Joshua Tree

Post-Live Aid, U2 suffered a crisis of confidence that was only broken by Adam Clayton’s ultimatum that they record another album and then split. The resulting sessions, which took place in Clayton’s Rathfarnham home, overseen by the double act of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, produced enough material for a double set. The new songs saw the band expand their range from the post-punk palette of the first four albums to incorporate blues, gospel, country and even hard rock dynamics. Intrigued by writers like Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, Sam Shepherd and the New Journalists, Bono matured as a lyricist, taking America’s heartlands as well as its foreign policy as his subject, from the Central American firestorm of ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’ (in which Larry Mullen Jr channelled John Bonham and The Edge went Hendrix) to the John Ford panorama of ‘In God’s Country’. Even when the band addressed Ballymun (the Velvets-y ‘Running To Stand Still’), Ethiopia (‘Where The Streets Have No Name’) or the 1984 miners’ strike in Britain (‘Red Hill Mining Town’), the root subject was American foreign policy, Reaganomics and Gekkonomics (and by extension, Thatcherism). Released in May 1987, The Joshua Tree propelled the band out of arenas and into the stadia, topped the Billboard chart and spawned a triptych of monster singles, including the bittersweet slow-burner ‘With Or Without You’.

No 5 in 2009, as voted for by over 200 Irish musicians. Down from No 3 in 2004.

The Chapters' Turlough Gunawardhana on U2's The Joshua Tree:
“Growing up after the album came out in 1987, I’d have heard some of the tracks on the radio and saw the very striking video for ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ on TV. I wasn’t a big fan of U2 back then: I only got into the album over the last five years or so. I’d heard so much about it, and I was a fan of Talking Heads and of Eno. And with Eno and Daniel Lanois being so heavily involved in The Joshua Tree I began to listen seriously to it. Eno’s production never sounds over-done. He likes to experiment within the context of the music. I have a sense of the band being willing to go with him to see where it might all lead – there are lots of synthesisers put to really interesting use. Today, I reckon the album is not only U2’s best but one of the best albums ever made, full stop.”