time had come to write words that meant something, out of my experience." Dylan told Bono of his own debt to Irish music, while Bono further demonstrated his interest in music traditions in his duet with Irish Celtic and folk group Clannad on the track "In a Lifetime".
The band wanted to build on the textures of The Unforgettable Fire, but in contrast to that record's often out-of-focus experimentation, they sought a harder-hitting sound within the limitations of more strict song structures. The group referred to this approach as working within the "primary colours" of rock music—guitar, bass, and drums. Guitarist The Edge was more interested in the European atmospherics of The Unforgettable Fire and was initially reluctant to follow the lead of Bono, who, inspired by Dylan's instruction to "go back", sought a more American, bluesy sound. Despite not having a consensus on musical direction, the group members agreed that they felt disconnected from the dominant synthpop and New Wave music In late 1985, U2 moved to drummer Larry Mullen, Jr.'s newly purchased home to work on material written during The Unforgettable Fire Tour. This included demos that would evolve into "With or Without You", "Red Hill Mining Town", and "Trip Through Your Wires", and a song called "Womanfish". The Edge recalled it as a difficult period with a sense of "going nowhere", although Bono was set on America as a theme for the album. of the time, and they wanted to continue making music that contrasted with these genres.
Recording and production
Based on their success with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois on The Unforgettable Fire, U2 wanted the duo to produce their new album. Mullen was excited about working with them again, as he felt the pair, Lanois in particular, were the band's first producers who "really [took] an interest in the rhythm section". Mark "Flood" Ellis was engineer for the sessions, marking the first time he worked with U2. The band was impressed by his work with Nick Cave, and Bono's friend Gavin Friday recommended Flood based on their work experiences together when Friday was a member of the Virgin Prunes. The band asked Flood for a sound that was "very open... ambient... with a real sense of space of the environment you were in", which he thought was a very unusual request at that time.
Intending to release an album in late 1986, U2 set up a studio in January of that year in Danesmoate House, a Georgian house in Rathfarnham in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. Their plan was to create atmosphere and inspiration there, much like their use of Slane CastleThe Unforgettable Fire sessions in 1984. While the band mainly recorded downstairs, their friends Guggi and Gavin Friday used the upstairs rooms to paint, and Bono regularly joined them on trips into Dublin to work with artist Charlie Whisker. A makeshift control room with tape machines, a mixing desk, and other outboard equipment was set up in the dining room, with the adjacent drawing room used for recording and performing. The large doors separating the rooms were replaced with a glass screen, and to maintain a relaxed "non-studio" atmosphere for the sessions, the control room was dubbed the "lyric room" and the recording space was called the "band room". The band found the house to have a very creative atmosphere. The large drawing room, with tall ceiling and wooden floors, created an "ear-splitting" drum sound that while difficult to work with, produced takes that ended up on the finished album. Lanois said that it "was loud, but it was really good loud, real dense, very musical. In my opinion it was the most rock and roll room of the lot." He thought the room sounded better than Slane Castle, and he was particularly impressed with the room's "low mid-range ... where the music lives", a property that he believes was a major factor in the success of The Joshua Tree. for
U2 began with their usual method of sorting through tapes from soundcheck jams, working through Bono's lyric book, and recording jam sessions. One aspect of their recording methods, however, changed after The Unforgettable Fire sessions; rather than recording each instrument separately and layering them into the mix, for The Joshua Tree, U2 recorded all but two of the songs "live". U2's songwriting methods were also developing; not all material was being worked out in band sessions, rather Bono and The Edge often brought basic song ideas to the rest of the group. Eno and Lanois intentionally worked with the band at alternate times—one producer for a week or two, followed by the other. Eno and Lanois encouraged an interest in older songs, especially American roots music. More contemporary references included the textural guitar work of The Smiths and My Bloody Valentine. The band's musical vocabulary improved after their previous album, facilitating communication and collaboration with the production team . One of the first songs worked on was "Heartland", which originated during The Unforgettable FireRattle and Hum. Supplementary recording sessions at STS Studios in Dublin with producer Paul Barrett saw the development of "With or Without You" and the genesis of "Bullet the Blue Sky". The arrangements for "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" were written early in the Danesmoate sessions, giving the band the confidence to experiment. sessions and was later released on the band's 1988 album
U2 interrupted the sessions to join Amnesty International's A Conspiracy of Hope Tour in June 1986. Rather than distract the band, the tour added extra intensity and power to their new music and provided extra focus on what they wanted to say. For bassist Adam Clayton, the tour validated the "rawness of content" and their attempts to capture the "bleakness and greed of America under Ronald Reagan ". In July, Bono travelled with his wife Ali to Nicaragua and El Salvador and saw firsthand the distress of peasants bullied by political conflicts and US military intervention, experiences which formed the basis of the lyrics for "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Mothers of the Disappeared". The group experienced a tragedy in July when Bono's personal assistant and roadie Greg Carroll was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin. The 26-year-old's death overwhelmed the U2 organisation, and the band travelled to his native New Zealand to attend his traditional Māori funeral.
On 1 August 1986, U2 regrouped at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin to resume work on the album. Writing and recording continued for the rest of the year, with the band also using Danesmoate House and The Edge's newly bought home, Melbeach. "Mothers of the Disappeared" and "Bullet the Blue Sky" were among the songs that the group made progress on at Melbeach. Lanois said "the bulk of the record was done at The Edge's house, even though the Danesmoate sessions were the backbone of the tonality of the record—we got a lot of the drums done in there." In August, Robbie Robertson, the former guitarist and chief songwriter for The Band, visited Dublin to complete an album that Lanois was producing; Robertson recorded two tracks with U2 that appear on his self-titled solo album.
A creative spurt in October resulted in new song ideas. However, they were shelved at Eno's suggestion lest the band miss the deadline for the album's completion. Recording for The Joshua Tree wrapped up in November 1986. Rough mixes had been created throughout the sessions after each song was recorded to, in Lanois' words, take "snapshots along the way ... because sometimes you go too far". The Edge explained that the arrangement and production of each song was approached individually and that while there was a strong uniform direction, they were prepared to "sacrifice some continuity to get the rewards of following each song to a conclusion". The final weeks were a frantic rush to finish, with the band and production crew all suffering exhaustion. Lanois and Pat McCarthy mixed songs at Melbeach on an AMEK 2500 mixing desk, where, without console automation, they needed three people to operate the console. Eno and Flood had minimal involvement with the final mixes. In late December, U2 hired Steve Lillywhite, producer of their first three albums, to remix the potential singles. His job was to make the songs more appealing to commercial radio, and his eleventh-hour presence and changes caused discontent among the production crew, including Eno and Lanois. Lillywhite's remixing was done on an SLL desk and extended into the new year.
Following the completion of the album proper, U2 returned to the studio in January 1987 to complete the new material they shelved in October. These tracks, which included "Walk to the Water", "Luminous Times (Hold Onto Love)", and "Spanish Eyes", were completed as B-sides for the planned singles. The song "Sweetest Thing" was left off the album as a B-side, as the band felt it was incomplete and did not fit with the other songs. The band later expressed regret that it had not been completed for the album. The track was re-recorded as a single for the group's 1998 compilation The Best of 1980–1990. The band considered releasing The Joshua Tree as a double-album that would have included the B-sides. Bono was the most vocal proponent of the idea, whereas The Edge argued for the 11-track version that was ultimately released. U2 agreed that one track, "Birdland", was too strong for a B-side and they held it for a future album release. In 2007, a re-recorded version of the song, retitled "Wave of Sorrow (Birdland)", was included with the 20th anniversary edition of the album.
On completion of The Joshua Tree, Bono said that he was "as pleased with the record as I can ever be pleased with a record". Although he was "very rarely pleased" with their finished albums to that point, he thought the new record was their most complete since their first. Clayton bought Danesmoate House in 1987, and it remains his Dublin home.
Composition
Music
U2 is credited with composing all of The Joshua Tree's music. The group's sound on the album draws from American and Irish roots music more than previous albums, following the counsel and influence of Bob Dylan , Van Morrison, and Keith Richards. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" has strong gospel influences, with Bono singing of spiritual doubt in an upper register and Eno, Lanois, and The Edge providing choir-like backing vocals. The slow piano-based balladslide acoustic guitar and harmonica. "Trip Through Your Wires", another song on which Bono plays harmonica, was described by Niall Stokes as a "bluesy romp".
The Edge's guitar playing on The Joshua Tree demonstrates what came to be his trademark sound. His minimalist style sharply contrasted with the emphasis on virtuosity and speed during the heavy metal era of the 1980s. The Edge views musical notes as "expensive", preferring to play as few of them as possible and instead focus on simpler parts that serve the moods of the songs. Much of this was achieved with a delay effect, contributing to a chiming, echo-laden sound. For example, the in the introduction of the opening track "Where the Streets Have No Name" is a repeated six-note arpeggio, with delay used to repeat notes. The riffs to "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "With or Without You" also prominently use delay, with Bono likening the guitar hook from the former track to "chrome bells".
The Edge continued using ambient guitar playing techniques that he first employed on The Unforgettable Fire; on "With or Without You", he used a prototype of the Infinite Guitar to add layers of sustained notes, an approach he first took on his 1986 solo album, the Captive soundtrack. On other songs, his guitar playing is more aggressive; "Exit" was described by Colin Hogg as a "decidedly scary... guitar-driven barrage", while Andrew Mueller said the guitar sounds from "Bullet the Blue Sky" resemble fighter planes. The Edge developed the harsh, feedback-charged guitar part for the latter song at Bono's instruction to "put El Salvador through an amplifier", after Bono returned angry from a visit to war-torn El Salvador. Bono also contributed to songwriting on guitar; the Spanish guitar melody in "Mothers of the Disappeared" originated from a song that he composed in Ethiopia to teach children about basic hygiene.
Much like on past records, Bono exhibits an expressive, open-throated vocal delivery, which many critics labelled as "passionate". Spin found that the group's exploration of roots music resulted in Bono's style expanding, saying he "commands the full whisper-to-shout range of blues mannerisms". Bono attributes this maturation to "loosening up" and "discover[ing] other voices", and to employing more restraint in his singing. His vocals became, in the words of Thom Duffy, more "dynamic" than they had been on previous records. On "Where the Streets Have No Name", his voice varies greatly in its timbre (as writer Mark Butler describes, "he sighs; he moans; he grunts; he exhales audibly; he allows his voice to crack") and timing by his usage of rubato to slightly offset the sung notes from the beat. For author Susan Fast, "With or Without You" marks the first track on which he "extended his vocal range downward in an appreciable way".
Lyrics
Bono is credited as the album's sole lyricist. Thematically, the album juxtaposes antipathy towards the United States against the band's deep fascination with the country, its open spaces, freedoms, and ideals. Anger is directed particularly at the perceived greed of the Ronald Reagan administration and its foreign policy in Central America. Bono said, "I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America", hence the album's working title, The Two Americas. The band wanted music with a sense of location and a "cinematic" quality, and the album consequently drew on imagery created by American writers whose works the band read. Having toured the United States extensively in the past, the group were inspired by the country's geography. As such, the desert, rain, dust, and water appear as lyrical motifs throughout the record. In many cases, the desert is used as a metaphor for "spiritual drought". One track that chiefly represents these themes is "In God's Country", which critics interpreted as addressing America's role as the "promised land". Clayton explained the impact of the desert imagery: "The desert was immensely inspirational to us as a mental image for this record. Most people would take the desert on face value and think it's some kind of barren place, which of course is true. But in the right frame of mind, it's also a very positive image, because you can actually do something with blank canvas, which is effectively what the desert is."
Political and social concerns were the basis for several tracks. Bono wrote the lyrics to "Bullet the Blue Sky" after visiting El Salvador and witnessing how US military intervention in the country's civil war hurt the local people. This trip also inspired "Mothers of the Disappeared", after Bono met members of COMADRES—the Mothers of the Disappeared—a group of women whose children were killed or "disappeared" at the hands of the government during the Salvadoran Civil War. The 1984 UK mining strike inspired the lyrics to "Red Hill Mining Town", which Bono wrote from the perspective of a couple affected by the strike. The story of a heroin-addicted couple was the basis for "Running to Stand Still", which Bono set in Dublin's Ballymun Flats. For "Where the Streets Have No Name", he wrote the lyrics in response to the idea that, in Belfast, a person's religion and income can be deduced based on the street they live on. "Exit" portrays a psychotic killer, although Clayton suggests the line "He saw the hands that build could also pull down" is also a jab at the US government's conflicting roles in international relations.
Bono described 1986 as "an incredibly bad year" for him, which was reflected in the lyrics. His marriage was under strain, in part due to the album's long gestation period, the band were criticised by the Irish media for their involvement in the Self Aid event, and his personal assistant Greg Carroll was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin. Bono said, "That's why the desert attracted me as an image. That year was really a desert for us." "With or Without You" was written while he was struggling to reconcile his wanderlust as a musician with his domestic responsibilities. "One Tree Hill", named after a volcanic peak in Carroll's native New Zealand, describes how Bono felt at Carroll's funeral. The album is dedicated to his memory.
The group's religious faith was a source of inspiration for many lyrics. On "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", Bono affirms this faith but sings of spiritual doubt ("I believe in Kingdom Come"... "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for"). Some critics surmised that the place Bono is referring to on "Where the Streets Have No Name" is Heaven. These two songs were singled out by some critics as demonstrating that the band was on a "spiritual quest". Several critics interpreted "With or Without You" in both romantic and spiritual manners. Biblical references are made on other songs like "Bullet the Blue Sky" ("Jacob wrestled the angel", images of fire and brimstone) and "In God's Country" ("I stand with the sons of Cain"). Thom Duffy interpreted the album as an exploration of the "uncertainty and pain of a spiritual pilgrimage through a bleak and harsh world".
Packaging and title
The album sleeve was designed by Steve Averill, and the band developed the idea for it from the record's "imagery, and cinematic location" in the desert. The initial concept for the sleeve was to represent where the desert met civilisation, and accordingly, one of the provisional titles for the album was The Desert Songs. They asked their photographer Anton Corbijn to search for locations in the United States that would capture this. From 14–16 December 1986, the band travelled with Corbijn and Averill on a bus around the Mojave Desert in California for a three-day photo shoot. The group stayed in small hotels and shot in the desert landscape, beginning at the ghost town of Bodie before moving to locations such as Zabriskie Point and other sites in Death Valley. For the shoot, Corbijn rented a panoramic camera to capture more of the desert landscapes, but having no prior experience with the camera, he was unfamiliar with how to focus it. This led to him focusing on the background and leaving the band slightly out of focus. Corbijn said, "Fortunately there was a lot of light." He later recounted that the main idea of the shoot was to juxtapose "man and environment, the Irish in America".
On the evening after the first day's shooting, Corbijn told the band about Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), hardy and twisted plants in the deserts of the American Southwest , and he suggested their use on the sleeve. Bono consulted the Bible and was pleased to discover the religious significance of the plant's etymology; early settlers, according to Mormon legend, named the plant after the Old Testament prophet Joshua, as the tree's stretching branches reminded them of Joshua raising his hands in prayer. The following day, Bono declared that the album should be titled The Joshua Tree. That day, while driving on Route 190, they spotted a lone-standing tree in the desert, unusual since the plant is usually found in groups. Corbijn had been hoping to find a single tree, as he thought it would result in better photographs than if he shot the band amongst a group of trees. They stopped the bus and photographed with the lone plant for about 20 minutes, something The Edge called "fairly spontaneous". Despite shooting in the desert, the group dealt with cold weather. Bono explained, "it was freezing and we had to take our coats off so it would at least look like a desert. That's one of the reasons we look so grim." The final day of shooting was spent in snow-covered ghost towns, much to the displeasure of Bono.
Corbijn's original idea for the sleeve was to have a shot of the Joshua tree on the front, with the band in a continuation of the photograph on the back. Ultimately, separate photographs were used for each side of the sleeve; an image of the group at Zabriskie Point was placed on the front, while an image of them with the tree appears on the reverse side. Rolling Stone believes the title and the images of the tree befit an album concerned with "resilience in the face of utter social and political desolation, a record steeped in religious imagery". In 1991, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 97 on its list of the "100 Greatest Album Covers of All Time".The tree photographed for the sleeve fell around 2000, yet the site remains a popular attraction for U2 fans to pay tribute to the group. One person inserted a plaque into the ground reading, "Have you found what you're looking for?", in reference to the album's track "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".
Release
Just prior to the release of The Joshua Tree, Bono was stricken with a sudden panic that the completed album was not good enough. He contemplated calling the production plants to order a halt of the record's pressing, but he ultimately held off. Island Records spent over $100,000 on store displays advertising the album; president Lou Maglia called it "the most complete merchandising effort ever assembled". The Joshua Tree was released on 9 March 1987, the first new release to be made available on the compact disc, vinyl record, and cassette tape formats on the same date. Record stores in Britain and Ireland opened at midnight to accommodate the large amount of fans who had queued outside to buy the album.
The Joshua Tree became, at the time, the fastest-selling album in British history, selling over 300,000 copies in two days. On 21 March 1987, it debuted on the UK Albums Chart at number one, spending two weeks at the top position, and it remained on the chart for 163 weeks. On the US Billboard Top Pop Albums chart, the album debuted on 4 April 1987 at number seven, the highest debut for a studio album in the US in almost seven years. Within three weeks, it topped the chart, where it remained for nine consecutive weeks. The album spent a total of 101 weeks on the Billboard Top Pop Albums, 35 of them in the top 10. On 13 May 1987, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album triple-platinum. All of the group's previous albums re-entered the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart in 1987. In Canada, the album debuted at number 51 on the RPM Top 100 Albums chart on 21 March 1987, and climbed to number one just two weeks later. Within 14 days of release, it sold 300,000 units in Canada and was certified triple-platinum. The Joshua Tree topped the albums charts in 19 other countries, including Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Sweden. Rolling Stone declared that the album increased the band's stature "from heroes to superstars". It was the first album by any artist to sell one million copies on CD in the US. U2 became the fourth rock band to be featured on the cover of Time (following The Beatles , The Band, and The Who ), who declared that U2 was "Rock's Hottest Ticket".
"With or Without You" was released as the lead single on 21 March 1987, with the B-sides "Luminous Times (Hold on to Love)" and "Walk to the Water". The single quickly topped the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the band's first number-one hit in America. The song topped the singles chart in Canada, while reaching number four in the UK and number two in the Netherlands . The group originally planned to use "Red Hill Mining Town" as the second single. However, the group were unhappy with the music video filmed by Neil Jordan, and Bono and Mullen had difficulty performing the song during rehearsals. Ultimately, the group canceled the single. Instead, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" was chosen as the second single, and it was released in May 1987 with the tracks "Spanish Eyes" and "Deep in the Heart" as B-sides. Like its predecessor, it topped the Hot 100, giving U2 consecutive number-one singles in the US. The single peaked at number six in the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands . By May, sales of the album surpassed 7 million copies worldwide.
"Where the Streets Have No Name" was released in August 1987 as the third single, with "Sweetest Thing", "Silver and Gold", and "Race Against Time" as B-sides. The single reached number one in the Netherlands , number four on the UK Singles Chart, and number 13 in the US. The album's first three singles all topped the Irish Singles Charts, while charting within the top 20 of the singles charts in the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands . "In God's Country" was released as a fourth single exclusively in North America in November 1987, peaking at number 44 on the Hot 100. "One Tree Hill" was released as a fourth single in Australia and New Zealand in March 1988, and having been written for the New Zealand-native Carroll, it reached number one in his home country. By the end of 1988, The Joshua Tree had sold more than 14 million copies worldwide.
In 1996, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab remastered the album and released it as a special gold CD. This edition rectified the incorrect track splitting between "One Tree Hill" and "Exit" that affected some CD releases; the quiet coda that concludes "One Tree Hill" had previously been included in the same track as "Exit".
The Joshua Tree received almost universally positive album reviews, the best of U2's career to that point. Rolling Stone wrote, "For a band that's always specialized in inspirational, larger-than-life gestures—a band utterly determined to be Important—The Joshua Tree could be the big one, and that's precisely what it sounds like." The review described the album's sound as "wed[ding] the diverse textures of The Unforgettable Fire to fully formed songs, many of them as aggressive as the hits on War". Steve Morse of The Boston Globe echoed these sentiments in his review, stating, "It's another spiritual progress report, enwrapped in music that strikes a healthy balance between the lushness of their last album, 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, and the more volcanic rock of their early years." Morse called it "their most challenging work to date" and the "most rewarding rock record of the new year". Q gave the album a rating of five stars, noting that "their reinvention of stadium rock sounds as impassioned as ever" and that the album strikes "a finely balanced mix of intimacy and power". NME praised the album as "a better and braver record than anything else that's likely to appear in 1987... It's the sound of people still trying, still looking..." In a five-star review, Thom Duffy of the Orlando Sentinel said the songs have "exultant power" that, "like the Joshua Tree's branches, stretch upward in stark contrast to their barren musical surroundings on rock radio". He praised the musicianship of the group members, calling Bono's vocals "wrenching", the rhythm section of Mullen and Clayton "razor-sharp", and The Edge's guitar playing "never... better".
The New Zealand Herald gave the album a five-star rating, calling it "the most compelling collection of music yet from a band that has cut its career with passionate, exciting slashes". The newspaper judged that the record's "power lies in its restraint" and that there is an "urgency underlying virtually all of the 11 songs". InTime's cover story on U2, Jay Cocks called the album the band's best, commenting that it had both commercial and thematic depth. Spin called The Joshua Tree their "first wholly successful album because it finally breaks free from the seductive but limiting chant-and-drone approach of earlier material". The review stated, "There isn't a bad song on the record" and that "every one has a hook". The magazine praised U2 for eschewing ambient experimentation in favour of uncomplicated but layered arrangements. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times said the album "confirms on record what this band has been slowly asserting for three years now on stage: U2 is what the Rolling Stones ceased being years ago—the greatest rock and roll band in the world". Hilburn noted that the band expanded on the "sketches" from The Unforgettable Fire with "sometimes breathtaking signs of growth", playing more "tailored and assured" music. Hot Press editor and longtime U2 supporter Bill Graham said that "The Joshua Tree rescues rock from its decay, bravely and unashamedly basing itself in the mainstream before very cleverly lifting off into several higher dimensions," and that U2 "must be taken very seriously indeed after this revaluation of rock".
John Rockwell of The New York Times was complimentary of the band for expanding its musical range, singling out their exploration of other genres and the combination of The Edge's "obsessive, repetitive guitar textures" with Eno's "eerie synthesizer coloration". Rockwell was more critical, though, of Bono's vocals, which he said were "marred throughout by sobbing affectation" and sounded too much like other singers, resulting in a "curious loss of individuality". The Houston Chronicle gave the album a three-and-a-half star review, calling it "music that both soothes and inspires, music that is anthemic, music with style". The publication called it a "natural sequel" to The Unforgettable Fire that "build[s] on the band's new-found sense of dynamics". The reviewer, however, believed the group took itself too seriously, resulting in a record that is "not a whole lot of fun, bordering on the pretentious", and he noted that he lost interest by its second side. In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic rated the album a perfect five stars, saying, "their focus has never been clearer, nor has their music been catchier". Erlewine found it ironic the band achieved its greatest success with an album filled with such dark lyrical content. His review concluded, "Never before have U2's big messages sounded so direct and personal."
Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone compared the album to Bruce Springsteen 's Born in the U.S.A., stating that both records "lifted a populist artist to mega-stardom", and that the musicians' uplifting live shows and the "sheer aural pleasure" of the two records obscured their foreboding nature. DeCurtis summarized The Joshua Tree's examination of America both lyrically and musically as such:
"The wild beauty, cultural richness, spiritual vacancy and ferocious violence of America are explored to compelling effect in virtually every aspect ofThe Joshua Tree—in the title and the cover art, the blues and country borrowings evident in the music ... Indeed, Bono says that 'dismantling the mythology of America' is an important part of The Joshua Tree's artistic objective."
The album placed fourth on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1987 Pazz & Jop critics' poll. At the 30th Grammy Awards in 1988, U2 won their first two Grammy Awards—Album of the Year and Best Rock Performance By a Duo or Group With Vocal.
The Joshua Tree Tour
Following the release of The Joshua Tree, U2 staged the worldwide Joshua Tree Tour. It began in April 1987, and comprising 109 shows over three legs, it continued through December. The first and third legs visited the US, while the second leg toured Europe. Before The Joshua Tree, the band had been proportionally more successful as a live act than as a record-selling act. The album brought them to a new level of mega-stardom, and the tour sold out arenas and stadiums around the world—the first time they had consistently visited venues of that size—while playing to over 3 million people. Songs from the album became staples of the tour setlists, as the group regularly performed eight of the record's eleven tracks, and the only song not to be played was "Red Hill Mining Town".
Like their previous tours, The Joshua Tree Tour was a minimalistic, austere production, and U2 used this outlet for addressing political and social concerns.One such issue was Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's canceling the state 's observance of Martin Luther King, Jr . Day. Throughout the tour, the group continued to explore American roots music: they collaborated with folk artist Bob Dylan , blues musician B. B. King , and Harlem's New Voices of Freedom gospel choir; U2 also visited Graceland and Sun Studios in Memphis, where they recorded new material. These new songs and the band's experiences on tour were documented for the 1988 Rattle and Hum album and Phil Joanou-directed motion picture.
The tour grossed $40 million, but despite its commercial success and positive reviews, U2 were dissatisfied creatively, and Bono believed they were musically unprepared for their success. Mullen said, "We were the biggest, but we weren't the best", and for Bono the tour was "one of the worst times of [their] musical life".On the road , the group dealt with death threats, along with injuries that Bono sustained from performing. The band hinted that the stresses of touring led them to enjoy the "rock and roll lifestyle" they previously avoided.
Legacy
Legacy
The Joshua Tree is often cited as one of the greatest albums in rock history. In 1989, two years after its release, it was rated number three on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Albums of the 80's". The Guardian collated worldwide data in 1997 from a range of renowned critics, artists, and radio DJs, who placed the record at number 57 in the list of the "100 Best Albums Ever". In 2001, music television channel VH1placed it at number 15 on their "100 Greatest Albums of Rock & Roll" countdown from their series The Greatest. That same year, the network's viewers voted The Joshua Tree the greatest album ever made. Also, the album made a significant impact in the Christian music market. CCM Magazine ranked the album at #6 on the 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music list. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 26 on their list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time"; it was U2's best position on the list. "The Definitive 200" list, compiled by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers and sponsored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, ranked the album as the fifth-greatest in history.
The Joshua Tree is the band's best-selling album, and with 25 million copies sold worldwide, it is among the best-selling albums worldwide. It ranks as one of the best-selling albums in the US. In 1995, the RIAA certified it 10× platinum for shipping 10 million units, and the album subsequently received the Diamond Award for reaching this level. Similarly, the Canadian Recording Industry Association certified the album diamond in Canada. In the UK, it is certified 6× platinum, with an additional silver certification for the 20th anniversary edition. In the Pacific, it is certified 5× platinum and 14× platinum in Australia and New Zealand, respectively.
In 2006, the album appeared on a number of rankings, including Hot Press's "100 Greatest Albums Ever" at number 11, and Time's "The All-Time 100 Albums". That same year, Q named it the best album of the 1980s, while the publication's readers ranked it the 16th-greatest album of all-time. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly ranked it at number 63 on its list of the greatest albums of the previous 25 years. In 2010, the album appeared at number 62 on Spin's list of the "125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years", which ranked the most influential albums in the 25 years since the magazine launched. The magazine wrote, "The band's fifth album spit out hits like crazy, and they were unusually searching hits, each with a pointed political edge."
Writer Derek White conducted a mathematical study of The Edge's rhythmic delay guitar effect in an attempt to explain why his playing style on the record sounds so "appealing". For a given song, White found that by dividing the number of repeated delay notes per minute by the song's tempo in beats per minute, he arrived at an important mathematical constant that is used to explain many natural phenomena.
The band's penchant for addressing political and social issues, as well as their staid depiction in Corbijn's black-and-white sleeve photographs, contributed to the group's earnest and serious image as "stone-faced pilgrim[s]". This image became a target for derision after the band's critically maligned Rattle and Hum project in 1988.Various critics called them "po-faced", "pompous bores", and "humourless". The group's continued exploration of American music for the project was labelled "pretentious" and "misguided and bombastic".After Bono told fans on the 1989 Lovetown Tour that U2 would "dream it all up again", the band reinvented themselves in the 1990s. The group incorporated alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music into their sound, and adopted a more self-deprecating, flippant image by which they embraced the "rock star" identity they struggled with in the 1980s. The band referred to their 1991 album Achtung Baby as "chopping down the Joshua Tree". Author Bill Flanagan summarised the impact of The Joshua Tree on the group's career in his liner notes to the album's 20th anniversary release: "The Joshua Tree made U2 into international rock stars and established both a standard they would always have to live up to and an image they would forever try to live down."
Rattle and Hum
Released October 10, 1988, Length 72:27, Label Island
1.Helter Skelter (live) 3:07
2.Van Diemen's Land 3:06
3.Desire 2:58
4.Hawkmoon 269 6:22
5.All Along the Watchtower (live) 4:24
6.I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (live) 5:53
7.Freedom for My People 0:38
8.Silver and Gold (live) 5:50
9.Pride (In the Name of Love) (live) 4:27
10.Angel of Harlem 3:49
11.Love Rescue Me 6:23
12.When Love Comes to Town 4:14
13.Heartland 5:02
14.God Part II 3:15
15.The Star Spangled Banner 0:43
16.Bullet the Blue Sky (live) 5:37
17.All I Want Is You 6:30
Rattle and Hum is the name of U2's sixth album and a companion documentary style motion picture. Both were released in 1988.
Both the film and the album contain live recordings, covers, and new songs. To a greater extent than on their previous album, The Joshua Tree, the band explores American Music, and incorporates elements of blues-rock, folk rock, andcountry. The motion picture was filmed primarily in the United States in late 1987 during the Joshua Tree Tour and it features their experiences with American music. Although Rattle and Hum was intended to represent the band paying tribute to rock legends, some critics accused U2 of trying to place themselves amongst the ranks of these artists. While critical reception was mixed, the album was a commercial success, reaching the No. 1 spot in several countries with multiplatinum sales.
History
While in Hartford during the 1987 The Joshua Tree Tour, U2 met film director Phil Joanou who made an unsolicited pitch to the band to make a feature-length documentary about the tour. Joanou suggested they hire Martin Scorsese , Jonathan Demme, or George Miller to direct the film. Joanou met the band again in Dublin to discuss the plans and again in France in September before the band chose him as director. The movie was originally titled "U2 In The Americas" and the band planned to film in Chicago and Buenos Aires later in the year. It was later decided that the Chicago venue wasn't suitable, and instead U2 used the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver to film. Following the success of Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky, which had been filmed in Denver four years earlier, the band hoped that "lightning might strike twice". With production problems and estimated costs of $1.2 million the band cancelled the plans for December concerts in South America. At the suggestions of concert promoter, Barry Fey, the band instead booked the Sun Devil Stadium in Arizona.
The movie is a rockumentary, which was initially financed by the band and intended to be screened in a small number of cinemas as an independent film. After going over budget, the film was bought by Paramount Pictures and released in theaters in 1988, before arriving on video in 1989. It was produced by Michael Hamlyn and directed by Phil Joanou. Paul Wasserman served as the publicist. It incorporates live footage with studio outtakes and band interviews. The album is a mix of live material and new studio recordings that furthers the band's experimentation with American music styles and recognises many of their musical influences. It was produced by Jimmy Iovine and also released in 1988.
The title, Rattle and Hum, is taken from a lyric from "Bullet the Blue Sky", the fourth track on The Joshua Tree.
Studio recordings
The album opens with a live cover of The Beatles ' "Helter Skelter". Its inclusion on the album was intended by the band to reflect the confusion of The Joshua Tree Tour and their new found superstar status. Bono's introduction of the song—"this song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles ...we're stealing it back"—was interpreted as U2 claiming to be the new Beatles .
Bono said "Hawkmoon 269" was in part as a tribute to writer Sam Shepard, who had released a book entitled Hawk Moon. Bono also said that the band mixed the song 269 times. This was thought to be a joke for years until it was recently confirmed by The Edge in U2 by U2, who said that they spent three weeks mixing the song. He also contradicted Bono's assertion about Shepard, saying that Hawkmoon came from a section of a town in the midwestern United States.
The album contains a live version of Bob Dylan 's "All Along the Watchtower", which can be seen as a dual tribute to Dylan and to Jimi Hendrix, who popularized the song with his own blistering rendition. Aside from the covers, a couple of songs were written for other artists. "Angel of Harlem" is a vivacious, horn-filled tribute to Billie Holiday. The bass-heavy "God Part II" is an introduction to the Achtung Baby sound, and is a sequel of sorts to John Lennon 's "God", his stark denunciation of everyone from Elvis Presley to Jesus Christ.
The punchy lead single, "Desire", sports a Bo Diddley beat. During the Joshua Tree tour, in mid-November 1987, Bono and Bob Dylan met in Los Angeles; together they wrote a song called "Prisoner of Love" which later became "Love Rescue Me". Dylan sang lead vocals on the original recording, a version which Bono called "astonishing", but Dylan later asked U2 not to use it citing commitments to The Traveling Wilburys.The live performance of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" (recorded with a full church choir) is a gospel song. "When Love Comes to Town" is a blues rocker featuring B. B. King on guitar and vocals.
U2 recorded "Angel of Harlem", "Love Rescue Me" and "When Love Comes to Town" at Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis Presley , Roy Orbison,Johnny Cash and many others also recorded. They also recorded an unreleased version of "She's a Mystery to Me" and Woody Guthrie's "Jesus Christ", which appeared on Folkways: A Vision Shared.
The band started writing "Heartland", in 1984 during The Unforgettable Fire sessions, and it was worked on during The Joshua Tree sessions.
All of the studio tracks apart from "Heartland" were performed in concert on the Lovetown Tour, which began almost a year after Rattle and Hum's release.
Live performances
The band chose to film the black and white footage over two nights Denver's McNichols Sports Arena on 7 and 8 November 1987. They chose the city following the success of their Under A Blood Red Sky video which was filmed in Denver in 1983. "We thought lightning might strike twice" said guitarist, The Edge. The first night's performance was disappointing with Bono finding the cameras infringe on his ability to play to the crowd. The second Denver show was far more successful and seven songs from the show are used in the film, and three on the album . Earlier that day, an IRA bomb killed eleven people at a Remembrance Dayceremony in the Northern Irish town of Enniskillen (see Remembrance Day Bombing). During a performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday", which appears on the film, Bono condemned the violence in a furious mid-song rant in which he yelled "Fuck the revolution." So powerful was the performance, that the band said they were not sure the song should have been used in the film, and after watching the film, they considered not playing it on future tours. After the film was released, the IRA were furious and threatened to kidnap Bono.
Colour outdoor concert footage is from the band's Tempe, Arizona shows on 19 December 1987 and 20 December 1987.
The performance of Bob Dylan 's "All Along the Watchtower" is from the band's impromptu "Save the Yuppies" concert in Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco,California on 11 November 1987. The video intersperses the performance of the song with footage from the band's performance of "Pride" from the same show, during which Bono spray-painted "Rock and Roll Stops the Traffic " on the Vaillancourt Fountain. This caused a bit of controversy, and ultimately, the band paid to repair the damage and publicly apologized for the incident. The phrase "Rock and Roll Stops the Traffic " reappeared 18 years later in the video "All Because of You" when an unnamed fan appeared with the sign at 1:55 in the video.
Dennis Bell, director of New York gospel choir, The New Voices of Freedom, recorded a demo of a gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For".While in Glasgow in late July during The Joshua Tree Tour, Rob Partridge of Island Records played the demo for the band. In late September, U2 rehearsed with Bell's choir in a Harlem church, and a few days later they performed the song together at U2's Madison Square Garden concert. Footage of the rehearsal is featured in the movie, while the Madison Square Garden performance appears on the album. After the church rehearsal, U2 walked around the Harlem neighbourhood where they come across blues duo, Satan and Adam, playing in the street. A 40 second clip of them playing their composition, "Freedom for My People", appears on both the movie and the album.
During "Silver and Gold", Bono explains that the song is an attack on apartheid.
"The Star Spangled Banner" is an excerpt of Jimi Hendrix's famous Woodstock performance in 1969.
The noise of the crowd was sampled extensively by The KLF for 'the Stadium House Trilogy' of singles on their 1990 album The White Room.
Reception
After the success of The Joshua Tree, the album received a generally mixed reception. Writing in Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis said, "The album ably demonstrates U2's force but devotes too little attention to the band's vision." The album received an 8/10 marking in the NME from Stuart Baillie but was controversial as Mark Sinker originally gave it a much poorer review, which was pulled in favour of Baillie's more positive one. Sinker left the NME shortly after.
Roger Ebert slammed the film saying that the concert footage was poorly lit and monotonous, with little use made of the crowds. However, review partner Gene Siskel was more sympathetic, praising the music and finding the footage of the Harlem gospel choir particularly moving.
"Rattle and Hum was conceived as a scrapbook, amemento of that time spent in America on the Joshua Tree tour. It changed when the movie, which was initially conceived of as a low-budget film, suddenly became a big Hollywood affair. That put a different emphasis on the album, which suffered from the huge promotion and publicity, and people reacted against it."—The Edge
U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree brought the band critical acclaim, great commercial success, and high exposure, but it was the beginning of a backlash against them. They were accused of being grandiose, over-earnest, and self-righteous. The criticism increased the following year with their continued exploration ofAmerican music on Rattle and Hum motion picture and companion album. The film's director Phil Joanou called the picture "pretentious", while critics called the record "misguided and bombastic". Many of them interpreted the band's intended homage to American music legends as an attempt to place themselves as peers with rock's all-time great artists.
Despite the criticism, the album was a strong seller, continuing U2's burgeoning commercial success. It hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, remaining at the top spot for 6 weeks, and also reached No. 1 in the UK and Australian charts. In the UK, it achieved the highest first-week sales of any album to that date (and held the record until the release of Oasis's Be Here Now in 1997). However, the album's sales were a far cry from the massive sales of The Joshua Tree. Also, in 2010 NME named it the 31st greatest live album of all time (despite the fact only some of the tracks on the album were recorded live).
Achtung Baby
Released November 19, 1991, Length 55:27, Label Island
Zoo Station 4:36
Even Better Than the Real Thing 3:41
One 4:36
Until the End of the World 4:39
Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses 5:16
So Cruel 5:49
The Fly 4:29
Mysterious Ways 4:04
Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World 3:53
Ultraviolet (Light My Way) 5:31
Acrobat 4:30
Love Is Blindness 4:23
Achtung Baby is the seventh studio album by rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and was released on 19 November 1991 on Island Records. Stung by the criticism of their 1988 release Rattle and Hum, U2 shifted their musical direction to incorporate alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music influences into their sound. Thematically, the album is darker, more introspective, and at times more flippant than the band's previous work. Achtung Baby and the subsequent multimedia-intensive Zoo TV Tour were central to the group's 1990s reinvention, which replaced their earnest public image with a more lighthearted and self-deprecating one.
Seeking inspiration on the eve of German reunification, U2 began recording Achtung Baby in Berlin's Hansa Studios in October 1990. The sessions were fraught with conflict, as the band argued over their musical direction and the quality of their material. After weeks of tension and slow progress, the group made a breakthrough with the improvised writing of the song "One". They returned to Dublin in 1991, where morale improved and the majority of recordings were completed. To confound the public's expectations of the band and their music, U2 chose the album's facetious title and colourful multi-image sleeve.
Achtung Baby is one of U2's most successful records. It earned favourable reviews and debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 Top Albums, while topping the charts in many other countries. It spawned five hit singles, including "One", "Mysterious Ways", and "The Fly". The album has sold 18 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy Award in 1993 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. One of the most acclaimed records of the 1990s, Achtung Baby is regularly featured on lists of the greatest albums of all time.
Background
U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the supporting Joshua Tree Tour brought them critical acclaim and commercial success. However, their 1988 album and motion picture Rattle and Hum precipitated a critical backlash. Although the record sold 14 million copies and performed well on music charts, critics were dismissive of it and the film, labelling the band's exploration of American music as "pretentious" and "misguided and bombastic". U2's high exposure and their reputation for being overly serious led to accusations of grandiosity and self-righteousness.
Despite their commercial popularity, the group were dissatisfied creatively, and lead vocalist Bono believed they were musically unprepared for their success. Drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. said, "We were the biggest, but we weren't the best", and by their 1989 Lovetown Tour, he became bored playing the band's greatest hits. U2 believe that audiences misunderstood the group's collaboration with blues musician B.B. King on Rattle and Hum and the Lovetown Tour, and they described it as "an excursion down a dead-end street". Bono said that, in retrospect, listening to black music enabled the group to create a work such as Achtung Baby, while their experiences with folk music helped him to develop as a lyricist. Towards the end of the Lovetown Tour, Bono announced on-stage that it was "the end of something for U2", and that "we have to go away and ... dream it all up again". Following the tour, the group began their longest break from public performances and album releases.
In mid-1990, Bono reviewed material he had written in Australia on the Lovetown Tour, and the group recorded demos at STS Studios in Dublin. The demos later evolved into the songs "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses", "Until the End of the World", "Even Better Than the Real Thing", and "Mysterious Ways". Going into the album sessions, the band wanted the record to completely deviate from their past work, but they were unsure how to achieve this. The emergence of the Madchester scene in the UK left them confused about how they would fit into any particular musical scene.
Reacting to their own sense of musical stagnation and to their critics, U2 searched for new musical ground. They wrote "God Part II" from Rattle and Hum after realising they had excessively pursued nostalgia in their songwriting. The song had a more contemporary feel that Bono said was closer to Achtung Baby's direction. Further indications of change were two recordings they made in 1990; the first was a cover version of "Night and Day" for the first Red Hot + Blue release. U2 used electronic dance beats and hip hop elements for the first time in this recording. The second indication of change was Bono's and guitarist The Edge's contribution to the original score of A Clockwork Orange 's theatrical adaptation. Much of the material they wrote was experimental, and according to Bono, "prepar[ed] the ground for Achtung Baby". Ideas deemed inappropriate for the play were put aside for the band's use. During this period, Bono and The Edge began increasingly writing songs together without Mullen or bassist Adam Clayton.
Recording and production
U2 hired Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno to produce the album, based on the duo's prior work with the band on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.Lanois was principal producer, with Mark "Flood" Ellis as engineer. Eno took on an assisting role, working with the group in the studio for a week at a time to review their songs before leaving for a month or two. Eno said his role was "to come in and erase anything that sounded too much like U2". By distancing himself from the work, he believed he provided the band with a fresh perspective on their material each time he rejoined them. As he explained, "I would deliberately not listen to the stuff in between visits, so I could go in cold". Since U2 wanted the record to be harder-hitting and live-sounding, Lanois "push[ed] the performance aspect very hard, often to the point of recklessness". The Lanois–Eno team used lateral thinking and a philosophical approach—popularised by Eno's Oblique Strategies—that contrasted with the direct and retro style of Rattle and Hum producer Jimmy Iovine.
Berlin sessions
The band believed that "domesticity [w]as the enemy of rock 'n' roll" and that to work on the album, they needed to remove themselves from their normal family-oriented routines. With a "New Europe" emerging at the end of the Cold War, they chose Berlin, in the centre of the reuniting continent, as a source of inspiration for a more European musical aesthetic. They recorded at Hansa Studios in West Berlin, near the recently opened Berlin Wall. Several acclaimed records were made at Hansa, including two from David Bowie 's "Berlin Trilogy" with Eno, and Iggy Pop's The Idiot. U2 arrived on 3 October 1990 on the last flight into East Berlin on the eve of German reunification. Expecting to be inspired, they instead found Berlin to be depressing and gloomy. The collapse of the Berlin Wall had resulted in a state of malaise in Germany. The band found their East Berlin hotel to be dismal and the winter inhospitable, while the run-down condition of Hansa Studios and its location in an SS ballroom added to the "bad vibe".
"At the instant we were recording it, I got a very strong sense of its power. We were all playing together in the big recording room, a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war, and everything fell into place. It was a reassuring moment, when everyone finally went, 'oh great, this album has started.' It's the reason you're in a band—when the spirit descends upon you and you create something truly affecting. 'One' is an incredibly moving piece. It hits straight into the heart."Morale worsened once the sessions commenced, as the band worked long days but could not agree on a musical direction. The Edge had been listening to electronic dance music and to industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails , the Young Gods, and KMFDM. He and Bono advocated new musical directions along these lines. In contrast, Mullen was listening to classic rock acts such as Blind Faith, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix, and he was learning how to "play around the beat". Like Clayton, he was more comfortable with a sound similar to U2's previous work and was resistant to the proposed innovations. Further, The Edge's interest in dance club mixes and drum machines made Mullen feel that his contributions as a drummer were being diminished. Lanois was expecting the "textural and emotional and cinematic U2" of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and he did not understand the "throwaway, trashy kinds of things" on which Bono and The Edge were working. Compounding the divisions between the two camps was a change in the band's longstanding songwriting relationship; Bono and The Edge were working more closely together, writing material in isolation from the rest of the group.
U2 returned to Dublin for Christmas, where they discussed their future together and all recommitted to the group. Listening to the tapes, they agreed their material sounded better than they originally thought. They briefly returned to Berlin in January 1991 to finish their Hansa work. Although just two songs were delivered during their two months in Berlin, The Edge said that in retrospect, working there had been more productive and inspirational than the output had suggested. The band had been removed from a familiar environment, providing a certain "texture and cinematic location", and many of their incomplete ideas were to be revisited in the Dublin sessions with success.U2 found that they were neither prepared nor well-rehearsed, and that their ideas were not evolving into completed songs. For the first time, the group could not find consensus during their disagreements and felt that they were not making progress. Bono and Lanois, in particular, had an argument that almost came to blows during the writing of "Mysterious Ways". With a sense of going nowhere, the band considered breaking up. Eno visited for a few days, and understanding their attempts to deconstruct the band, he assured them that their progress was better than they thought. By adding unusual effects and sounds, he showed that The Edge's pursuit for new sonic territory was not incompatible with Mullen's and Lanois' "desire to hold on to solid song structures". In December, a breakthrough was achieved with the writing of the song "One". The Edge combined two chord progressions on guitar, and finding inspiration, the group quickly improvised most of the song. It provided much-needed reassurance and re-validated their longstanding "blank page approach" to writing and recording together.
Dublin sessions
In April, tapes from the earlier Berlin sessions were leaked and bootlegged. Bono dismissed the leaked demos as "gobbledygook", and The Edge likened the situation to "being violated". The leak shook the band's confidence and soured their collective mood for a few weeks. Staffing logistics led to the band having three engineers at one point, and as a result, they split recording between Elsinore and The Edge's home studio. Engineer Robbie Adams said the approach raised morale and activity levels: "There was always something different to listen to, always something exciting happening." To record all of the band's material and test different arrangements, the engineers utilised a technique they called "fatting", which allowed them to achieve more than 48 tracks of audio by using a 24-track analogue recording, a DAT machine, and a synchroniser. At the end of May, final lyrics and vocal takes were yet to be completed, but Lanois believed some of the in-progress songs would become worldwide hits.
In February 1991, U2 resumed the album's sessions in the seaside manor "Elsinore" in Dalkey, renting the house for ₤10,000 per month. Lanois' strategy to record in houses, mansions, or castles was something he believed brought atmosphere to the recordings. Dublin audio services company Big Bear Sound installed a recording studio in the house, with the recording room in a converted garage diagonally beneath the control room. Video cameras and TV monitors were used to monitor the spaces. Within walking distance of Bono's and The Edge's homes, the sessions at Elsinore were more relaxed and productive. The band struggled with one particular song—later released as the B-side "Lady With the Spinning Head"—but three separate tracks, "The Fly", "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" and "Zoo Station" were derived from it. During the writing of "The Fly", Bono conceived an alternate persona based on a pair of oversized black sunglasses that he wore to lighten the mood in the studio. Bono developed the character into a leather-clad egomaniac also called "The Fly", and he assumed this alter ego for the band's subsequent public appearances and live performances on the Zoo TV Tour.
During the Dublin sessions, Eno was sent tapes of the previous two months' work, which he called a "total disaster". Joining U2 in the studio, he stripped away what he thought to be excessive overdubbing. The group believes his intervention saved the album. Eno theorised that the band was too close to their music, explaining, "if you know a piece of music terribly well and the mix changes and the bass guitar goes very quiet, you still hear the bass. You're so accustomed to it being there that you compensate and remake it in your mind." Eno also assisted them through a crisis point one month before the deadline to finish recording; he recalls that "everything seemed like a mess", and he insisted the band take a two-week holiday from working on the album. The break gave them a clearer perspective and added decisiveness.
After work at Elsinore finished in July, Eno, Flood, Lanois, and previous U2 producer Steve Lillywhite mixed the tracks at Windmill Lane Studios. Each producer created his own mixes of the songs, and the band either picked the version they preferred or requested that certain aspects of each be combined. Additional recording and mixing continued at a frenetic pace until the 21 September deadline, including last-minute changes to "The Fly" and "One". The Edge estimates that half of the work for the album sessions was done in the last three weeks to finalise songs. The final night was spent devising a running order for the record. The following day, The Edge travelled to Los Angeles with the album's tapes for mastering.
Composition
Music
For the album, The Edge often eschewed his normally minimalistic approach to guitar playing and his trademark chiming, delay-heavy sound, in favour of a style that incorporated more solos, dissonance, and feedback. Industrial influences and guitar effects, particularly distortion, contributed to a "metallic" style and "harder textures". Music journalist Bill Wyman said The Edge's guitar playing on the closing track "Love is Blindness" sounded like a "dentist's drill". The Edge achieved breakthroughs in the writing of songs such as "Even Better Than the Real Thing" and "Mysterious Ways" by toying with various effects pedals.U2 is credited with composing the music for all of Achtung Baby's tracks, despite periods of separated songwriting. They wrote the music primarily through jam sessions, a common practice for them. The album represents a deviation from the sound of the band's past work; the songs are less anthemic in nature and explore new sonic territory for the group. Their musical style demonstrates a more European aesthetic, introducing influences from alternative rock, industrial music and electronic dance music.The band referred to the album's musical departure as "the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree". Accordingly, the distorted introduction to the opening track "Zoo Station" was intended to make listeners think the record was broken or was mistakenly not the new U2 album. Author Susan Fast said that with the group's use of technology in the song's opening, "there can be no mistake that U2 has embraced sound resources new to them".
The rhythm section is more pronounced in the mix on Achtung Baby, and hip hop-inspired electronic dance beats are featured on half the album's tracks, most prominently "The Fly". Elysa Gardner of Rolling Stone compared the layering of dance beats into guitar-heavy mixes to songs by British bands Happy Mondays and Jesus Jones. "Mysterious Ways" combines a funky guitar riff with a danceable, conga-laden beat, for what Bono called "U2 at our funkiest... Sly and The Family Stone meets Madchester baggy." Amidst layers of distorted guitars, "The Fly" and "Zoo Station" feature industrial-influenced percussion—the timbre of Mullen's drums exhibits a "cold, processed sound, something like beating on a tin can", according to author Albin Zak.
On the group's previous work, Bono's vocals were centre-stage in melody and mix, whereas on Achtung Baby, they are often lower in the mix or in a lower register. On many tracks, including "The Fly" and "Zoo Station", Bono sang as a character; one technique used is what Fast called "double voice", in which the vocals are doubled but sung in two different octaves. This octave differentiation was sometimes done with vocals simultaneously, while at other times, it distinguishes voices between the verses and choruses. According to Fast, the technique introduces "a contrasting lyrical idea and vocal character to deliver it", leading to both literal and ironic interpretations of Bono's vocals. For several tracks, his vocals were also treated with processing. These techniques were used to give his voice a different emotional feel and distinguish it from his past vocals.
Lyrics
Of the album's personal nature, Bono said that there were a lot of "blood and guts" in it. His lyrics to the ballad "One" were inspired by the band members' struggling relationships and the German reunification.The Edge described the song on one level as a "bitter, twisted, vitriolic conversation between two people who've been through some nasty, heavy stuff". Similarly, "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" describes a strained relationship and unease over obligations, and on "Acrobat", Bono sings about weakness, hypocrisy, and inadequacy. The torch songs of Roy Orbison, Scott Walker, and Jacques Brel were major influences, demonstrated on tracks such as "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses", a description of a couple's argument; "So Cruel", about unrequited love, obsession, and possessiveness; and the closing track, "Love Is Blindness", a bleak account of a failing romance.Bono is credited as the sole lyricist. In contrast to U2's previous records, which frequently made political and social statements, Achtung Baby is more personal and introspective, examining love, sexuality, spirituality, faith, and betrayal. The lyrics are darker in tone, describing troubled personal relationships and exuding feelings of confusion, loneliness, and inadequacy. Central to these themes was The Edge's separation from his wife and mother of his three children, which occurred halfway through the album's recording. The pain not only focused him on the record and led him to advocate more personal themes, but it also affected Bono's lyrical contributions. Bono found inspiration from his own personal life, citing the births of his two daughters in 1989 and 1991 as major influences. This is reflected in "Zoo Station", which opens the album as a statement of intent with lyrics suggesting new anticipations and appetites.
U2 biographer Bill Flanagan credits Bono's habit of keeping his lyrics "in flux until the last minute" with providing a narrative coherence to the album. Flanagan interpreted Achtung Baby as using the moon as a metaphor for a dark woman seducing the singer away from his virtuous love, the sun; he is tempted away from domestic life by an exciting nightlife and tests how far he can go before returning home. For Flanagan, "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" on the album's latter third describes the character stumbling home in a drunken state, and the final three songs—"Ultraviolet" (Light My Way), "Acrobat", and "Love Is Blindness"—are about how the couple deal with the suffering they have forced on each other.
Despite the record's darker themes, many lyrics are more flippant and sexual than those from the band's previous work. This reflects the group's revisiting some of the Dadaist characters and stage antics they dabbled with in the late 1970s as teenagers but abandoned for more literal themes in the 1980s. While the band had previously been opposed to materialism, they examined and flirted with this value on the album and the Zoo TV Tour. The title and lyrics of "Even Better Than the Real Thing" are "reflective of the times [the band] were living in, when people were no longer looking for the truth, [they] were all looking for instant gratification". "Trashy" and "throwaway" were among the band's buzzwords during recording, leading to many tracks in this vein. The chorus of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" features the pop lyrical cliché "baby, baby, baby", juxtaposed against the dark lyrics in the verses. Bono wrote the lyrics to "The Fly" as the song's eponymous character by composing a sequence of "single-line aphorisms". He called the song "like a crank call from Hell... but [the caller] likes it there".
Religious imagery is present throughout the record. "Until the End of the World" is an imagined conversation between Jesus Christ and his betrayer, Judas Iscariot. On "Acrobat", Bono sings about feelings of spiritual alienation in the line "I'd break bread and wine / If there was a church I could receive in". In many tracks, Bono's lyrics about women carry religious connotations, describing them as spirits, life or light, and idols to be worshipped. Religious interpretations of the album are the subject of the book Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall.
Packaging and title
An initial photo shoot with the band's long-time photographer Anton Corbijn was done near U2's Berlin hotel in late 1990. Most of the photos were black-and-white, and the group felt they were not indicative of the spirit of the new album. They re-commissioned Corbijn for an additional two-week photo shoot in Tenerife in February 1991, for which they dressed up and mingled with the crowds of the annual Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, presenting a more playful side of themselves. It was during the group's time in Tenerife, and during a four-day shoot in Morocco in July, that they were photographed in drag. Additional photos were taken in Dublin in June, including a shot of a naked Clayton. The images were intended to confound expectations of U2, and their full colour contrasted with the monochrome imagery on past sleeves.The sleeve artwork for Achtung Baby was designed by Steve Averill, who had created the majority of U2's album covers. To mirror their change in musical direction, the band considered sleeve concepts that used multiple images in colour to contrast with the seriousness of the individual, mostly monochromatic images from their previous album sleeves. Rough sketches and designs were created early during the recording sessions, and some more experimental designs were conceived to closely resemble, as Averill put it, "dance-music oriented sleeves. We just did them to show how extreme we could go and then everyone came back to levels that they were happy with. But if we hadn't gone to these extremes it may not have been the cover it is now."
The album's title, "Achtung Baby", is German for "Attention, baby!" or "Watch out, baby!", and it was used by the band's sound engineer Joe O'Herlihy during recording. He reportedly took the phrase from the A single image scheme had been planned for the sleeve, and among the photographs considered were those of a cow on an Irish farm in County Kildare, the nude Clayton, and the band driving a Trabant—an East German automobile they became fond of as a symbol for a changing Europe. Ultimately, a multiple image scheme was used, as U2, Corbijn, Averill, and the producers could not agree on a single image; the resulting front sleeve is a 4×4 squared montage. The band wanted to balance the "colder European feel of the mainly black-and-white Berlin images with the much warmer exotic climates of Santa Cruz and Morocco". Some photographs were used because they were striking on their own, while others were used because of their ambiguity. Images of the band with Trabants, several of which were painted bright colours, appear on the sleeve and throughout the album booklet. These vehicles were later incorporated into the Zoo TV Tour set as part of the lighting system. The nude photo of Clayton was placed on the rear cover of the record. On the US compact disc and cassette sleeves, Clayton's penis is censored with a black "X" or a four-leaf clover, while vinyl editions feature the photo uncensored. In 2003, music television network VH1 ranked Achtung Baby's sleeve at number 39 on its list of the "50 Greatest Album Covers". Three years later, Bono called the sleeve his favourite U2 cover artwork.
For the album, U2 had considered several titles, including Man (in contrast to the group's debut, Boy), 69, Zoo Station, and Adam, which would have been paired with the nude photo of Clayton. Other possible titles included Fear of Women, and Cruise Down Main Street—a reference to The Rolling Stones ' record Exile on Main St. and the cruise missiles launched on Baghdad during the Gulf War. Most of the proposed titles were rejected out of the belief that people would see them as pretentious and "another Big Statement from U2". The album's lighthearted title influenced other musicians, including David Bowie , who was an inspiration to U2 and Eno during recording. Bowie's band Tin Machine called their live record Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby, putting a Yiddish spin on U2's German title.
Release
As early as December 1990, the music press reported that U2 would be recording a dance-oriented album and that it would be released in mid-1991. In August 1991, sound collage artists Negativland released an EP entitled U2 that parodied U2's song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and used the band's likenesses on the cover. Island Records objected to the cover, believing consumers would confuse the EP for a new U2 record. Island successfully sued for copyright infringement but were criticised in the music press, as were U2, although they were not involved in the litigation. Uncut's Stephen Dalton believes that much of the negative headlines were tempered by the success of Achtung Baby's first single, "The Fly", released on 21 October 1991 a month before the album. Sounding nothing like U2's typical style, it was selected as the lead single to announce the group's new musical direction. It became their second song to top the UK Singles Chart, while reaching number one on the singles charts in Ireland and Australia. The single was less successful in the US, peaking at number 61 on the Hot 100.
Island Records and U2 refused to make advance copies of the album available to the press until just a few days before the release date, preferring fans to listen to the record before reading reviews. The decision came amid rumours of tensions within the band, and journalist David Browne compared it to the Hollywood practice of withholding review copies of films from the media before release whenever they receive poor word-of-mouth press. Achtung Baby was released on 19 November 1991 on compact disc, tape cassette, and vinyl record, with an initial shipment of 1.4 million copies. The album was the first release by a major act to use two so-called "eco-friendly" packages—the cardboard Digipak, and the shrinkwrapped jewel case without the long cardboard attachment. Island encouraged record stores to order the jewel case packaging by offering a four-percent discount.
Achtung Baby was U2's first album in three years and their first comprising entirely new material in over four years. The group maintained a low profile after the record's release, avoiding interviews and allowing critics and the public to make their own assessments. Instead of participating in an article with Rolling Stone magazine, U2 asked Eno to write one for them. The marketing plan for the album focused on retail and press promotions. Posters featuring the sleeve's 16 images were distributed to record stores and through alternative weekly newspapers in major cities, and television and radio advertisements were created. In comparison to the large hype of other 1991 year-end releases, Island general manager Andy Allen explained the relatively understated marketing of Achtung Baby: "U2 will not come out with that kind of fanfare in terms of outside media. We feel the fan base itself creates that kind of excitement."
"Mysterious Ways" was released as the second single five days after the release of Achtung Baby. On the US Billboard charts, the song topped the Modern Rock Tracks and Album Rock Tracks charts, and it reached number nine on the Hot 100.Elsewhere, it reached number one in Canada and number three in Australia. In addition to the success of the first two singles, the album performed well commercially; in the US, Achtung Baby debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 Top Albums on 7 December 1991. It fell to number three the following week, but spent its first 13 weeks on the chart within the top ten. In total, it spent 97 weeks on the Billboard 200 Top Albums. It sold 295,000 copies in the US in its first week, and on 21 January 1992, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified it double-platinum. Achtung Baby peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart, spending 87 weeks on the chart. In other regions, it topped the RPM 100 in Canada, the ARIA Albums Chart in Australia, and the RIANZ Top 40 Albums in New Zealand. The record sold seven million copies in its first three months on sale.
Three additional singles were released in 1992. "One", released in March to coincide with the beginning of the Zoo TV Tour, reached number seven in the UK and number ten in the US charts. Like its predecessor, it topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and the singles charts in Canada and Ireland. The song has since become regarded as one of the greatest of all-time, ranking highly on many critics' lists. The fourth single from Achtung Baby, "Even Better Than the Real Thing", was released in June. The album version of the song peaked at number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, while reaching number one on the Album Rock Tracks chart. A "Perfecto" remix of the song by DJ Paul Oakenfold performed better in the UK than the album version did, peaking at number eight. "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" followed as the fifth and final single in August 1992. It peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, and number two on the US Album Rock Tracks chart. All five singles charted within the top 20 in Ireland, Australia, Canada, and UK. By the end of 1992, Achtung Baby had sold 10 million copies worldwide.
In October 1992, U2 released Achtung Baby: The Videos, The Cameos, and a Whole Lot of Interference from Zoo TV, a VHS compilation of nine music videos from the album. Running for 62 minutes, it was produced by Ned O'Hanlon and released by Island/Polygram. It included three music videos each for "One" and "Even Better than the Real Thing", along with videos for "The Fly", "Mysterious Ways", and "Until the End of the World". Interspersed between the music videos were clips of so-called "interference", comprising documentary footage, media clips, and other video similar to what was displayed at Zoo TV Tour concerts. The release was certified platinum in the US, and gold in Canada.
Reception
Achtung Baby received very favourable reviews from critics. Elysa Gardner of Rolling Stone, in a four-and-a-half-star review, said that U2 had "proven that the same penchant for epic musical and verbal gestures that leads many artists to self-parody can, in more inspired hands, fuel the unforgettable fire that defines great rock & roll." The review said that the album, like its predecessor Rattle and Hum, was an attempt by the band to "broaden its musical palette, but this time its ambitions are realized". Bill Wyman of Entertainment Weekly gave the record an "A" and called it a "pristinely produced and surprisingly unpretentious return by one of the most impressive bands in the world". Steve Morse of The Boston Globe echoed these sentiments, stating that the album "not only reinvigorates their sound, but drops any self-righteousness. The songs focus on personal relationships, not on saving the world." Morse commended the album's "clanging, knob-twisting sound effects" and The Edge's "metallic, head-snapping guitar". Jon Pareles of The New York Times lauded the record not only for featuring "noisy, vertiginous arrangements, mostly layers of guitar", but also for the group's ability to "maintain its pop skills". The review concluded, "Stripped-down and defying its old formulas, U2 has given itself a fighting chance for the 1990s."
In a five-star review, Q called Achtung Baby U2's "heaviest album to date. And best." The review praised the band and its production team for making "music of drama, depth, intensity and, believe it, funkiness". Time magazine featured a very positive review, writing that the record features "major-league guitar crunching and mysterious, spacy chords" and "songs of love, temptation, loose political parable and tight personal confession". The review declared that U2 had successfully reinvented themselves. In a four-star review, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times stated, "the arty, guitar-driven textures are among the band's most confident and vigorous ever". He said the album is a difficult one for listeners because of the dark, introspective nature of the songs, which contrasts with the group's uplifting songs of the past. Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote a favourable three-out-of-four stars review, saying the record "shows the band in a grittier light: disrupting, rather than fulfilling, expectations". He praised Lanois' production and said that due to The Edge's guitar playing, "U2 sounds punkier than it has since its 1980 debut, Boy". Kot concluded his review by calling the album "a magnificent search for transcendence made all the more moving for its flaws". Niall Stokes of Hot Press gave the album a score of 10-out-of-12, writing, "Ostensibly decadent, sensual and dark, it is a record of, and for, these times."
Spin was more critical of the record, calling it an "ambitious failure"; the review welcomed its experimentation but judged that when the group "strays from familiar territory, the results are hit-and-miss". Robert Christgau rated it a dud, indicating "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought". Christgau reflected this sentiment in his review of the group's 1993 album Zooropa: "After many, many tries, Achtung Baby still sounded like a damnably diffuse U2 album to me, and I put it in the hall unable to describe a single song." The New Zealand Herald wrote a favourable three-and-a-half star review, calling the record "pretty damn good" and its sound "subdued, tightly controlled, [and] introverted". However, it critiqued the album for too many "downbeat moments where songs seem to be going nowhere", preventing it from being a "truly wondrous affair". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic gave Achtung Baby a maximum score of five stars in a retrospective review, praising the band's musical transformation as "thorough", "effective", and "endlessly inventive". Erlewine concluded that few artists at that stage in their career could have "recorded an album as adventurous or fulfilled their ambitions quite as successfully as U2 [did]".
The success of Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV Tour re-established U2 as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed musical acts in the world. The group nearly swept Rolling Stone's 1992 end-of-year readers' polls, winning honours for "Best Single" ("One"), "Artist of the Year", "Best Album", "Best Songwriter" (Bono), "Best Album Cover", and "Comeback of the Year", among others. The album placed fourth on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1991 Pazz & Jop critics' poll. At the 35th Grammy Awards in 1993, Achtung Baby won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and it earned Lanois and Eno the award for Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). The record was also nominated for the Album of the Year award.
Zoo TV Tour
Whereas the group were known for their earnest live act in the 1980s, their Zoo TV performances were intentionally ironic and self-deprecating; on stage, Bono portrayed several characters he conceived, including "The Fly", "Mirror Ball Man", and "MacPhisto". The majority of the album's songs were played at each show, and the set lists began with up to eight consecutive Achtung Baby songs as a further sign that they were no longer the U2 of the 1980s.Following the release of Achtung Baby, U2 staged a worldwide concert tour, titled the Zoo TV Tour. Like Achtung Baby, the tour was intended to deviate from the band's past. In contrast to the austere stage setups of previous U2 tours, Zoo TV was an elaborately-staged multimedia event. It satirised television and the viewing public's over-stimulation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The stage featured large video screens that showed visual effects, random video clips from pop culture, and flashing text phrases. Live satellite link-ups, channel surfing, crank calls, and video confessionals were incorporated into the shows.
The tour began in February 1992 and comprised 157 shows over almost two years. During a six-month break, the band recorded the album Zooropa, which was released in July 1993. It was inspired by Zoo TV and expanded on its themes of Legacy
The record is highly regarded among the members of U2; Mullen said, "I thought it was a great record. I was very proud of it. Its success was by no means preordained. It was a real break from what we had done before and we didn't know if our fans would like it or not." The group's reinvention occurred at the peak of the alternative rock movement, when the genre was achieving widespread mainstream popularity. Bill Flanagan pointed out that many of U2's 1980s contemporaries struggled commercially with albums released after the turn of the decade. He argued that U2, however, were able to take advantage of the alternative rock movement and ensure a successful future by "set[ting] themselves up as the first of the new groups rather than the last of the old". Toby Creswell echoed these sentiments in his 2006 music reference book 1001 Songs, writing that the album helped U2 avoid "becoming parodies of themselves and being swept aside by the grunge and techno revolutions". A 2010 retrospective by Spin said that "U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby."
Achtung Baby is certified 8× platinum in the US by the RIAA, and according to Nielsen Soundscan, the album has sold 5.5 million copies in the country, as of March 2009.The record has been certified 5× platinum in Australia, 4× platinum in the UK, and diamond in Canada, the highest certification award. Overall, 18 million copies have been sold worldwide. It is the group's second-highest-selling record after The Joshua Tree, which has sold 25 million copies. For the band, Achtung Baby was a watershed that ensured their creative future, and its success prefigured their continued musical experimentation during the 1990s. Zooropa, released in 1993, was a further departure for the band, incorporating additional dance music influences and electronic effects into their sound. In 1995, U2 and Brian Eno collaborated on the experimental/ambient album Original Soundtracks 1 under the pseudonym "Passengers". For Pop in 1997, the group's experiences with dance club culture and their usage of tape loops, programming, rhythm sequencing, and sampling resulted in their most dance-oriented album.
Achtung Baby has been acclaimed as one of the greatest albums in rock history, and many publications have placed it among their rankings of the best records. The Guardian collated worldwide data in 1997 from a range of renowned critics, artists, and radio DJs, who placed the record at number 71 in the list of the "100 Best Albums Ever". VH1 ranked it at number 65 on their "100 Greatest Albums of Rock & Roll" countdown from their series The Greatest. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the record at number 62 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time", writing, "U2 visibly loosened up on Achtung Baby, cracking jokes and even letting themselves be photographed in color". That same year, "The Definitive 200" album list—sponsored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—listed Achtung Baby at number 45. The Q staff named it the third-best album from 1980–2004, and similarly, in 2008, Entertainment Weekly called it the third-best album of the previous 25 years.In 2006, the record appeared on a number of lists, including Hot Press's "100 Greatest Albums Ever" at number 21, and Time's "The All-Time 100 Albums". In 2010, the record topped Spin's list of the "125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years", which ranked the most influential albums in the 25 years since the magazine launched. The author said, "Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend... Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational."
Zooropa
Released July 5, 1993, Length 51:15. Label Island
1.Zooropa 6:31
2.Babyface 4:01
3.Numb 4:20
4.Lemon 6:58
5.Stay (Faraway, So Close!) 4:58
6.Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car 5:20
7.Some Days Are Better Than Others 4:17
8.The First Time 3:45
9.Dirty Day 5:24
10.The Wanderer 5:41Zooropa is the eighth studio album by rock band U2. Produced by Flood, Brian Eno, and The Edge, it was released on 5 July 1993 on Island Records. Inspired by the band's experiences on the Zoo TV Tour, Zooropa expanded on many of the tour's themes of technology and media oversaturation. The record continued the group's experimentation with alternative rock, electronic dance music, and electronic sound effects that began with their previous album, Achtung Baby, in 1991.
U2 began writing and recording for Zooropa in Dublin in February 1993, during a six-month break between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. The record was originally intended as an EP to promote the "Zooropa" leg of the tour that was to begin in May 1993, but during the sessions, the group decided to extend the record to a full-length LP. Pressed for time, U2 wrote and recorded at a rapid pace, with songs originating from many sources. The album was not completed in time for the tour's resumption, forcing the band to travel between Dublin and their tour destinations in May to complete mixing and recording.
Zooropa received generally favourable reviews from critics. Despite none of its three singles—"Numb", "Lemon", and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)"—being hits consistently across regions, the record sold well upon release and peaked at number one in multiple countries. The album's charting duration and lifetime sales of 7 million copies, however, were weaker than Achtung Baby. In 1994, Zooropa won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. Although the record was a success and music journalists view the album as one of the group's most creative, the band regard it with mixed feelings.
Background
Background
The group concluded the American "Outside Broadcast" leg of the tour on 25 November 1992, and they were left with a six-month break before resuming the tour in Europe in May 1993 with the "Zooropa" leg. Rather than use the time to rest, lead vocalist Bono and guitarist The Edge were keen to record new material. Following a hectic year of touring, the two did not want to settle back into domestic life. Bono said, "We thought we could live a normal life and then go back on the road [in May 1993]. But it turns out that your whole way of thinking, your whole body has been geared toward the madness of Zoo TV... So we decided to put the madness on a record. Everybody's head was spinning, so we thought, why not keep that momentum going...?" The Edge also wished to distract himself from the emotions he was feeling after separating from his wife during the Achtung Baby sessions in 1991. The other members, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., ultimately agreed to join them for recording.
U2 regained critical favour with their commercially successful 1991 album Achtung Baby, and the supporting Zoo TV Tour in 1992. The record was a musical reinvention for the group, incorporating influences from alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music into their sound. The tour was an elaborately-staged multimedia event that satirised television and the viewing public's over-stimulation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The band finished 1992 with one of their most successful years, selling 2.9 million concert tickets and reaching 10 million copies sold for Achtung Baby. Their 70-plus North American concerts from the year grossed US$ 67 million, easily the highest amount for any touring artist in 1992.
Soon after the sessions commenced, Bono pushed for the band to work towards a full-length LP. The Edge was initially hesitant, but saw the opportunity as a challenge to quickly record an album before returning to tour and prove the band had not become spoiled by the luxury of having ample recording time. Additionally, Bono and band manager Paul McGuinness had discussed the possibility of releasing a "one-two punch" of records since the beginning of the Achtung Baby sessions. In early March, U2 reached a consensus that their new material should comprise a full LP. Much like they had for the Achtung Baby sessions, the band split work between two studios at once; Adams operated a Soundtracs mixing console at The Factory, while Flood used an SSL console at the new Windmill Lane Studios.
Recording and production
After handling audio engineering for the recording of Achtung Baby, Robbie Adams was invited by U2 to manage sound mixing on the Zoo TV Tour. Adams also recorded the group's tour soundchecks. In January 1993, the band asked him to compile these recordings and create loops of interesting parts that they could play to in the studio. After Adams spent a few weeks assembling loops, in February, the group entered The Factory in Dublin to begin composing rough demos. Bono and The Edge were most involved during this initial demoing process, which lasted six weeks.
The group employed Brian Eno and his assisting partner Mark "Flood" Ellis—both of whom worked on Achtung Baby—to produce the sessions; long-time Eno collaborator Daniel Lanois was busy promoting his solo album and was unavailable. Similar to the Achtung Baby sessions, Eno worked two-week shifts. The group often gave him in-progress songs to adjust and add his own personality to. Initially, the band did not have a clear plan for how they would proceed with releasing the sessions' material. At the time, Clayton said, "I don't know if what we're doing here is the next U2 album or a bunch of rough sketches that in two years will turn into the demos for the next U2 album." The Edge was a proponent of making an EP of new material to promote the upcoming leg of the tour, describing his mentality as thus: "We've got a bit of time off. We've got some ideas hanging around from the last record, let's do an EP, maybe four new songs to spice the next phase of the tour up a bit. It'll be a fan thing. It'll be cool."
Due to the time limit, U2 were forced to write and record songs at a more rapid pace. They continued their long-time practice of jamming in the studio. Eno and Flood edited together song sections they liked and then discussed the arrangements with the group. U2 suggested alterations and added lyrics and melodies, before returning to the studio and performing to the edited arrangements. Eno used an eraseable whiteboard to give instructions and cues to the band while they jammed; he pointed at chords and various commands, such as "hold", "stop", "change", and "change back", to direct their performances. To record all of the band's material and test different arrangements, the engineers utilised a technique they called "fatting", which allowed them to achieve more than 48 tracks of audio by using a 24-track analogue recording, a DAT machine, and a synchroniser. The production crew faced issues with audio spill at The Factory, as all group members recorded in the same room as the mixing desk and Bono frequently sang in-progress lyrics that were to be replaced. Flightcases and wood booths were built to separate the performers' sound as much as possible.
As May's "Zooropa" leg of the tour approached, U2 continued to record while simultaneously rehearsing for the tour. Their time limit prevented them from working on live arrangements for any of the new songs. Despite the sessions' rapid pace, the album was not completed by the time they had to resume touring. Moreover, Flood and Eno had to begin work on other projects. The Edge remembers everyone was telling the group, "Well, it's an EP. You did good but there's a lot more work needed to finish some of these songs." However, the band did not want to shelve the project, as they believed they were on a "creative roll" and that they would be in a completely different frame of mind if they revisited the material six months later.Songs originated and were inspired from a variety of sources. "Zooropa" was the result of combining two separate pieces of music together, one of which the band discovered a recording of from a tour soundcheck. The verse melody to "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" and an instrumental backing track that became "Numb" were originally from the sessions toAchtung Baby. "Babyface", "Dirty Day", "Lemon", and "The Wanderer" were written during the Zooropa sessions. Country singer Johnny Cash recorded vocals for "The Wanderer" during a visit to Dublin, and although Bono recorded his own vocals for the song, he preferred Cash's version. The production crew and the band debated which version to include on the record. Throughout the sessions, U2 were undecided on a unifying musical style for the release, and as a result, they maintained three potential track listings—one for the best songs, one for "vibes", and one for a soundtrack album. Bono suggested editing the best segments of songs together to create a montage.
The group's solution was to continually fly back to Dublin after their May concerts to finish recording and mixing at night and during their off-days, before returning to their tour destinations. Clayton called the process "about the craziest thing you could do to yourself", while Mullen said of it, "It was mad, but it was mad good, as opposed to mad bad." McGuinness later said the band had nearly wrecked themselves in the process. The group simultaneously used three separate rooms at Windmill Lane to mix, overdub, and edit. Adams said the hectic approach meant "there was never anybody sitting around waiting or doing nothing". Flood called the period one of "absolute lunacy". Eschewing console automation, the engineers adopted a "live performance" attitude to mixing, based on past experiences with Lanois. The band and production crew sat in on the mixing and offered encouragement, creating, as Adams put it, "a kind of cheerleader thing. It all induces a nervous energy in you and creates a lot of pressure, and gives the whole thing a performance feel."
In the final weeks, the band decided to exclude the traditional rock songs and guitar-driven tracks they had written in favour of an "album of disjointed, experimental pop". The Edge received a production credit—his first on a U2 record—for the extra level of responsibility he assumed for the album. Twenty songs were recorded during the sessions, but ultimately 10 were chosen. One piece that was left off the record was "In Cold Blood", which featured somber lyrics written by Bono in response to the Bosnian War and was previewed prior to the album's release. Other tracks that were left off the album included "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", "If God Will Send His Angels", "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", and "Wake Up Dead Man". The first was later released as a single from the Batman Forever soundtrack in 1995, and the latter three were included on the band's following studio album, Pop, in 1997.
Composition
Music
With an even more "European" musical aesthetic than U2's previous album Achtung Baby, Zooropa is a further departure from the group's late-1980s "rootsy" sound. Much like how the group embracedtechnology for the Zoo TV Tour, the group utilized technology as a musical resource to a greater extent on Zooropa. The record exhibits additional influences from alternative rock, electronic dance music, and industrial music—it is more synthesised than U2's past work, featuring various sound effects, audio loops, and use of synthesiser; in addition to The Edge playing the instrument, Brian Eno contributed synthesiser on six tracks. The Edge's guitar playing on Zooropa marks a further shift away from his trademark style, highlighted by a heavier reliance on guitar effects and the songs' reduced emphasis on his guitar parts. The danceable "Lemon", called a "space-age German disco" by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, features a guitar part played with rhythmic gated effect. The distorted "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" was described by Bono as "industrial blues".
Music
With an even more "European" musical aesthetic than U2's previous album Achtung Baby, Zooropa is a further departure from the group's late-1980s "rootsy" sound. Much like how the group embraced
Similar to how the Zoo TV Tour display screens sampled video footage from television programming, a number of songs from Zooropa sample audio. The introduction to the title track, "Zooropa", contains a noisy collage of indecipherable human voices from radio signals—credited to the "advertising world"—played over sustained synthesiser chords. The industrial-influenced "Numb" features a noisy backdrop of sampled, rhythmic noises, including "arcade sounds", a Walkman rewinding, and a Hitler Youth boy banging a bass drum in the 1936 propaganda film Triumph of the Will. "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" begins with a snippet of fanfare from Lenin's Favourite Songs and samples MC 900 Ft. Jesus' song "The City Sleeps".
The vocals on Zooropa are a further departure from U2's previous style. Throughout the record, Bono, as Jon Pareles describes, "underplays his lung power", in contrast to his impassioned, belting vocals from past work. Additionally, in songs such as "Lemon" and "Numb", Bono sings in what he calls a "Fat Lady" voice, an operatic falsetto. Two tracks feature other people on lead vocals: for "Numb", The Edge provides lead vocals in the form of a droning, monotonous list of "don't" commands; for the closing song "The Wanderer", country musician Johnny Cash sings lead vocals. The song was sequenced as the final track because U2 wanted to end the album on a "musical joke". It features Cash's haggard voice juxtaposed against a synthesised bassline. The group described the instrumentation as resembling the "ultimate Holiday Inn band from hell".
Lyrics
Bono is credited as the sole lyricist for eight of the ten songs, while The Edge received sole credit for "Numb". The duo share credits for the lyrics to "Dirty Day". Technology is a common theme onZooropa, inspired by the group's experiences on the Zoo TV Tour. Jon Pareles wrote that the songs are about how "media messages infect characters' souls", while music journalist David Browne said the songs are concerned with "emotional fracturing in the techno-tronic age". Critic Robert Hilburn interpreted the album as U2 probing into what they saw as the "disillusionment of the modern age".
"Zooropa" is set amongst neon signs of a brightly-lit futuristic city. In the song's introduction, background voices ask, "What do you want?" In response to the question, the lyrics in the first three verses consist of various advertising slogans, including, "Better by design", "Be all that you can be", and "Vorsprung durch technik". Critic Parry Gettelman interpreted these lines as meaning to "signify the emptiness of modern, godless life". In the song's second half, the theme of moral confusion and uncertainty becomes present in the remaining lyrics, particularly the lines "I have no compass / And I have no map". "Babyface" is about a man practicing his obsessive love for a celebrity by manipulating her image on a TV recording. "Lemon", inspired by an old video of Bono's late mother in a lemon-coloured dress, describes man's attempts to preserve time through technology . This is reflected in lines such as, "A man makes a picture / A moving picture / Through the light projected he can see himself up close". The lyrics to "Numb" are a series of "don't" commands, amidst a noisy backdrop of sounds. The Edge notes that the song was inspired by one of the themes of Zoo TV, "that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you".
In contrast to the technology -inspired lyrics of many songs, others had more domestic themes. "The First Time" was Bono's interpretation of the story of the Prodigal son, but in his version, the son decides not to return home. Similarly, "Dirty Day" was written about a character who abandons his family and returns years later to meet his son. Many of the track's lyrics are taken from phrases that Bono's father commonly used, such as "No blood is thicker than ink" and "It won't last kissing time". "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" is a love song written for an abused woman. Bono based his lyrics to "The Wanderer" on the Old Testament's Book of Ecclesiastes, and he modeled the song's character after the book's narrator, "The Preacher". In the song, the narrator wanders through a post-apocalyptic world "in search of experience", sampling all facets of human culture and hoping to find meaning in life. Bono described the song as an "antidote to the Zooropa manifesto of uncertainty", and he believes it presents a possible solution to the uncertainty expressed earlier on the album.
Packaging and titleThe sleeve was designed by Works Associates of Dublin under the direction of Steve Averill, who had created the majority of U2's album covers. The cover features a sketch of the circle of stars from the Flag of Europe with a "sad cosmonaut" drawing in the center. The illustration, created by Shaughn McGrath, was an alteration of the "graffiti babyface" by Charlie Whisker that was originally taken from the face of the Achtung Baby compact disc/vinyl record. The cover's drawing was meant to represent the Soviet cosmonaut left floating in orbit for weeks after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the background is a 3-by-3 montage of blurred images—similar to the 4-by-4 arrangement of images on Achtung Baby's sleeve. The images include shots of a woman's face and mouth, as well as photographs of European leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, and Nicolae Ceauşescu. These images are obscured by distorted purple text, which comprises the names of unfinished songs from the album sessions, including "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", "Wake Up Dead Man", and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress". Author Višnja Cogan described this text as giving the impression of a "torn veil".
Zooropa was named for the "Zooropa" leg of the Zoo TV Tour, which began in May 1993 while the band completed the record. The name is a portmanteau of "zoo" (from Zoo TV Tour and "Zoo Station") and "Europa". One of the album's proposed titles was Squeaky.
ReleaseU2's delivery of Zooropa in late May caught PolyGram somewhat off-guard, as they were not expecting a new album by the group for several years. With Achtung Baby, PolyGram had approximately six months to market the record and plan its release strategy, but the sudden completion of Zooropa necessitated a more hurried promotional plan. PolyGram president/CEO Rick Dobbis explained: "For the last one, we prepared for six months. It was like a marathon. But this is like a sprint , and that is the spirit it was made in. The band was so excited about it, they sprinted to complete the album before the ... tour. We want to bring it to the street with that same spirit." Island/PolyGram's and U2's marketing for Zooropa was intended to focus less on singles and more on the record as a whole, and ultimately, only three singles were released, compared to Achtung Baby's five singles. The first single "Numb" was released in June 1993 exclusively on VHS as a "video single". The music video was directed by Kevin Godley. The song peaked at number seven in Australia and number nine in Canada, while reaching number two on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. However, it failed to chart on the singles charts in the UK or US.
Zooropa completed U2's contractual obligation to Island Records, and to PolyGram, the multinational that purchased Island in 1989. Although the group were free to sign a new contract elsewhere, their strong relationship with the label and its founder Chris Blackwell prompted the band to remain with Island/Polygram by signing a long-term, six-album deal. The Los Angeles Times estimated that the deal was worth US$ 60 million to U2, making them the highest-paid rock group ever. At the time, the group were cognizant of several emerging technologies that would potentially impact the delivery and transmission of music to the purchasing public in the following years. Author Bill Flanagan speculated, "Record stores could become obsolete as music is delivered over cable, telephone wires, or satellite transmissions directly into consumers' homes." With uncertainty over the future of these technologies and the implications of entertainment and telecommunications companies merging, the band negotiated with Island that the division of their earnings from future transmission systems would be flexible and decided upon at a relevant time. U2 toyed with the idea of releasing Zooropa as an interactive audio-video presentation in lieu of conventional physical formats, but the deadline imposed by the Zoo TV Tour prevented the band from realising this idea.
Zooropa was released on 5 July 1993, during the Zooropa leg of the Zoo TV Tour. An initial shipment of 1.6 million copies was made available in stores at the time of release. The album performed very well commercially, debuting at number one in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland. It also reached number one in the Netherlands , Italy, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland. In the US, the album spent its first two weeks on the Billboard 200 at the top spot, staying in the top 10 for seven weeks. In its first week on sale, Zooropa sold 377,000 copies in the US, the group's best debut in the country to that point. The album reached the top 10 in 26 countries. Despite reaching impressive peak positions, it had a shorter stay on the music charts than Achtung Baby did. In total, Zooropa spent 40 weeks on the Billboard 200, 57 fewer weeks than Achtung Baby. Similarly, the album's stay of 31 weeks on the UK Albums Chart was a decrease of 56 weeks from its predecessor.
Two additional commercial singles were released from the album. "Lemon" received a limited commercial release in North America, Australia, and Japan in September 1993. The single peaked at number six in Australia and number three on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. The final commercial single was "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)", released worldwide on 22 November 1993. It was the album's most successful single, topping the Irish Singles Chart and peaking at number five in Australia, number six in New Zealand, number four in the UK, and number 61 in the US—making it the record's only single to chart on the UK Singles Chart and Hot 100. "Zooropa" was released as a promotional single in Mexico and the United States. By the end of 1993, Zooropa had sold 1.8 million copies in the US.
Reception
Zooropa received generally favourable reviews from critics. Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone wrote in his four-star review that the album was "a daring, imaginative coda to Achtung Baby" and that "it is varied and vigorously experimental, but its charged mood of giddy anarchy suffused with barely suppressed dread provides a compelling, unifying thread". Spin wrote a positive review, commenting that the record "sounds mostly like a band shedding its skin, trying on different selves for size". The review said the album "has the feel of real collectivity", praising the cohesiveness of the individual band members' playing. The review concluded by saying Zooropa "indicates U2 might be worthy of whatever absurd mutations the '90s throw our way". Jon Pareles of The New York Times praised the group for transforming themselves and becoming "raucous, playful and ready to kick its old habits". Pareles enjoyed the sonics and electronic effects that made the "sound of a straightforward four-man band ... hard to find", and he commented that "The new songs seem destined not for stadiums ... but for late-night radio shows and private listenings through earphones." The Orlando Sentinel gave the record a rating of three-out-of-five stars, commenting, "Although U2 leans heavily on the electronic sound of contemporary dance music, the rhythm tracks on Zooropa are less than propulsive." The review said that Brian Eno's production and the electronic flourishes made the album interesting, but that ultimately, "there's nothing especially hummable" and "the songs are not very memorable".
David Browne of Entertainment Weekly gave Zooropa an "A", calling it "harried, spontaneous-sounding, and ultimately exhilarating album". Browne noted that it sounds "messy" and "disconnected", but clarified "that sense of incoherence is the point" in the context of the record's technology themes. He concluded, "For an album that wasn't meant to be an album, it's quite an album." Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times gave the record a maximum score of four stars. In two separate articles, he said that it "captured the anxious, even paranoid tone of the Zoo TV Tour" so much so that "it stands as the first tour album that doesn't include any of the songs from the tour" and that it sounds like a "souvenir" of Zoo TV. In a positive review, Jim Sullivan of The Boston Globe called the album a "creative stretch", noting that the band experiments more yet retains their recognizable sound. He commented that the "yearning anthemic reach" of previous records is absent, as is the "obvious, slinky pop charm" of "Mysterious Ways" from Achtung Baby, and it is instead replaced with "darker corners, more disruptive interjections, more moodiness". Paul Du Noyer of Q gave Zooropa a score of four-out-of-five stars, finding a "freewheeling feel of going with the flow" throughout the album and calling it "rootless and loose, restless and unsettled". For Du Noyer, U2 sounded "monstrously tight as a performing unit and fluidly inventive as composers, so the results transcend the merely experimental".
The New Zealand Herald was more critical, noting that the album started as an EP and "just got longer but not necessarily better". The publication called it "more perplexing than challenging" and commented that it "sounds like the biggest band in the world having one of the biggest, strangest mid-life crises". Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun Times gave the record a three-and-a-half star review, calling it "inconsistent", but admitting "it's satisfying and surprising to hear a band of U2's status being so playful, experimental, and downright weird". Robert Christgau gave the album a B−, calling it "half an Eno album" in the same manner that David Bowie 's Eno-produced albums Low and "Heroes" were, but saying, "The difference is that Bowie and Eno were fresher in 1977 than Bono and Eno are today." The Irish media was most consistently negative in their reviews of the album; George Byrne of the Irish Independent said, "The songs sound like they were knocked up in double-quick time and with about as much thought put into the lyrics as goes into a DJ's timecheck". Byrne remarked that the record resembles "a lot of mickey-taking over a variety of drum patterns". In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic said in a four-star review that "most of the record is far more daring than its predecessor". For him, although there were moments that the album was "unfocused and meandering ... the best moments of Zooropa rank among U2's most inspired and rewarding music".
Zooropa finished in 9th place on the "Best Albums" list from The Village Voice's 1993 Pazz & Jop critics' poll. At the 36th Grammy Awards in 1994, it won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. In his acceptance speech, Bono sarcastically mocked the "alternative" characterisation the album received and used a profanity on live television: "I think I'd like to give a message to the young people of America. And that is: We shall continue to abuse our position and fuck up the mainstream."
Zoo TV TourThe Zooropa album was released in July 1993, halfway through the Zooropa leg of the tour. Of the 157 shows the band played during the Zoo TV Tour, approximately 30 of them were after the release of Zooropa. Many of the album's songs found permanent places in the shows' setlists. "Lemon" and "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car" were performed with Bono in his MacPhisto persona, during encores of the Zoomerang Leg of the tour. "Dirty Day" was also played on this leg after the acoustic set. "Numb" was performed with The Edge playing guitar and on lead vocals, with Larry Mullen Jr. performing backing vocals while drumming. "Zooropa" was played only three times and "Babyface" twice more at the same shows on the Zooropa leg, but were cut out of the setlist after the band didn't feel they sounded right live. "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" was performed acoustically for the Zooropa and Zoomerang legs.
The band began the Zoo TV Tour in February 1992 in support of their previous album Achtung Baby. In contrast to the austere stage setups of previous U2 tours, Zoo TV was an elaborate multimedia event. It satirised television and the viewing public's over-stimulation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The stage featured large video screens that showed visual effects, random video clips from pop culture, and flashing text phrases. Live satellite link-ups, channel surfing, crank calls, and video confessionals were incorporated into the shows.
LegacyAfter the release of record, David Bowie praised the band, writing, "[U2] might be all shamrocks and deutsche marks to some, but I feel that they are one of the few rock bands even attempting to hint at a world which will continue past the next great wall—the year 2000." Although the record was a success, in the years following its release, the group have regarded it with mixed feelings. Bono said, "I thought of Zooropa at the time as a work of genius. I really thought our pop discipline was matching our experimentation and this was our Sgt. Pepper. I was a little wrong about that. The truth is our pop disciplines were letting us down. We didn't create hits. We didn't quite deliver the songs. And what would Sgt. Pepper be without the pop songs?" The Edge said that he did not think the songs were "potent", further stating, "I never thought of Zooropa as anything more than an interlude... but a great one, as interludes go. By far our most interesting." Clayton said, "It's an odd record and a favourite of mine."
Recording and production
team eventually became comfortable with it, even sampling Mullen's drumming, The Edge's guitar riffs, Clayton's bass lines, and Bono's vocalisations.Howie B sampled almost anything he could in order to find interesting sounds. He created sequenced patterns of The Edge's guitar work, which The Edge, having never done it before, found very interesting. Howie B explained, "Sometimes I would sample, say, a guitar, but it wouldn't come back sounding like a guitar; it might sound more like a pneumatic drill, because I would take the raw sound and filter it, really destroy the guitar sound, and rebuild it into something completely different." Although sequencing was used, mostly on keyboards, guitar loops, and some percussion, it was used sparingly out of fear of becoming a "slave" to it.
Zooropa is certified 2× Platinum in the US by the Recording Industry Association of America, 3× Platinum in Australia, Platinum in the UK, and 4× Platinum in both New Zealand and Canada. To date, it has sold more than 7 million copies.
Neil McCormick wrote about Zooropa, "It feels like a minor work, and generally U2 don't do minor. But if you're not going to make the Big Statement, you're maybe going to come up with something that has the oxygen of pop music." In 1997, Spin wrote, "Zooropa took U2 as far from the monastic mysticism of The Joshua Tree as they could go. It freed U2 from itself." Edna Gundersen of USA Today said in 2002, "the alien territory of Achtung Baby and Zooropa cemented U2's relevance and enhanced its cachet as intrepid explorers".
Pop
Released March 3, 1997, Length 60:09, Label Island
1.Discothèque 5:19
2.Do You Feel Loved 5:07
3.Mofo 5:46
4.If God Will Send His Angels 5:22
2.Do You Feel Loved 5:07
3.Mofo 5:46
4.If God Will Send His Angels 5:22
5.Staring at the Sun 4:36
6.Last Night on Earth 4:45
7.Gone 4:26
8.Miami 4:52
9.The Playboy Mansion 4:40
10.If You Wear That Velvet Dress 5:14
11.Please 5:10
12.Wake Up Dead Man 4:52Pop is the ninth studio album by Irish rock band U2, released in March 1997. The album was a continuation of the band's 1990s reinvention, as they pursued a new musical direction by combining alternative rock, techno, dance, andelectronica influences. The album employs a variety of production techniques relatively new to U2, including sampling, loops, programmed drum machines, and sequencing.
Recording sessions began in 1995 with various record producers, including Nellee Hooper, Flood, Howie B, and Steve Osborne, who were introducing the band to various electronica influences. At the time, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. was inactive due to a back injury, prompting the other band members to take different approaches to songwriting. Upon Mullen's return, the band began re-working much of their material but ultimately struggled to complete songs. After the band allowed manager Paul McGuinness to book their upcoming 1997 PopMart Tour before the album was completed, U2 were rushed into completing the album. Even after delaying the album's release date from the 1996 Christmas and holiday season to March 1997, U2 ran out of time in the studio and the final product was not to their liking. Since the album's release, many of its songs have been re-recorded and remixed.
Although it reached #1 in 35 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, Pop's lifetime sales are among the lowest in U2's catalogue, and critical reaction was mixed. Pop was certified Platinum by the RIAA on 5 May 1997.
Background and writingIn the first half of the 1990s, U2 underwent a dramatic shift in musical style. The band had experimented withalternative rock and electronic music and the use of samples on their 1991 album, Achtung Baby, and, to a greater extent, on 1993's Zooropa. In 1995, the group's side-projects provided them an opportunity to delve even deeper into these genres. Bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. remixed the Mission: Impossible theme in an electronica style. The recording was nominated for a Grammy Award for "Best Pop Instrumental Performance" in 1997 and was an international Top Ten hit. In 1995, U2 and Brian Eno recorded an experimental album, Original Soundtracks 1, under the moniker "Passengers". The project included Howie B, Chuck D, Akiko Kobayashi and Luciano Pavarotti, among others.
Bono and The Edge had written a few songs before recording started in earnest. "Wake Up Dead Man", "Last Night on Earth" and "If God Will Send His Angels" were originally conceived during the Zooropa sessions. "Mofo" and "Staring at the Sun" were also partly written and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" came out of pre-production sessions with Nellee Hooper.
Recording and production
For the new record, U2 wanted to continue their sonic experimentation, and they employed multiple producers to have additional personnel to share ideas with.Flood was principal producer, having previously worked with the group as engineer for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and co-producer of Zooropa. Mark "Spike" Stent and Howie B were principal engineers. Flood described his job on Pop as a "creative coordinator. There were some tracks where I didn't necessarily have a major involvement... but ultimately the buck stopped with me. I had the role of the creative supervisor who judged what worked and didn't work." Howie B first worked with the band for Original Soundtracks 1 supplying mixing, treatments and scratching. On Pop, he was initially given the role of "DJ and Vibes". Later, his roles became more defined as co-producer, engineer, and mixer. One of his main tasks was to introduce the band to sounds and influences within electronica. The band and Howie B regularly went out to dance clubs to experience club music and culture. The overall goal for the record was to create a new sound for the band that was still recognizable as U2.
U2 began work on Pop in mid-1995, collaborating with Nellee Hooper in London, France, and Ireland. In September, the band moved the recording sessions to Hanover Quay in Dublin to a studio the band had just converted from a warehouse. The studio was designed to be rehearsal space more so than an actual studio. Flood, Howie B, Steve Osborne, and Marius de Vries joined Hooper and the band there, each of them incorporating their influences and experiences in electronic dance music. Flood described Howie's influence thus: "Howie would be playing all kinds of records to inspire the band and for them to improvise to. That could be anything from a jazz trumpet solo to a super groove funk thing, with no holds barred. We also programmed drum loops, or took things from sample CDs; anything to get the ball rolling. U2 arrive in the studio with very little finished material." These sessions lasted until December, and around 30-40 pieces of music emerged during this period.
Mullen, who had mostly been absent from the sessions to start a family and nurse a worsening back injury, had major surgery on his back in November. Mullen was unable to drum properly during this period, forcing U2 to abandon their usual methods of songwriting as a group and allowing them to pursue different musical influences. Mullen admits that he was upset that the band entered the studio without him, cognizant that key decisions would be made in the early months of recording. Eno attempted to convince the other band members to wait for Mullen, but as The Edge explains, "The thinking was that we were going to further experiment with the notion of what a band was all about and find new ways to write songs, accepting the influence, and aesthetics of dance music... we thought, 'Let's just start with Howie mixing drum beats and see where that gets us.'" Mullen was back in the studio three weeks after his surgery, but his back prevented him from fully dedicating himself to recording. As he described, "I needed a little more time to recover. But we were struggling with some of the material and for the project to move ahead, I had to put a lot of time in." Sessions ceased temporarily in January 1996 to allow Mullen to rehabilitate.
Despite the initial difficulties with sampling, the band and production Following Mullen's return and the sessions' resumption in February 1996, there was a three-month period in which Flood, Howie B, and Hooper production team attempted to re-work much of the band's material to better incorporate loops and samples with the band's musical ideas from 1995. This period was a difficult one; Mullen, in particular, had to record drum parts to replace loops that Howie B had sampled without permission. Flood said, "We took what we had and got the band to play to it and work it into their own idiom, whilst incorporating a dance ethic... The groove-orientated way of making music can be a trap when there's no song; you end up just plowing along on one riff. So you have to try to get the groove and the song, and do it so that it sounds like the band, and do it so that it sounds like something new."
Nellee Hooper left the sessions in May 1996 due to his commitments to the Romeo + Juliet film score. The recording sessions changed radically in the last few months, which is why Hooper was not credited on the album.
By forcing the band members out of their individual comfort zones, the producers were able to change their approach to songwriting and playing their instruments.Mullen, in particular, was forced to do this, as he used samples of other records, sample CDs, or programmed drums while recuperating. Although he eventually reverted to recording his own samples, the experience of using others' changed his approach to recording rhythms.
During the recording sessions, U2 allowed manager Paul McGuinness to book their upcoming PopMart Tour before they had completed the album, putting the tour's start date at April 1997. The album was originally planned to be completed and released in time for the 1996 Christmas and holiday season, but the band found themselves struggling to complete songs, necessitating a delay in the album's release date until March 1997. Even with the extended timeframe to complete the album, recording continued up to the last minute. Bono devised and recorded the chorus to "Last Night on Earth" on, ironically enough, the last night of the album's recording and mixing. When Howie B and The Edge took the album to New York City to be mastered, changes and additions to the songs were still being made. During the process, Howie B was adding effects to "Discothèque", while The Edge was recording backing vocals for "The Playboy Mansion". Of the last minute changes, The Edge said, "It's a sign of absolute madness." Flood says, "We had three different mixes of 'Mofo', and during mastering in November '96 in New York, I edited a final version of 'Mofo' from these three mixes. So even during mastering, we were trying to push the song to another level. It was a long process of experimentation; the album didn't actually come together until the last few months."
U2 ultimately felt that Pop was not finished like they had wanted. The Edge described the finished album as "a compromise project by the end. It was a crazy period trying to mix everything and finish recording and having production meetings about the upcoming tour... If you can't mix something, it generally means there's something wrong with it..." Mullen remarked that "If we had two or three more months to work, we would have had a very different record. I would like someday to rework those songs and give them the attention and time that they deserve." McGuinness disagrees that the band did not have enough time, saying, "It got an awful lot of time, actually. I think it suffered from too many cooks [in the kitchen]. There were so many people with a hand in that record it wasn't surprising to me that it didn't come through as clearly as it might have done... It was also the first time I started to think that technology was getting out of control." The band ended up re-working and re-recording many songs for the album's singles, as well as for the band's 2002 compilation The Best of 1990-2000.
CompositionClayton's bass guitar was heavily processed, to the point that it sounded like a keyboard bass (an instrument utilized on "Mofo"). The Edge wanted to steer away from the image he had since the 1980s as having an echo-heavy guitar sound. As a result, he was enthusiastic about experimenting with his guitar's sound, hence the distorted guitar sounds on the album, achieved with a variety of effects pedals, synthesisers and knob twiddling. Bono was very determined to avoid the vocal style present on previous (especially 1980s) albums, characterized by pathos, rich timbre, a sometimes theatrical quality and his use of falsetto singing: instead he opted for a rougher, more nervous and less timbre-laden style. The production team made his voice sound more intimate, as up-front and raw as possible. As Flood explained, "You get his emotional involvement with the songs through the lyrics and the way he reacts to the music—without him having to go to 11 all the time... We only used extreme effects on his voice during the recording, for him to get himself into a different place, and then, gradually, we pulled most effects out."
The Village People) limited its appeal. This started a backlash against U2 and Pop, limiting sales, as many fans felt that the band had gone a bit too far over-the-top in the self-mocking and "ironic" imagery.
Pop features tape loops, programming, sequencing, sampling, and heavy, funky dance rhythms. The Edge said in U2's fan magazine Propaganda that, "It's very difficult to pin this record down. It's not got any identity because it's got so many." Bono has said that the album "begins at a party and ends at a funeral", referring to the upbeat and party-like first half of the album and sombre and dark mood of the second half. According to Flood, the production team worked to achieve a "sense of space" on the record's sound by layering all the elements of the arrangements and giving them places in the frequency spectrum where they did not interfere with each other through the continual experimenting and re-working of song arrangements.
"Do You Feel Loved", which was considered for a single release, runs at a slower pace and features electronic elements."Discothèque", the lead single, begins with a distorted acoustic guitar that is passed through a loud amplifier and a filter pedal, along with being processed through a ARP 2600 synthesizer. The song's riff and techno dance rhythm are then introduced. The break in the song's rhythm section features guitar sounds utilizing "Big Cheese", an effects pedal made by Lovetone.
"Mofo" is the most overtly "techno" track on the record. Bono's lyrics lament the loss of his mother. There are little guitar and vocal samples that the band played and the production team sampled. They selected the bits that they liked, and then Edge played them back in a keyboard. Pop's producer Flood also put some of guitar work through the ARP 2600 on this track.
"If God Will Send His Angels" is a ballad with Bono pleading for God's help. Like the other singles, the single version is different to the album version.
"Staring at the Sun" features acoustic guitars and a distorted guitar riff from Edge, and a simple rhythm section from Mullen. The backing track was played to the ARP 2600 running in free time, playing an odd drum-like sequence.
"Last Night on Earth" is anthemic with fuzzy, layered, guitars a funk-inspired bass line, and vocal harmonies during the song's bridge.
"Gone" features a "siren" effect from Edge's guitar, complex krautrock style drums from Mullen and a funk-inspired bass line. This track was also considered for release as a single. Flood applied VCS3 spring reverb and ring modulation in a few places, and used it a lot on the basic rhythm track of this song.
"Miami" has a trip rock style. It begins with a drum loop, with Mullen's hi-hats playing backwards through a very extreme equalization filter. Howie b explains, "The main groove is actually just Larry's hi-hat, but it sounds like a mad engine running or something really crazy -- about as far away from a hi-hat as you can imagine... the task in 'Miami' was to make it unlike anything else on the album, and also unlike anything else you'd ever have heard before." Edge also comes in with a frenetic guitar riff and Bono's affected vocal style singing about Miami in metaphors and descriptions of loud, brash Americana. In 2005, Q magazine included the song "Miami" in a list of "Ten Terrible Records by Great Artists".
"The Playboy Mansion" starts out with mellow, kitsch guitar playing from Edge. Along with Mullen's drumming, here are breakbeats and hip-hop beats on the rhythm track, which were recorded as loops by Mullen. Howie described the loops thus; "Larry went off into a side room and made some sample loops of him playing his kit, and gave the loops to me and Flood. It was the same with the guitars; there's a guitar riff which comes in in the verse and chorus, which is a sample of Edge playing." Bono's lyrics are a tongue-in-cheek account of pop culture icons.
"If You Wear That Velvet Dress" features a mellow, dark atmosphere. Marius De Vries played keyboards on this track, contributing to the ambient feel. Mullen uses brush stroke style drums for the most part. Bono totally reworked this song as a powerful lounge-jazz piece for the 2002 Jools Holland album Small World Big Band volume 2.
"Please" features Bono lamenting The Troubles and the Northern Irish peace process, pleading with the powers that be to "get up off their knees". Mullen uses martial-style drumming, similar to "Sunday Bloody Sunday". Flood put guitar work through the ARP 2600 on the song. He explains, "For ages the rhythm track played all the way through the track. It's a fairly tight groove/bass thing, and then we suddenly decided to drop out the rhythm section in the middle and add a load of strings and these weird synthetic sounds at the end of that break." The single releases and live performances of the song were different from the album version, with more prominent guitar playing and a guitar solo to end the song.
"Wake Up Dead Man" began as an upbeat song from the Achtung Baby sessions in 1991. It evolved into a darker composition during the Zooropa sessions, but it was shelved until Pop. One of the band's darkest songs, "Wake Up Dead Man" features Bono pleading with Jesus to return and save mankind, evident in the lyrics "Jesus / Jesus help me / I'm alone in this world / And a fucked-up world it is too". It is also one of only a few U2 songs to include the word "fuck", if not the only one.
ReleasePop was originally scheduled for a November 1996 release date, but after the recording sessions went long, the album was delayed until March 1997. This significantly cut into the band's rehearsal time for the upcoming PopMart Tour that they had scheduled in advance, which impacted the quality of the band's initial performances on tour.
Promotion
On 12 February 1997, two weeks before the album released, the band announced details for the PopMart Tour in the lingerie section of a K-Mart department store in New York City. On 26 April 1997, American television network ABC aired a one-hour prime time special about Pop and the PopMart Tour, titled U2: A Year in Pop. Narrated by actor Dennis Hopper, the documentary featured footage from the Pop recording sessions, as well as live footage from the opening PopMart show in Las Vegas, which took place the night before. The program received poor reception, ranking at 101 out of 107 programs aired that week, according to Nielsen ratings, and became the lowest rated non-political documentary in the history of the ABC network. Despite the low ratings, U2 manager Paul McGuinness appreciated the opportunity for the band to appear on network television in the first place, stating that the small audience for the television special was still a large audience for the band, as it was much larger than any audience that could be obtained by MTV.
Singles
The album's first single, "Discothèque", was released on 3 February 1997 and was a huge dance and airplay success in the U.S. and UK. It also reached #1 in the singles charts of most of European countries including the United Kingdom, where it was their third #1 single. In the United States, "Discothèque" is notable for being U2's only single since 1991 to crack the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #10. However, the song's dance elements and more humorous video (featuring U2 in a discothèque and even imitatingPop featured six international singles, the most the band has released for a single album. "Do You Feel Loved" and "Gone" were also considered for release.
The follow-up single "Staring at the Sun" was released 15 April 1997 and became a Top 40 success in the U.S., but to a lesser extent, peaking at #26 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Last Night on Earth" was released as the third single on 14 July 1997, but did not crack the top 40, peaking at #57. "Please", "If God Will Send His Angels", and "Mofo" were subsequently released as singles, but none reached the Top 100.
The Please: Popheart Live EP, featuring four live tracks from the PopMart Tour, was also released in most regions. In the United States, the four live tracks were instead released on the "Please" single, along with the single version of "Please," itself.
Reception
Upon its release, the album debuted at #1 in 35 countries, and drew mixed reviews. Rolling Stone gave Pop a 4/5 star rating, praising the band's use of technology on the album: "U2 know that technology is ineluctably altering the sonic surface – and, perhaps, even the very meaning – of rock & roll." The review also stated that U2 had "pieced together a record whose rhythms, textures and visceral guitar mayhem make for a thrilling roller-coaster ride" and that the band had "defied the odds and made some of the greatest music of their lives." Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B rating, stating, "Despite its glittery launch, the album is neither trashy nor kitschy, nor is it junky-fun dance music. It incorporates bits of the new technology -- a high-pitched siren squeal here, a sound-collage splatter there -- but it is still very much a U2 album". Others felt that the album was a disappointment. Neil Strauss of The New York Times wrote that "From the band's first album, Boy, in 1980, through The Joshua Tree in 1987, U2 sounded inspired. Now it sounds expensive." He further commented that "U2 and techno don't mix any better than U2 and irony do."Although an early commercial success at the time of its release — it reached number one in 32 countries, including the UK and the US —Pop's lifetime sales are among the lowest in U2's catalogue, and critical reaction was mixed. It was certified RIAA platinum once, the lowest since the band's album October.
PopMart TourIn support of the album, the band launched the PopMart Tour. Consisting of four legs and a total of 94 shows, the tour took the band to stadiums worldwide from April 1997 to March 1998. Much like the band's previous Zoo TV Tour, PopMart was elaborately-staged, featured a lavish set, and saw the band embrace an ironic and self-mocking image. The band's performances and the tour's stage design poked fun at the themes of consumerism and embraced pop culture. Along with the reduced rehearsal time that affected initial shows, the tour suffered from technical difficulties and mixed reviews from critics and fans over the tour's extravagance.
Legacy
Following the PopMart Tour, the band expressed their dissatisfaction with the final product. Between the album's various singles and the band's The Best of 1990–2000 compilation (and disregarding dance remixes and the like), the band has re-recorded, remixed, and rearranged "Discothèque", "If God Will Send His Angels", "Staring at the Sun", "Last Night on Earth", "Gone", and "Please".
The band took a considerably more conservative, stripped down approach with Pop's follow-up, All That You Can't Leave Behind, along with the Elevation Tour that supported it. The few songs from Pop that were performed on the Elevation Tour ("Discothèque", "Gone", "Please", "Staring at the Sun", and "Wake Up Dead Man") were often presented in relatively bare-bones versions. On the Vertigo Tour, songs from Pop were even more rarely played; "Discothèque" was played twice at the beginning of the third leg, while other Pop songs appeared merely as snippets. This trend would continue for future tours.
All that You Can't Leave Behind
Released October 30, 2000, Length 49:25, Label Island/ Interscope
1.Beautiful Day 4:06
2.Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of 4:32
3.Elevation 3:45
2.Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of 4:32
3.Elevation 3:45
4.Walk On 4:55
5.Kite 4:23
6.In a Little While 3:37
7.Wild Honey 3:47
8.Peace on Earth 4:46
9.When I Look at the World 4:15
10.New York 5:28
11.Grace 5:31
UK, Australia and Japan bonus track
12.The Ground Beneath Her Feet 3:44All That You Can't Leave Behind is the tenth studio album by rock band U2. It was released on 30 October 2000 by Island Records in the United Kingdom and Interscope Records in the United States. Following the mixed reception to their 1997 album, Pop, All That You Can't Leave Behind represented a return to a more conventional sound for the band after they experimented with alternative rock and dance music in the 1990s. At the time of the album's release, U2 said on a number of occasions that they were "reapplying for the job ... [of] the best band in the world". U2 brought back producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois who had produced a number of the band's previous albums. The album was originally named "U2000", which was a working title for their past PopMart Tour.
All That You Can't Leave Behind has sold over 12 million copies, received wide critical acclaim, and won sevenGrammy Awards. The songs "Beautiful Day", "Walk On", "Elevation", and "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" were all successful singles. In 2003, the album was ranked number 139 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
RecordingThe band were not pleased with the reception of the Pop album and PopMart Tour. After the band's experimentation with alternative rock and electronic dance music on their previous three records, guitarist The Edge said the band had "taken the deconstruction of the rock 'n' roll band format to its absolute 'nth degree." The band wished to return to song arrangements that consisted almost entirely of guitar, bass, and drums, and to regroup in the studio relatively quickly after the PopMart tour wrapped up. They reunited with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who also produced The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby albums.
While the band wanted to develop material before recording, Eno convinced them to work on writing material quickly in the studio. For three weeks in late 1998, U2, Eno, and Lanois recorded demos in Hanover Quay Studios. One of the few quality ideas from these brief sessions, was the song "Kite". Lead singer Bono's vocals inspired everyone in the studio and came following vocal problems he had been having for the last few years. U2 believed they would have a new record completed in time for 1999. After the band's brief demo sessions, The Edge worked alone on song ideas before the band reunited at Hanover Quays. They recorded with the mentality of a "band in a room playing together", an approach that led to the album's more stripped-down sound.
Bono's involvement in the Jubilee 2000 campaign prevented him from dedicating all of his time to the album's recording, something Eno thought was a distraction. There was also a two-month break in the sessions when Bono worked with Lanois and Hal Wilner on the Million Dollar Hotel film soundtrack. The band had thought they could complete the album for 1999, but the sessions ran long, with band members' conflicting schedules playing a large part in the delay. U2 did not want to put a deadline on completing the album after their experience with their previous album which had to be rushed to completion before the pre-booked PopMart Tour.
In the summer 1999, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. bought houses in the South of France, in order to be near Bono and Edge's homes so they could have a place to both "work and play".
The band have said that All That You Can't Leave Behind was an album that acknowledged the band's past. For example, there was a big debate amongst the band members during the writing and recording of "Beautiful Day"; The Edge was playing with a guitar tone that he hadn't used much since their 1983 album War and the band wanted something more forward-looking. The Edge won out and the sound would make it into the final studio version for the song. Additionally, although the record was described as "a return to the traditional U2 sound", many songs were complex and retained elements of the band's 1990s experimenting;"Beautiful Day" features an electronic drum beat, and the song's intro features an "electronification of the [chorus] chords with a beat box and a string part"; "New York" came together when the band members were away at a meeting and Lanois and Eno were playing around with a drum loop that drummer Larry Mullen, Jr.had recorded. The album's recording wrapped up in 2000.
CompositionThe album was seen as a return to the band's traditional sound after their more experimental records of the 1990s. In many ways, however, this is an oversimplification, as the album breaks new ground by retaining the sonic nuances of their 1990s work and reconciling it with the melodic, hook-filled rock of their 1980s work. The first song (and lead single), "Beautiful Day," for instance, is an optimistic anthem that opens with a drum machine and a rhythm sequencer. The album also includes "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," a song written by Bono for his friend, lead singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence, who committed suicide in 1997.
Release
Promotion
Following the comparatively poor reception of their previous album Pop, U2 declared on a number of occasions that they were "re-applying for the job ... of best band in the world." Promotional activities for the album included a number of U2 firsts such as appearances on MTV's Total Request Live, USA Network's Farm Club, and Saturday Night Live. The band kicked off the release of the album by performing a short concert for about 600 people at the ManRay club in Paris, France, on 19 October 2000, as part of the promotion for the 30 October release of the album.
Single releases
The album was preceded by the lead single "Beautiful Day", released on 9 October 2000. It was U2's fourth #1 single in the UK, their first #1 in the Netherlands , and was also #1 for a week in Australia. The song peaked at #21 in the US.
The album's second single, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", was originally released 29 January 2001. It was also a success, reaching #2 on the UK Singles Chart.
A third single, "Elevation", was released 12 June 2001. The version of the song released as the single was the "Tomb Raider Mix", which appeared in television commercials for the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movie. It featured a much more hard rock arrangement than the album version, and it is this arrangement that the band plays live.
The album's fourth and final single, "Walk On" was released on 19 November 2001. The song was originally written about and dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese activist, but the song took on new meaning with listeners following the 11 September attacks.
Ban in Burma
The album is banned in Burma by SPDC because "Walk On" is a song dedicated to Burmese human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi.
Cover art
The photograph on the album cover was taken by long-time U2 photographer Anton Corbijn in the Roissy Hall 2F of the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris, France. Unlike the busy colour sleeves of the band's 1990s records, the cover is a single monochrome image of the band in the airport's departure terminal. The designers describe the look they created as "grown up". Early versions of the cover released to the press show a departure sign that reads "F21-36", however, this was changed to J33-3 in reference to the Bible verse Jeremiah 33:3, "Call unto me and I will answer thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not." Bono referred to it as "God's phone number" The lyric "3:33 when the numbers fell off the clock face" appears on the song "Unknown Caller" from the group's 2009 album No Line on the Horizon.
Reception
The album was generally well-received by critics and the public, debuting at #1 in 32 countries (#3 in the United States). Many critics, such as Rolling Stone magazine, declared it as "U2's third masterpiece", alongside The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. Steve Morse of The Boston Globe said the record "has great songs that tie together beautifully—a welcome change from the disjointed nature of U2 discs such as 1993's Zooropa and 1997's Pop". He believed that Bono took extra care in crafting the lyrics, resulting in the "most thoughtful, personal, and tender U2 songs in memory".
The first single released was "Beautiful Day", which reached #1 in the UK single charts (which tracks the popularity of individual songs) and in most European countries, Canada and Australia. All That You Can't Leave Behind became the fourth-highest-selling U2 album, with total sales of over 12 million. The album holds an average critic score of 79/100 on Metacritic.
Awards and accolades
All That You Can't Leave Behind and its singles won seven Grammy Awards in two years. In 2001, "Beautiful Day" won "Song of the Year", "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal", and "Record of the Year". In 2002, "Walk On" won "Record of the Year", "Elevation" won "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal", and "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" won "Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal". The album also won "Best Rock Album" that year. All That You Can't Leave Behind is the only album ever to have two singles win "Record of the Year" in two consecutive years.
In 2003, All That You Can't Leave Behind was ranked number 139 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2009, it was ranked by Rolling Stone as the 13th-best album of the decade, while "Beautiful Day" was rated the 9th best song.
Elevation TourThe accompanying Elevation Tour officially began on 24 March 2001 with a two-night stay at the National Car Rental Center near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and ended back in Miami, Florida on 2 December 2001 at the American Airlines Arena. The tour featured three legs and a total of 113 shows. The Elevation Tour saw U2 return to playing indoor arenas after they spent the 1990s in outdoor stadiums. The stage design of the Elevation Tour was more stripped-down and intimate for the fans. The tour grossed approximately US$110 million, and in 2005 was listed as the third biggest tour of all time by Pollstar, with many of the stops selling out immediately. The band performed multiple shows in the same location including four consecutive shows in Chicago, Boston and London, respectively.
perspective of citizens from the developing world, focusing on the disparity between the long-term socioeconomic planning stressed by the West ("You speak in signs and wonders") and the developing world's immediate need for sustenance ("But I'm begging for the crumbs from your table"). One line ("You speak in signs and wonders") was meant as a criticism of the Catholic Church. The bridge ("Where you live should not decide / Whether you live or whether you die") is statement from Bono that follows with the theme in his speeches in which he tries to raise awareness about African poverty. Bono stated on a bonus DVD included with special editions of the album that the band has no recollection of writing the song, as they were intoxicated at the time. A studio performance is also included on the aforementioned bonus DVD. It was only played a handful on times during the third leg of the Vertigo Tour.
U2 made various promotional appearances on television. On 20 November 2004, U2 appeared as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live, performing "Vertigo ", "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own", and "I Will Follow". Two days later, on the day of the album's release, U2 performed on a flat-bed truck, which drove through much of downtown New York City. The drive ended at the Brooklyn Bridge, under which the band performed a "secret gig", some of which comprised an MTV special and an EP called Live from Under the Brooklyn Bridge.
"Original of the Species" was released as a promotional single in the US. It peaked at #6 on the Triple A Chart according to mediaguide.com and the video has reached #12 on VH1's top 20 video countdown. The track has also made brief appearances on the Hot AC charts according to Radio and Records and MediaGuide.Los Angeles Times , and The Boston Globe , among others quite vocal in its praise. Following the 22 November 2004 release, the album debuted at #1 in 34 countries, including the US Billboard 200 (with sales of 840,000), the UK album chart, and the Aria charts. The album has gone on to sell 9 million copies worldwide. This album is often described as the album which has firmly entrenched U2 at the top after the commercial and critical let down of 1997's Pop. The album received an average critic score of 79%, according to Metacritic.
Awards and Accolades
In support of the album, U2 launched the Vertigo Tour, which featured five legs and a total of 131 shows. The first and third legs featured indoor concerts in North America, while the second and fourth legs featured outdoor concerts in Europe and Central/South America, respectively. The final leg, which saw the band touring the Pacific, was delayed due to an illness suffered by The Edge's daughter Sian. The stage design of the Vertigo Tour was a stripped-down, intimate affair for the fans and featured an ellipse-shaped B-stage extending from the main stage. In total, the Vertigo Tour had sold 4,619,021 tickets for a total gross of $389 million; the gross was the second-highest such figure ever. Three concert films depicting the tour, Vertigo 2005: Live from Chicago, Vertigo : Live from Milan, and U2 3D, were recorded.
technology -inspired directions. The track was developed early in the Fez sessions. The guitar solo at the song's conclusion was taken from the backing track.
Reception
Critical response
Blu-Ray as U2 360° at the Rose Bowl on 3 June 2010. "Get on Your Boots", "Magnificent", "No Line on the Horizon", "Unknown Caller", "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight", and "Moment of Surrender" are on the release. "Breathe" is included as a bonus track.
The song "Beautiful Day", which debuted on the tour, is one of only three U2 songs to have been played at every concert since their introduction (the other two being "One" and "Vertigo ").
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Released November 22, 2004, Length 48:46, Label Island/Interscope
1.Vertigo 3:11
2.Miracle Drug 3:54
2.Miracle Drug 3:54
3.Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own 5:08
4.Love and Peace or Else 4:48
5.City of Blinding Lights 5:47
6.All Because of You 3:34
7.A Man and a Woman 4:30
8.Crumbs from Your Table 5:03
9.One Step Closer 3:48
10.Original of the Species 4:41
11.Yahweh 4:22
UK and Japan bonus track
12.Fast Cars 3:44How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is the eleventh studio album by Irish rock band U2, released in November 2004. Much like their previous album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was commercially successful and critically acclaimed and maintains a more traditional rock sound after the band experimented with alternative rock and dance music in the 1990s. The album was produced by Steve Lillywhite, with others involved in the production including Flood, Jacknife Lee, Nellee Hooper, Chris Thomas, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Carl Glanville.
U2 lead singer Bono described the album as "our first rock album. It's taken us twenty years or whatever it is, but this is our first rock album." Although not a concept album in the traditional sense, most of the music on the record deals with the world at the crossroads of its existence. Love and war, peace and harmony, and approaching death are themes of the album.
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and its singles won all nine Grammy Awards for which it was nominated (U2 themselves were awarded eight out of the nine). The album also was the fourth biggest selling album of 2004, selling over 9 million copies and yielded several successful singles in "Vertigo ", "City of Blinding Lights", and "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own".
The album was also included in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Best Albums of the Decade at number 68.
Development
In 2003, Bono said how one of their new songs called "Full Metal Jacket" was "the mother of all rock songs" and "the reason to make a new album". A similar demo called "Native Son" was also recorded. Both of these demos would later become "Vertigo ".
A demo version of the album (The Edge's copy) was stolen while the band were having their photo taken for a magazine in France in July 2004. It contained unfinished versions of several songs that made it onto the album. The band publicly announced that if those tracks were leaked online, they would release the album immediately. Several months later, tracks from the album were released online, but they were the finished products, and not the rough demos from The Edge's stolen CD.
Adam Clayton said of Atomic Bomb, "It's very much a guitar record. "Vertigo ", "Love and Peace", "City of Blinding Lights", "All Because of You", all pretty up, rocky tunes. A lot of them are a kick-back to our very early days, so it's like with each year we have gathered a little bit more and this is what we are now."
In late 2004, "Mercy", an unreleased track taken from the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb sessions, surfaced on the Internet through a fan who had been given a copy of the album containing the extra track. The track is of less than standard audio quality, but managed to become a favorite on fan websites. It was cut from the final release, but is described by Blender Magazine as "a six-and-a-half-minute outpouring of U2 at its most uninhibitedly U2-ish". The lyrics to the song can be found in the booklet for the Collector's Edition. After rehearsing the song prior to dates on the European leg of the U2360 Tour, a significantly revised version of the song received its live debut on 12 September 2010 during the second Zurich concert, and was officially released as the leading track on the band's "Wide Awake in Europe" vinyl-only live EP that November.
Singer Michael W. Smith joined the band in the studio during the Atomic Bomb sessions and worked on at least one track with them entitled "North Star ". That track, which was a tribute to Johnny Cash , has not yet surfaced officially or unofficially in any form. A song introduced by Bono as "North Star " was played in Turin during the U2 360° Tour, however it is unknown whether or not this is the same song that was worked on during the sessions. Other tracks, such as "Shark Soup", "Lead Me In The Way I Should Go", and "You Can't Give Away Your Heart", were referenced in the media and by the band themselves, but have not been released.
"Crumbs from Your Table" is about the relationship between Western countries and developing countries. The verses and chorus address the relationship from the The very earliest versions of "Love and Peace or Else" originated from the studio sessions to 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind album. It serves as Atomic Bomb's "big plea for peace" song, following in the footsteps of "Sunday Bloody Sunday", "Please", "Miss Sarajevo", and "Peace on Earth". During performances on the Vertigo Tour, "Love and Peace Or Else" featured Larry Mullen Jr. moving out to the center of the ellipse-shaped ramp, where he played a floor tom and crash cymbal for the majority of the song. Near the end, Bono took over and played the drum until the song segued into the opening drumbeat of "Sunday Bloody Sunday". Most live performances of the song also saw Mullen singing the "release, release, release, release" part during the chorus alongside Bono.
"One Step Closer" is slow tempo song, with Bono's lyrics centered around traffic images, leading to the singer being stranded on a refuge island. The origins of the song go back to the All That You Can't Leave Behind sessions. It was revived for Atomic Bomb, with Lanois introducing a pedal steel guitar, in addition to guitars from The Edge and Bono, and musical influences varying from country music to The Velvet Underground making themselves felt. One recording of the song ran for more than 15 minutes, with Bono adding many verses that were subsequently dropped. Producer Jacknife Lee also contributed to the final form of the recording. "One Step Closer" is billed in the album with thanks to Noel Gallagher of Oasis. The title of the song comes from a conversation Bono had with Gallagher about Bono's dying father, Bob Hewson. Bono asked, "Do you think he believes in God?" to which Gallagher replied, "Well, he's one step closer to knowing." Through the end of the Vertigo Tour, the song had never been performed in any U2 concert. The title of the album derives from a lyric in the song "Fast Cars", which was only available on some versions of the album.
Release
A week prior to the album's release, U2.com streamed the album in its entirety for visitors.
Promotion
"Vertigo " was featured on a widely-aired television commercial for the Apple iPod . Apple, in a partnership with the band, released a special edition iPod bearing the black and red color scheme of the album, as well as laser-engraved autographs of each member on the back. The Complete U2, an iTunes Store-exclusive box set featuring 448 tracks, including previously unreleased content was also released. Proceeds from the iPod and iTunes partnerships were donated to charity. A live version of "Original of the Species" from the concert film Vertigo 2005: Live from Chicago was later featured in commercials for the video iPod .
Singles
The album was preceded by the lead single "Vertigo ", which was released on 24 September 2004. The song topped the charts in several countries, including the UK, reached #31 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and topped the Modern Rock Tracks chart. It also topped the digital downloads chart in both the US and the UK, becoming U2's best-selling digital single ever in the US, with 2x Platinum status (note that for downloads, Platinum status was obtained at 200,000 copies sold). Upon release the song received extensive airplay and was an international hit, being featured in a popular iPod television commercial. The song lent its namesake to the band's Vertigo Tour.
The second single in the UK was "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own", released on 7 February 2005. The song is about Bono's relationship with his dying father. The song debuted at #1 on the UK Singles Chart, becoming U2's first-ever follow-up single to top the charts. On US adult contemporary radio, it reached #15 on the Adult Top 40 and also appeared on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, the Pop 100, and the Hot 100.
"City of Blinding Lights" was the third UK release. It peaked at #2 and spent nine weeks on the chart. It also placed on the US Adult Top 40.
The second single in the US was "All Because of You". Although it received some airplay on rock radio, reaching #6 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and #20 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, the song had little mainstream exposure. When released in the UK, it peaked at #4 but only spent four weeks on the chart.
"Original of the Species" was released as a promotional single in the US. It peaked at #6 on the Triple A Chart according to mediaguide.com and the video has reached #12 on VH1's top 20 video countdown. The track has also made brief appearances on the Hot AC charts according to Radio and Records and MediaGuide.
Reception
Much like its predecessor, this album was generally well-received by critics like Rolling Stone (who described it as "grandiose music from grandiose men"), Q, NME, the Awards and Accolades
Like Santana's Supernatural, this album was awarded nine Grammy Awards overall in 2005 and 2006, winning in all of the categories in which it was nominated. It was awarded the Album of the Year award in 2006. "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" from the album was awarded "Song of the Year" and "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal". "City of Blinding Lights" was awarded the award for "Best Rock Song", and the album was also awarded "Best Rock Album". Album producer Steve Lillywhite was also awarded Producer of the Year, Non Classical in 2006. In 2005, the single "Vertigo " from the album won in all three categories in which it was nominated: "Best Rock Song", "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal", and "Best Short Form Music Video".
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was rated the best album of 2004 by USA Today, Paste Magazine, and The New York Times . The Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn called it the second best album of the year, and it was ranked third and fourth respectively by liveDaily and Q in their lists of the best albums of the year. Village Voice rated it the eighth best album of 2004, while PopMatters.com ranked it 25th. It was included in Rolling Stone's Top 50 Albums of 2004, and they later rated it the 68th best album of the decade, while "Vertigo " was ranked the 64th best song. Despite all of the critical acclaim for the album, Bono would later state that "[t]here are no weak songs. But as an album, the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, and it fucking annoys me."
Vertigo Tour
In support of the album, U2 launched the The songs "Vertigo " and "City of Blinding Lights", which debuted on the tour, are two of only four U2 songs to have been played at every concert since their introduction.
No Line on the Horizon
Released February 27, 2009, Length 53:44, Label Mercury/ Island/ Interscope
1.No Line on the Horizon 4:12
2.Magnificent 5:24
3.Moment of Surrender 7:24
2.Magnificent 5:24
3.Moment of Surrender 7:24
4.Unknown Caller 6:03
5.I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight 4:14
6.Get on Your Boots 3:25
7.Stand Up Comedy 3:50
8.Fez – Being Born 5:17
9.White as Snow 4:41
10.Breathe 5:00
11.Cedars of Lebanon 4:13No Line on the Horizon is the twelfth studio album by rock band U2. Released on 27 February 2009, it was the band's first record since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004), marking the longest gap between studio albums of U2's career. The band originally intended to release the songs as two EPs, but later combined the material. Photographer Anton Corbijn shot a companion film, Linear, to be released alongside the album and included with several special editions.
U2 began work on the album in 2006 with record producer Rick Rubin, but shelved most of the material from those sessions. From May 2007 to December 2008, the band collaborated with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who produced and co-wrote many of the new songs. Writing and recording took place in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Morocco. The group intended to release No Line on the Horizon in November 2008; after composing 50 to 60 songs, they postponed the release because they wanted to continue writing.
Prior to release, U2 indicated that Eno's and Lanois' involvement, as well as the band's time in Fez, Morocco, had resulted in a more experimental record than their previous two albums; the band compared the shift in style to that seen between The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby (1991). Upon its release, No Line on the Horizon received generally favourable reviews, although many critics noted that it was not as experimental as previously suggested. The album was not as commercially successful as anticipated, and the band expressed disappointment over the relatively low sales of five million copies when compared to previous albums. U2 are supporting the album with the U2 360° Tour.
Recording and production
Aborted sessions with Rick Rubin
In 2006, U2 started work on the follow-up to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004), collaborating with producer Rick Rubin in southern France and at Abbey Road Studios in London. Later that year, the band released two songs from these sessions on the compilation album U218 Singles: a cover of the Skids' "The Saints Are Coming" with Green Day , and "Window in the Skies". In January 2007, lead singer Bono said U2 intended to take their next album in a different musical direction from their previous few releases. He said, "We're gonna continue to be a band, but maybe the rock will have to go; maybe the rock has to get a lot harder. But whatever it is, it's not gonna stay where it is."
Rubin encouraged a "back to basics" approach and wanted the group to bring finished songs to the studio. This approach conflicted with U2's "free-form" recording style, by which they improvised material in the studio. They ultimately decided to end recording with Rubin; though the material from these sessions was shelved, the band expressed interest in revisiting it in the future. They subsequently employed Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as principal producers and co-writers. Steve Lillywhite was also brought in to produce a few tracks.
Sessions with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois
The group spent two weeks in Fez, occasionally recording with an oud player and local percussionists. Recording during the festival exposed the group to Hindu and Jewish music, Sufi singing and Joujouka drums. The exotic influences inspired them to pursue a more experimental sound. Bassist Adam Clayton said the music they heard in Fez "had a primitivism ... but there was an other-worldly feel, there was that connection with that Arabic scale." Eno insisted that drummer Larry Mullen, Jr.use an electronic drum kit. The band described many of the tracks conceived in these sessions as unsuitable for radio airplay or for playing live. The open-air riad allowed the group to hear birdsong, as captured in the introduction to "Unknown Caller".The songs "Moment of Surrender", "White as Snow", "No Line on the Horizon" and "Unknown Caller" were written at this time; each track was recorded in one take. In total, the band recorded approximately 10 songs during the two weeks. After leaving Fez, the band recorded in Hanover Quay Studios in Dublin, Platinum Sound Recording Studios in New York City, and Olympic Studios in London.U2 began work with Eno and Lanois in May 2007. Bono had accepted an invitation to the World Sacred Music Festival in Fez, Morocco, and he invited his bandmates, as well as Eno and Lanois, to attend. They rented the riad of hotel Riad Yacout and turned it into a makeshift recording studio, intending to create "future hymns"—songs that would be played forever.
Clayton filmed the band's progress during the album's production; these videos were added to the subscribers' section of U2.com. On 16 August 2008, an eavesdropping fan recorded several songs playing from Bono's beach house in Èze, France. These "beach clips" were uploaded to YouTube, but removed at Universal Music's request.In November 2008, U2 guitarist The Edge confirmed the album's working title as No Line on the Horizon and noted that the band had to move quickly to complete mixing to meet the new February release date. In an interview with Q, the group revealed that rapper will.i.am had worked with them on the track "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight".
In pre-release interviews, U2 compared the extent of their expected shift in musical style to that of Achtung Baby. The band scaled back these experimental pursuits, however; Mullen, Jr. noted, "at a certain stage, reality hits, and you go, 'What are we gonna do with this stuff?' Are we going to release this sort of meandering experimentation, or are we gonna knock some songs out of this?" Bono shared this opinion, stating, "We went so far out on the Sufi singing and the sort of ecstatic-music front, that we had to ground it and find a counterpoint." Eno commented that many of "the more contemplative and sonically adventurous songs" had been dropped, attributing the lack of African-inspired music to its sounding "synthetic" and unconvincing when paired with other songs.
In December 2008, U2 recorded at Olympic Studios in London, putting the finishing touches to the album and making several changes to its content. The group had planned to release the material as two extended plays, titled Daylight and Darkness, but during these sessions decided to compile the best songs onto one album. The band struggled to complete "Stand Up Comedy", a song they had been working on since the Fez sessions 16 months previously. The song had been through multiple iterations and titles, including "For Your Love" and "Stand Up". U2 cut "Winter", a song Eno had urged them to complete, and "Every Breaking Wave", which they cut to reduce the album's running time. "Winter" appears in the accompanying Anton Corbijn film Linear and the 2009 war film Brothers. Both songs had been mentioned in pre-release album reviews.
The band changed many of the tracks' names during recording, retitling "French Disco" to "Magnificent" and "Crazy Tonight" to "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight". "Chromium Chords" became "Tripoli", and finally "Fez – Being Born". The band considered "Fez – Being Born" and "Get on your Boots" as album openers, but ultimately decided on "No Line on the Horizon". At the end of the sessions, the band chose to include "White as Snow", a quiet song about a dying soldier in Afghanistan, to balance out the earlier, rockier tunes. With the exception of this track, U2 had tried to keep the theme of war out of the album. In early December 2008, Clayton stated, "this is definitely the last week of recording. But then again, last week was definitely the last week of recording, and the week before that." The final sessions ended later that month. No Line on the Horizon is dedicated to Rob Partridge, who signed the band's first record deal in 1979 and died of cancer in late 2008.
Linear
Linear, a film directed by Anton Corbijn, is included with the digipak, magazine, box, and deluxe iTunes editions of the album. The idea for the film originated from a U2 video shoot in June 2007, during which Corbijn asked the band to remain still while he filmed them to create a "photograph on film"; the band did not move but the objects around them did. Impressed, the band believed that the online album listening experience could be enhanced with moving imagery. In May 2008, they commissioned Corbijn to create the film. Corbijn has claimed that Linear is not a music video but "a new way to listen to a record" and "a new way to use film to connect to music".
The film is based on a story by Corbijn and Bono, and includes several of the characters Bono created for the album. The plot focuses on a Parisian motorcycle officer, played by Saïd Taghmaoui; the character has become disillusioned with his life and the conflict between immigrants and the police in the city, causing him to leave to see his girlfriend in Tripoli. The song order in the film is representative of No Line on the Horizon's as it was in May 2008.
Following album
In February 2009, Bono stated that by the end of the year U2 would release an album consisting of discarded material from the No Line on the Horizon sessions. Bono labelled it "a more meditative album on the theme of pilgrimage". Provisionally titled Songs of Ascent, it would be a sister release to No Line on the Horizon, similar to Zooropa's relationship to Achtung Baby. In June 2009, Bono said that although nine tracks had been completed, the album would only be released if its quality surpassed that of No Line on the Horizon. A December 2009 report stated that U2 had been working in the studio with the goal of a mid-2010 release. The band revealed that the first single was intended to be "Every Breaking Wave".In April 2010, U2's manager Paul McGuinness confirmed that the album would not be finished by June, but indicated that a release "before the end of the year is increasingly likely." In October 2010, Bono stated that the new album would be produced by Danger Mouse, and that 12 songs had been completed. He also noted that U2 were working on an album of club music in the spirit of "U2's remixes in the 1990s". McGuinness said the next album was slated for an early 2011 release. In December 2010, Will.i.am confirmed that he will be co-producing the next release with Danger Mouse. In February 2011 McGuinness stated that the album was almost complete gave a tentative release date of May 2011, although he noted that Songs of Ascent was no longer the likely title.
Composition
The drug addict character appears in the songs "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller". "Moment of Surrender", improvised and recorded by U2, Eno, and Lanois in a single take, demonstrates gospel influences. Eno and Lanois said the song is the closest to the group's original concept for an album of future hymns. Eno noted, "Apart from some editing and the addition of the short cello piece that introduces it, the song appears on the album exactly as it was the first and only time we played it." In the song, the addict is having a crisis of faith. In "Unknown Caller", the character is suicidal and, while using his phone to buy drugs, begins receiving cryptic text messages withDuring the Hanover Quay sessions in 2008, Bono indicated that he had become "tired of [writing in] the first-person", leading him to write songs from the perspective of different characters. He invented "a traffic cop, a junkie [and] a soldier serving in Afghanistan." Although each character tells a personal story, the underlying theme of the album is peripheral vision, events taking place in the wider world, "just at the edges". Bono described it as "central to the understanding of this album". Nevertheless, as the characters narrate there is an intentional "shutting out" of the wider world, so that the focus remains on their "personal epiphanies". The narrative the group originally planned for the album was broken up in the sessions' final weeks with their changes to the track listing. In January 2008, Bono revealed that numbers were significant in many of the songs. In February 2009, he noted that the album was split into thirds; he described the first section as "a whole world unto itself, and you get to a very ecstatic place", and the second as "a load of singles". The final third is composed of songs that are "unusual territory" for the band.
"No Line on the Horizon" stemmed from Mullen's experiments with different drum beats; Eno sampled and manipulated the patterns, and the rest of the band began to play over the beats. The lyrical idea of a place "where the sea meets the sky and you can't tell the difference between the two" and the vocal delivery were both present from the start. Bono noted that the theme behind the song was infinity, and that the track was inherently optimistic. "Magnificent" is an up-tempo song that begins with a synthesizer line by Eno. The band wanted a track that felt euphoric, and the melody, created from a series of chord changes during a jam, was worked on continuously by Bono. The setting in the lyrics was described by Lanois as "New York in the 50s", written from the perspective of "a Charlie Parker kind of figure". The song has been described as "echo[ing] The Unforgettable Fire's opening track 'A Sort of Homecoming' in its atmospheric sweep".
Eno developed "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" during the Fez sessions, under the working title "Diorama". U2 reworked it with Steve Lillywhite during a break from recording with Eno and Lanois. Some of the lyrics were influenced by Barack Obama 's presidential campaign, while others referenced Bono. Album reviews described the song as a joyous pop rock composition. "Get on Your Boots" stemmed from a guitar riff The Edge created and recorded at his home. At 150 beats per minute, the song is one of the fastest the band have recorded. Rolling Stone called it a "blazing, fuzzed-out rocker that picks up where 'Vertigo ' left off." Thematically, the song is about Bono taking his family on vacation to France and witnessing warplanes flying overhead at the start of the Iraq War. The chant "let me in the sound" was developed late in the recording sessions and became a theme throughout parts of the album.
"Stand Up Comedy" went through numerous iterations; at one point, Lanois noted, "that song was about six different songs". In its original concept, the track featured mandolins playing in a Middle Eastern beat. The riff was altered and a chorus of "for your love" was introduced. This version was discarded as the band came up with a new riff and lyrics, only retaining the "for your love" vocal. U2 liked the result at the end of the sessions, but felt that the song would appear too "crafted"; they instead chose an older mix for inclusion on the album. Several of the song's lyrics, including the line, "Be careful of small men with big ideas", relate to Bono's self-mockery. The guitar sound from the experimental "Fez" portion of "Fez – Being Born" was developed while the band recorded "The Saints Are Coming" during the Rick Rubin sessions. Lanois edited the part, adding a beat developed by Eno, before playing it for the group. The sounds of a Moroccan marketplace were also added. The faster section of the song, "Being Born", was altered into the same key as "Fez" and Lanois placed the two sections together, creating the one song. The "let me in the sound" chant from "Get on Your Boots" is included at the beginning of the track.
"White as Snow" focuses on the soldier character's last thoughts as he dies from the wounds suffered from an improvised explosive device. The song is based on the traditional hymn "Veni, veni, Emmanuel"; the idea to base the song on a public domain melody was suggested to Lanois by Newfoundland musician Lori Anna Reid. "Breathe" is set on 16 June, an intentional reference to James Joyce 's novel Ulysses . U2 worked on an earlier version of the song for a long time before they scrapped it and re-recorded it with Lillywhite. Two sets of lyrics were also present; one about Nelson Mandela, and the other "more surreal and personal". The band decided to use the latter. "Cedars of Lebanon", written from the perspective of a journalist covering a war overseas, was created in a similar manner to "Fez – Being Born". The song's melody was based on a sample of "Against the Sky", a track Eno and Lanois had collaborated on with Harold Budd for the 1984 album The Pearl; the group noted that the ambience of the song was "like a direct throwback to the early 80s". The final verse is a condemnation of the Iraq War.
Release
At the music industry trade fair Midem in 2008, Paul McGuinness said No Line on the Horizon would be ready for release in October 2008. Lanois corroborated that in June 2008, stating the album should be ready in 3–4 weeks. He said, "We're just finishing the vocals. Bono's in great form, singing fantastic." On 3 September 2008, U2.com posted an article in which Bono revealed that the new album would be out "in early 2009", also noting that "around 50–60 songs" had been recorded in the sessions. It was later confirmed the album would be released on 27 February 2009 in Ireland, 2 March in the UK, and 3 March in North America. The gap between How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and No Line on the Horizon's release was the longest in the band's career.
Universal Music Group took extreme measures to prevent the album from leaking, offering pre-release listening sessions for critics instead of sending out review copies. However, Universal Music Australia's online music store, getmusic.com.au, accidentally released the album for digital sale on 18 February 2009, almost two weeks before the scheduled release date. The complete album appeared on the website for a short time before it was removed, and the accidental sale led to the album's being leaked and shared across the Internet. U2 reacted to the leak with some positivity. The Edge stated, "The one good thing about that is a lot of our fans have already given us their thumbs up. Even though it was fans getting it for free."
Cover art
The cover art for No Line on the Horizon is a photograph of Lake Constance, taken by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto; titled Boden Sea, it is one of 200 pictures in his Seascapes collection. The image was the inspiration for Bono's lyrics on the track "No Line on the Horizon". Sugimoto and U2 struck a deal in which the band could use the photograph as the cover art and Sugimoto could use "No Line on the Horizon" in his future projects; Sugimoto's only stipulation was that no text could be placed on top of the image. Original releases had an equals sign superimposed in the middle of the album cover, but later releases featured only the image.
Boden Sea had previously been used by Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree for their 2006 album Specification.Fifteen. The album covers are similar, though No Line on the Horizon has a white border around the image, and Specification.Fifteen has a box at the top of the cover with the names of the artists and the album. Deupree called U2's cover "nearly an exact rip-off" and stated that for the band to obtain the rights to the image it was "simply a phone call and a check." Sugimoto refuted both of these claims, calling the use of the same photograph a coincidence and stating that no money was involved in the deal with U2.
Formats
No Line on the Horizon was released in five physical formats, three of which—the digipak, magazine, and box formats—were limited editions. The standard jewel case release contained a 24-page booklet. The LP vinyl release was pressed on two black discs and contained a 16-page booklet. The digipak release had a 36-page booklet and a poster, which was also included in the box release. A 60-page magazine was included in the magazine release. Linear was a downloadable feature in the digipak and magazine formats, and was a bonus DVD in the box release, which also contained a 64-page hardcover book.
The album was made available for pre-order on the iTunes Store on 19 January 2009, the day "Get on Your Boots" premiered on radio. iTunes album pre-orders contained bonus tracks unavailable with any other version. Digital versions were available from Amazon.com in MP3 format, and from U2.com in MP3 and FLAC formats.
Promotion and singles
From 11 to 17 February 2009, U2.com hosted a promotion where 4,000 fans could win a 7-inch single collector's edition box set that contained all four of the singles released from No Line on the Horizon. An alternate version of the title track, "No Line on the Horizon 2", debuted on RTÉ 2XM on 12 February 2009; it was later used as the B-side for the first single, "Get on Your Boots". The full album began streaming on the group's MySpace page on 20 February 2009, and on U2.com a few days later.To promote No Line on the Horizon, U2 performed "Get on Your Boots" at the 51st Grammy Awards, the 2009 BRIT Awards, and the 2009 Echo Awards, although the album was not eligible for awards at any of the ceremonies.The band later appeared on French television and radio on 23 February 2009, and on 26 February they taped a segment for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, which was aired the next day. On 27 February U2 made an appearance on a Live Lounge session for BBC Radio 1, followed by a mini-concert on the roof of Broadcasting House. On the week of 2 March 2009, U2 appeared on CBS -TV's Late Show with David Letterman for five consecutive nights, the first time a musical guest had performed for an entire week on the show. The group performed "Breathe", "Magnificent", "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight", "Beautiful Day", and "Get on Your Boots". On 3 March, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, added a street sign reading "U2 Way" at 53rd Street in Manhattan, for the week that U2 performed on the Late Show. U2 also performed at Fordham University on 6 March 2009 for an appearance on ABC-TV's Good Morning America.] From 9 to 11 March, the band participated in "U2 3 Nights Live", a series of radio interviews and performances that were broadcast across North America and streamed live on U2.com.
Four singles were planned from the album, although only three were released. The first single, "Get on Your Boots", was released as a digital download on 19 January 2009, and in a physical format on 16 February 2009. The iTunes store held the exclusive digital download rights to the single for the first 24 hours. The second single, "Magnificent", was released on 4 May 2009. The third single, "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight", was released on 7 September 2009.
Reception
Critical response
No Line on the Horizon received generally favourable reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 72 based on 30 reviews, three of which gave it a perfect score. David Fricke of Rolling Stone gave a perfect score of five stars, labelling it "[U2's] best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby." Blender and Q also gave it a perfect score. In his review for Blender, Rob Sheffield stated "The days are gone when U2 were trying to keep it simple—at this point, the lads have realized that over-the-top romantic grandiosity is the style that suits them, so they come on like the cosmic guitar supplicants they were born to be." Mojo and Uncut gave the album four stars; Uncutreviewer Andrew Mueller commented, "It's U2's least immediate album—but there's something about it that suggests it may be one of their most enduring." Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly graded it A− and called the album "an eclectic and electrifying winner, one that speaks to the zeitgeist the way only U2 can and dare to do." BBC Music reviewer Chris Jones said, "There's plenty to rejoice about here" while noting that the "symbiotic relationship with Brian Eno (and Daniel Lanois) seems to have reached the point of imperceptibility." NME contributor Ben Patashnik rated the album seven out of ten, calling it "a grand, sweeping, brave record that, while not quite the reinvention they pegged it as, suggests they've got the chops to retain their relevance well into their fourth decade as a band."
Time Out Sydney gave No Line on the Horizon two stars out of five, stating, "U2 return with a new album. Sadly, it's Brian Eno's ... for all that's new, there's no way that you'll mistake it for another band." Pitchfork Media reviewer Ryan Dombal gave a score of 4.2 out of 10, stating, "the album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms." Cameron Adams of the Herald Sun gave a rating of three and a half stars, comparing it to the 1990s albums Zooropa, Pop, and Original Soundtracks 1 while stating "This is no blockbuster ... It's the least immediate U2 album in years, but one that diehard fans will enjoy living with". Madeleine Chong of MTV Asia also gave the album seven out of ten, concluding that "Although U2 should be lauded for their efforts at constant reinvention and pushing the envelope in the rock genre, [No Line on the Horizon] possesses neither the iconic qualities of The Joshua Tree or the radical yet relevant magnetism of Achtung Baby." Toronto Star music critic Ben Rayner called the songs boring, adding that the ambience introduced by Eno and Lanois was "often all these vague, hook-deficient songs have going for them." Rob Harvilla of The Village Voicegave the album a mixed review and wrote that its songs "will remind you of other, much better songs, but in a way that only makes you want to go and listen to those other songs instead." Time also gave it an unfavourable review, calling the effort "unsatisfied" and "mostly restless, tentative and confused."
Commercial performance
No Line on the Horizon opened with strong sales, although these quickly declined. The album debuted at number one in thirty countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands , Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As of June 2009, over five million copies had been sold worldwide. Within one week of release, the album was certified platinum in Brazil, a record for the country. In the United Kingdom, the album became U2's tenth number-one album, making them the fifth-most-successful act on the UK Albums Chart. In the United States, it was U2's seventh number-one album; first-week sales exceeded 484,000, the band's second-highest figures after How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. By October 2009, sales in the US had exceeded just over one million copies, the group's lowest in more than a decade. By September 2010, sales globally had reached five million copies.
Eight months after No Line on the Horizon's release, Bono said he was disappointed with the album's sales. In the UK, it sold less than a third of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb's figures—a quarter of All That You Can't Leave Behind's—and it did not generate a hit single. ABC noted that sales of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb had been propelled by the track "Vertigo " which, although not a chart success, had become well-known to the public from its use in iPod commercials. Regarding the lack of commercial appeal, Bono said, "We weren't really in that mindset. We felt that the 'album' is almost an extinct species, and we [tried to] create a mood and feeling, and a beginning, middle and an end. And I suppose we've made a work that is a bit challenging for people who have grown up on a diet of pop stars." Clayton agreed that "the commercial challenges have to be confronted" but said, "the more interesting challenge is, 'What is rock 'n' roll in this changing world?' Because, to some extent, the concept of the music fan—the concept of the person who buys music and listens to music for the pleasure of music itself—is an outdated idea." The Edge predicted that, despite its lack of a big hit, No Line on the Horizon would grow on listeners over time. He noted that the reaction to the songs in the live setting made U2 believe that the material was connecting with the fans, adding, "There's a lot of records that make great first impressions. There might be one song that gets to be big on the radio, but they're not albums that people ... play a lot. This is one that I gather from talking to people. ... Four months later, they're saying, 'I'm really getting into the album now.'" Lillywhite believed that the African influence had not translated well onto the album, remarking "It's a pity because the whole idea of Morocco as a big idea was great. When the big idea for U2 is good, that is when they succeed the most, but I don't think the spirit of what they set out to achieve was translated. Something happened that meant it did not come across on the record." McGuinness believed that the conditions of the music market were more responsible for the low sales than any decline in U2's popularity. Despite the comparatively low sales, globally it was the seventh-highest-selling album of 2009.
Accolades
No Line on the Horizon was nominated in the Best Rock Album category at the 52nd Grammy Awards in 2010. The song "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" was nominated for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals and Best Rock Song. The cut song "Winter" was nominated for Best Original Song at the 67th Golden Globe Awards for its role in the film Brothers. Rolling Stone ranked No Line on the Horizon the best album of the year and the 36th-best album of the decade, and "Moment of Surrender" as the best song of the year and the 36th-best song of the decade. The Irish Independent placed it fourth on their list of the year's top Irish albums, while Time listed the song "No Line on the Horizon" as the third-best of 2009.
U2 360° Tour
During the first leg of the tour in Europe, the band typically played songs from No Line on the Horizon early in the set. "Breathe", "No Line on the Horizon", "Get on Your Boots" and "Magnificent" were played as the opening quartet, while "Unknown Caller" and a remixed arrangement of "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" appeared close to the halfway point. "Moment of Surrender" closed every show. U2 made minor changes to the setlists for the second leg of the tour. "No Line on the Horizon" was performed later in the concerts, while "Unknown Caller" was dropped for several weeks before being revived towards the end of the leg. The band did not play "Stand Up Comedy", "Fez – Being Born", "White as Snow", or "Cedars of Lebanon" at any point in 2009. The 25 October 2009 concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, U2's penultimate concert of 2009, was filmed and streamed live over YouTube. The shoot used 27 high definition cameras; the concert was released on DVD andFollowing the release of No Line on the Horizon, U2 staged a worldwide stadium tour, titled the U2 360° Tour. Beginning on 30 June 2009 in Barcelona, the tour included European and North American legs in 2009, 2010, and 2011.The concerts featured a 360-degree stage that the audience surrounded. The idea for the stage, with some initial design suggestions, had been proposed to the group by the set designer Willie Williams at the end of the Vertigo Tour in 2006. At 50 meters (165 feet) tall, the concert stage was the largest ever constructed and twice the size of the previous largest set, which was used on The Rolling Stones ' A Bigger Bang Tour. The design was intended to overcome the staid traditional appearance of outdoor concerts where the stage was dominated by speaker stacks on either side. By the conclusion of the second leg, the tour had grossed over US$ 311 million from 44 shows, making it the highest-grossing tour of the year; despite this, the high production costs, approximately US$750,000 per day, meant the tour was barely breaking even. In 2011, the U2 360° Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour, with ticket sales totaling over US$700 million.
No comments:
Post a Comment