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The secret history of 'The Joshua Tree'

For many people it is U2's greatest album. Twenty years on, to mark it's re-release, Colm O'Hare talks to Daniel Lanois and reflects on the extraordinary background to a monumental album.

Colm O Hare, 21 Nov 2007

Sonically, ‘One Tree Hill’ is the least instrumentally adorned song on the album, resplendent in a feeling of space and openness. Encouraged by the supple mid-tempo rhythm from Larry and Adam, the key signature is Edge’s African-tinged, highlife guitar motif which runs through the song like a river.

Edge explained to John Waters how he stumbled across this sound: “We were jamming with Brian [Eno]. He was playing keyboards, I was playing guitar…we just got this groove going, and this part began to come through. It’s almost highlife, although it’s not African at all… the sound was for me at that time a very elaborate one. I would never have dreamt of using a sound like that before then, but it just felt right, and I went with it.”

Exit

Like ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’, ‘Exit’ is angry and discordant, a murder ballad of sorts, written by Bono after he had read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner's Song, an account of the life of convicted killer Gary Gilmore (brother of Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore), who was executed in 1977.

“I don’t even know what the act is, in that song,” Bono told Hot Press. “Some see it as murder, others suicide – and I don’t mind. But the rhythm of the words is nearly as important in conveying the state of mind.”

With a bizarre and astonishing similarity to the Charles Manson ‘Helter Skelter’ saga of two decades earlier, a man named Robert Bardo claimed in a Los Angeles court in 1991 that ‘Exit’ had inspired him to murder a young actress, Rebecca Schaeffer. The twenty-one year old Schaeffer, who had appeared briefly in Woody Allen’s Radio Days, was shot by Bardo, a paranoid schizophrenic, in April 1989 after he arrived at her apartment with a gun. It later transpired that he had become obsessed with the actress and had been writing to her for several years. With even more sinister shades of John Lennon’s murder, she had apparently signed an autograph for him twenty minutes earlier. After he shot her he ran onto a freeway in an apparent suicide attempt, but was caught and arrested. His claim about the effect of ‘Exit’ on his state-of-mind was never pursued, as he pleaded insanity and received a life sentence. One result of Schaeffer’s murder was the classification of stalking as a felony in California.



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Colm O Hare

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