Reviews of U2's album The Joshua Tree, Eamon Dunphy's book about the band, Unforgettable Fire, and the Zooropa album. These were written for Q Magazine in 1987, 1988 and 1993.
U2: The Joshua Tree
The second and fastest track to impress on this, the fifth studio album by U2, is called I Still Don't Know What I'm Looking For. It could be that's the line which best describes how matters stand with U2 in 1987. Because, for all that The Joshua Tree is an accomplished and musically superb LP, the record's greatest
strength is in its restlessness. There may be no more powerful album made in mainstream rock this year, but the source of that potency lies in a kind of spiritual frustration - a sense of hunger and tension which roams its every track in search of some climactic moment of release, of fulfilment, that never arrives.
The Joshua Tree is dedicated to Greg Carroll, a young member of U2's road crew killed in a motorcycle accident last year; the tone of it all is sombre, the sleeve itself is lavish but black. It carries a cover shot of the band, unsmiling, frowning (bass player Adam Clayton, once the cherubic playboy of the four, looks to have aged by decades). And the last track is especially solemn: Mothers Of The Disappeared concerns those tragic women who gather in public squares in Latin American dictatorships, imploring the authorities for news of their sons and daughters, missing presumed imprisoned or dead. The lyric sheet ends with a message to join the organisation Amnesty International.
So far, so grim. But no music is finally depressing when it breathes the generosity of spirit that U2' s best efforts possess - compassion, not self-pity, is the keynote - and these vast, yearning soundscapes are alive with the will to uplift.
Four years ago U2 were an orthodox, if fiery, post-punk group. Then they met the production team of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno and made The Unforgettable Fire, an astonishing work which turned the old sound inside out, its shape stretched wide and gorgeously textured. The same collaboration has given us The Joshua Tree, a record that's every mile as spacious as its predecessor.
Subdued instrumental passages are common; elsewhere there's a red-blooded physicality - even lust (Trip Through Your Wires) toughened by the truculent thump of Larry Mullen's drumming, the grudging bump of Clayton's bass. There are sad strings (One Tree Hill), and Eno's careful keyboard backdrops, but there is still The Edge, the man whose electric guitar is on hand to scour and gash the surface smoothness. U2 have never lost faith in rock's possibilities, the way that Paul Weller did.
Lyrically Bono tackles theme of loss, of anger, regret, and draws on fairly obvious images of savage grandeur - mountains, rivers, sky and sea - in some impatient desperation to express the intensity of feelings he evidently needs to share. That the perfect words elude him is not a failing, but rather an asset. His recent delvings into blues music find their echoes everywhere, but never reach that condition of majestic resignation that characterises older masters of the form. Once more, just as it was seven years ago when U2 made their explosive debut Boy, the striving is all.
The music is only sporadically tempestuous, and much of it is softly meditational. But all of it has the one thing vital to worthwhile rock, a thing so often absent: the urge to exist.
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UNFORGETTABLE FIRE by Eamon Dunphy
Eamon Dunphy's career is, if anything, even more extraordinary than U2's. An Irishman, he spent the '70s as a professional footballer in England, including a nine-year stint with MillwalL Having hung up his muddy boots he moved into journalism, and produced one of the few classic books on soccer, Only A Game?
His latest undertaking, a massively thorough biography of Ireland's most successful rock band, is every bit as substantial. Dunphy's own Dublin upbringing enables him to explore the social backdrop to U2's story with an informed eye, certainly affectionate but ever on his guard against the trap of romanticising "Irishness".
Dunphy is a fan of his subject, and it's to fellow-fans that the book will, naturally, appeal the most - few of the uncommitted, for instance, will care to wade through four chapters on the boys' schooldays,. But there is enough detail in his telling of U2's rise from garden shed rehearsals to mega-stadium stardom to render the bulk of the story a satisfactory deal for anyone with half an interest in the way the music business operates in the 1980s.
The portrait which emerges is one of four unusually rootless young men: none of them is a product of the classic Catholic Irish upbringing, The Edge and Adam Clayton were immigrants (Anglo- Welsh and upper-crust English respectively) while Bono's family was half-Protestant. The implication seems to be that, denied the standard sense of national and religious identity, U2 were drawn together in a search to create their own,
If that sounds improbable (most pop stars, in Bob Geldof’s phrase, embark on that career to get "rich, famous, and laid"), then there were moments when U2 nearly quit, afraid that rock and their own stubborn spirituality wouldn't mix. The only exception was Adam Clayton, more attracted to the pop life than his colleagues, and very nearly lost to them because of it.
There's an intriguing contrast - and Dunphy makes it - between U2 and their Dublin predecessor Phil Lynott, whose self-destructive, swashbuckling hedonism was an embrace of the myths that U2 were repelled by. Like Springsteen, U2 have acquired a glow of nobility that strikes a certain chord for the Live Aid generation. As Dunphy expresses it: "The most decadent child of all, rock'n'roll, had survived and matured to become in the mid-1980s the defender of truth and decency, the most vigorous agitator for a spirituality lost in the changing times."
U2 are not quite ready for sainthood, though. It's not so long, for instance, since Bono was a Dublin punk given to stopping the traffic by dropping his trousers in the street ~ even if he was undergoing instruction with a religious prayer group at the same period of his life, Dunphy's book recounts it all.
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U2: Zooropa
U2's new album Zooropa stands, in relation to its mighty predecessor Achtung Baby, somewhat as Rattle And Hum did to its mighty predecessor, The Joshua Tree – basically a child of the same creative surge, birthed amid the mind-warping turmoil of the global enormo-tour that attended the original record. Against the parallel is the fact they've not expanded this package with live tracks. On the other hand, there is a teaming with one Grand Old Man of Music – Johnny Cash this time, instead of B.B. King. All the world loved The Joshua Tree, but Rattle And Hum fell back on the band's fan-base for support. All the world (give or take a few dissidents) loves Achtung Baby, so what fate awaits Zooropa?
These 10 tracks began as ideas from Achtung Baby's Berlin sessions, or at Zoo TV sound-checks, or in hotel bedrooms. Being a band that seems these days unable to stop being a band, even for a week, U2 used any pause in touring to get those excess ideas on tape in a Dublin studio. This was once meant to have been an EP only, but the way they tell it, Zooropa is music that just insisted on getting made.
There's a freewheeling fee1 of going with the flow all across the record - rootless and loose, restless and unsettled. Freed from the need to make a standing start, there's not the sense of U2 "re-inventing" anything, but there is evidence in some songs of the band relying on familiar templates (like the slow, unfolding clatter of Stay and Dirty Day) as well as a few deliberate borrowings from Achtung Baby. Even more, though, it's a time, as Bono declaims at one point, for the four to "dream out loud". Co-producer Brian Eno urged them to improvise, and they have.
In the absence of explicit lyrical viewpoints, what emerges first is Bono's fascination with insincerity; the opening title track is a string of advertising slogans ("Be all that you can be ... Fly the friendly skies ... ") sung with a sensual tenderness in line with current Bono-think about pulling your own poetry out of media saturation, surrendering your psyche to a million random, fragmentary messages until they begin to coalesce into some perverse new logic. Enter sci-fi novelist William Gibson, whose "cyberpunk" writings such as Neuromancer with its sky "the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel" are cited as a primary Zooropa influence - and the basis of Billy Idol's new concept album, which rather subtracts a few snob-value points - and you're in a place where everything that's human is falling to pieces but renegade technology is forging ahead every minute.
One song is actually called Numb (its lyric is intoned by The Edge in passionless Kraftwerk fashion); another title is Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car, whose similarity to another Eno co-production, Always Crashing In The Same Car, points up the kinship of this music to Bowie's late 70s studies in future-shock Low and Station To Station: But here is U2, the foremost rock'n'roll band on the planet, seeing if rock can be fashioned from sonic technology in the way that so much dance music has been. Rock has always been electrical like a tractor, ploughing its soily emotional furrow, but not electronic like a rocket, I taking us somewhere new. Zooropa refines the first steps in this attempt that Achtung Baby took; and U2 are on powerful form right now, monstrously tight as a performing unit and fluidly inventive as composers, so the results transcend the merely experimental.
Finally, The Wanderer anchors its predecessors' conceits, the vocal going to rumbling country icon Johnny Cash: Adam Clayton takes instrumental lead with what resembles one of history's great bass lines, that played by Barry Adamson on Magazine's A Song From Under The Floorboards, while Cash lends his gravelly majesty to this tale of a soul that stalks apocalyptic landscapes carrying "a bible and a gun" in search of redemption. It’s a magnificent ending.
Zooropa will refresh the set that U2 take on this year's stadium dates, and if the Achtung Baby experience is any guide, the stage shows will add dimensions to the new songs' resonance. In the short term it will sit as Achtung Baby's baby, but one day it will stand as a valid and valued episode of this band's impressive evolution.
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