Close to The Edge
30th Anniversary Retrospective: In a special interview, The Edge reminisces about the early days of Hotpress, explains Bill Graham’s role in U2’s development, and comes clean about what the band have been up to recently in Morocco.
Peter Murphy, 26 Jun 2007
It was bound to happen: U2 have lit out for Interzone. 15 years after shooting the ‘Mysterious Ways’ video in Fez, the third largest city in Morocco, the band have fetched up there again, conducting speculative songwriting sessions for their next album, with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno operating as collaborative players rather than producers.
The quartet have always set much store in the importance of location as a crucial influence on the recording of their music. Unforgettable Fire was hatched in the echoey halls and stairwells of Slane Castle. Achtung Baby took shape (or refused to take shape) in Hansa by the Wall in Berlin, the chilly Nazi ballroom that incubated albums by Iggy, Bowie, Nick Cave, the Gun Club and Depeche Mode. Pop, by contrast, was informed by the tropical humidity and hot colours of Miami.
So when The Edge downs tools in his Killiney home and interrupts a spot of recording for a hotpress 30th anniversary retrospective chat, he’s still buzzing from his sojourn to Morocco, a liminal space that for thousands of years has served as both port and portal, a haven for criminals, spies and all manner of outsider artists, including George Orwell, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles and William Burroughs.
Rolling Stone Brian Jones also made a pilgrimage there in 1968, and with the help of Brion Gysin recorded an album’s worth of music by the Master Musicians of Joujouka (described by Burroughs as “a thousand year old rock ‘n’ roll band”). The Stones themselves revisited there for ‘Continental Drift’ in 1989. More recently, the city has hosted the World Sacred Music Festival every year.
“It’s Africa, but it feels like a different part of Africa,” Edge says. “This is not a new culture, this is thousands of years old. In fact in Fez they have the oldest university in the world, established somewhere in the eighth century, which gives you some idea of how old that city is. And the way the architecture operates, everything is inside the city walls. The souk is kind of the market, but the Medina is full of little tiny streets just about wide enough for a donkey with a basket on its back, no way could you get a car down there. It’s a totally different scale and approach to building, which has been like that for over a thousand years. Depending on where you are, you could get lost for weeks.”
Page 1/7 <Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next>
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy