The Celtic Verses

U2
ACHTUNG BABY

March 2005 and Hot Press has just unveiled ‘The 100 Greatest Irish Albums Of All Time’ as voted by you. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a certain Achtung Baby, U2’s 1991 game-changer, polls quite high. Number three to be exact. As with all things U2, opinions veer from one extreme to another. For many, it should unequivocally straddle the top of the list, whilst others wouldn’t even consider it the prime offering in U2’s vast discography. It is, however, the one U2 album that’s okay for the hip, anti-Bono camp to love and cherish. An undeniably daring and supremely executed modern work that saw the group dispense with their more earnest leanings, today it sits alongside the world’s greatest rock records.
Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan was among its fans. “I’m not sure that Achtung Baby is my favourite U2 album, I think I prefer The Joshua Tree, but ‘One’ would be one of my favourite songs of theirs. It’s a complex father/son story disguised as a love song. It’s got a kind of a moving narrative to it with characters that are very real. It’s amazing that Bono can re-invent himself so many times. It’s unique that a 25-year-old band are still top of the world. There’s an elevator coming down with all the other bands and they’re the only ones going up. Remarkable!”
Backtrack to 1991. U2 have just released their seventh studio album and Hot Press editor Niall Stokes has delivered his November verdict.
“In many ways it is the bleakest U2 album, but it also contains some of their most obvious singles – pop songs which are deceptively accessible while dealing in harrowing emotions, the illusion of something throwaway masking the search for a deeper truth. Achtung Baby at once evokes the spirit of T. Rex and Scott Walker, The Beatles and the Stones, Bob Marley, Al Green and Leonard Cohen. It is trashy, ambitious, subversive and profound. It sounds less like the U2 that we know than anything they have done before and yet it is unmistakably them, their signature indelibly inscribed into the grooves, from the Edge’s first guitar colourings on the opening track onwards.
“’One’ seems transcendent, a magnificent synthesis of elements: words and music, rhythm, instrumentation, arrangement and intonation combine to create something that speaks a language beyond logic, the definitive language of emotional truth. ‘Well it’s too late tonight’, Bono sings, ‘to drag the past out into the light…’ and anyone who doesn’t understand, well, they haven’t been there.
The late Bill Graham flew to Zurich the following May to catch up with the band as they prepared to transmit the greatest show on Earth – Zoo TV. Graham confessed that he journeyed to Switzerland with some trepidation.
“I’m wary of some of the easy recent praise given U2 since it involves a dualism; an amputation of their past that separates them from the Good U2 of Achtung Baby and the Bad U2 of Rattle & Hum. Whereas I see continuities, this latest conventional line on the band seems to me to create gaping and false discontinuities.
“Moreover, I wasn’t completely convinced by Achtung Baby – of course it was inevitable this restless band would change. Just as The Unforgettable Fire marked a necessary new departure after War, any follow-up to Rattle & Hum was destined to scuttle off elsewhere.”
Still clearly getting his head around the release, Graham did shrewdly note how it had ushered in another phase in the Dublin four piece’s career.
“Crucially, Achtung Baby stands in the same relationship to Rattle & Hum as The Unforgettable Fire to War, an earlier shift which was also hailed as a return to European form. It looks like they’ve been cast in a Jekyll and Hyde role, the Good U2 and the
Bad U2.”
He turned, at that point, to The Edge, and asked when we could expect the return of the Bad U2. The guitarist, exhausted in a Zurich hotel, paused for thought.
“I was just saying now that we’ve got all these great reviews again, I’m slightly depressed because all I’ve got to look forward to is the next backlash.” Safe to say, they had plenty more than that to look forward to over the next two decades. Achtung Baby had helped propel a rattled band towards the 21st century. The rest is rock history.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE
LOVELESS

Loveless could be viewed as a somewhat leftfield choice for a series on ‘Poetic Champions’, given that the twin human voices floating and flitting through it are obscured by feedback bliss, the words indecipherable and mysterious. But then, My Bloody Valentine never did do things the orthodox way – the lyrical, poetic beauty of this, their second and last record, lies purely in the sound. Kevin Shields had already been constructing an altogether different type of sonic architecture on 1988’s noisy Isn’t Anything, but it was Loveless that saw his singular vision come to fruition.
And it came, as we pointed out in a ‘Greatest Albums Ever’ poll back in April 2006, at a high price.
“After three years, 18 engineers and £250,000, Kevin Shields emerged from behind the sandbags with an alchemist’s elixir that went no wave, new wave, everywhere and nowhere,” our man Peter Murphy noted. “The freeform wilfulness of those ornate tuning missteps, submerged vocals, spidery drum machines and looped back basslines coalesced into a shadowy force that just kept on coming.”
Creation boss Alan McGee probably didn’t spend too much time immersing himself in its aural intricacies, however. He was probably more concerned with the accounts – My Bloody Valentine had all but bankrupted Creation and it would take the meteoric rise of Oasis to keep the label afloat under Sony.
Not that any of this concerned our own Stuart Clark back in November 1991. He was simply lost in the music.
“I wonder if My Bloody Valentine were aware of the avalanche they were about to trigger when they first took Bilinda Butcher’s airbrushed vocals and smothered them with layer upon layer of white noise guitar?” he mused. “Now that it’s finally arrived, the album lives up to the most exalted of expectations and reveals that underneath it all My Bloody Valentine are really a pop group at heart, albeit a severely traumatised one... Loveless joins Primal Scream’s Screamadelica in supplying the current crop of new bands with an important reference point. It sets standards that others would be well advised to aspire to.”
A full 21 years on and there was still no sign of album number three. Luckily, a mere nine years after saying they were on the way, Shields had finally put out a remastered version of Loveless. It gave Mr. Clark cause for 2012 reflection.
“Nothing has happened in the intervening 21 years to change my mind. I’ll stand over my, ‘Openers ‘Only Shallow’ and ‘Loomer’ are both as laden with melody as they are decibels, songs of fractured beauty and jarring extremes where Bilinda Butcher’s breathy tones are starkly contrasted by Kevin Shields’ tastefully brutal riffing.’”
It would seem an island-wide census had formed – though Hot Press called the album “the great lost Irish treasure” in 2004, that same year saw it finish at No. 4 in our list of the Greatest Irish Albums. A year later, Loveless was 5th in a People’s Choice poll. Designer and actor Antonia Campbell-Hughes took the opportunity to talk about her memories of it.
“Loveless was a great album for 15-year-olds to get stoned to. I’ve always said that my work is a result of my upbringing, and my upbringing was very musically-oriented – I was quite the dirty little rebel. Most of my collections are really dark and brooding and black as a result. I won’t be sending Kevin any royalty cheques anytime soon, though!”
The most recent MBV news is that Kevin Shields is readying a new record for release before Christmas. But we’ve been burned before. Even back in June 2002, Jonathan O’Brien was unsure it would ever surface. His rationale? How could you top Loveless.
“The most annoying thing about My Bloody Valentine’s disappearance from sight,” he wrote, “is that, eight years ago, they were virtually the only band even attempting to do genuinely new things to, and with, rock music. They upped the stakes enormously on Loveless, and nobody was able to compete. Even today, no single band of any note has picked up the gauntlet they threw down in 1991. All of which makes it all the more mystifying as to why they sank into anonymity the way they did during the subsequent decade. Perhaps they knew, deep down, that they’d never be able to surpass or even equal it.”