U2 Special: "Sometimes we move on too quickly and some real beauties can be left behind"

The Edge, a funny chap, once joked that U2 have an advanced incendiary device rigged up to their archive in case the plane goes down, to avoid half-baked (or less) ideas being foisted onto the public following their demise.

We assume he was joking, but don’t be surprised if an unforgettable fire breaks out in a well-to-do part of Dublin in the days following any tragic exit, as U2 had always been careful about exposing their preliminary sketches (apart from the odd briefcase or photoshoot CD going walkabout). Or at least they were until Apple came along.

Following the completion of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, the band’s management entered talks with various telephone companies about sponsorship but, sensibly, they struck a fantastic deal with Apple instead, where lead single ‘Vertigo’ was used in 2004’s ad campaign for their new iPod, helping it conquer the world. They cannily took no money upfront, wangling instead a royalty for every U2-branded iPod sold, something Paul McGuinness might still smile about as he looks back over his deal-making cereer. If you shelled out for one of these tasty-looking black and red numbers in the US, you also received a $50 coupon towards The Complete U2, an iTunes digital boxset made up of the band’s complete works released the day after Bomb.

There would be deluxe editions of a lot of their albums later, but here was fans’ first real look into the cupboards that Edge threatens to torch because the set, as well as including all their albums up to that point, their earliest demos, and some crucial live material (like the 1989 New Year’s Eve show we all taped off the radio and then wrapped in a cover we cut from the pages of Hot Press), housed a ‘disc’ titled Unreleased & Rare. This was revived in slightly augmented physical form (Medium, Rare & Remastered) as a U2.com subscription enticement a few years later, a double CD which also included outtakes added to those deluxe album editions I was talking about. In the sleeve notes, The Edge called it “the U2 sketchbook.”

A good proportion of the unreleased material on Unreleased & Rare were outtakes from HTDAAB, which brings us neatly around to How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, the ‘shadow album’ which forms part of the anniversary boxset and also receives a stand-alone fancy vinyl release for Record Store Day patrons. What’s the story, The Edge? “I went into my personal archive,” the man in the hat tells us, “to see if there were any unreleased gems and I hit the jackpot. We chose ten that really spoke to us.” The man Bono calls “the Mother Teresa of lost songs” goes on to assure us all that “this is the pure U2 drop.”

Photo by Anja Grabert.

Building The Bomb

A quick history lesson. After touring the very successful All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and wishing to capitalise on some vital momentum – “the sound of the crowd was still ringing in our ears,” Bono observes – U2 spent a couple of weeks bashing ideas out in Monaco, which certainly beats arsing around in a garage in Dublin. Out of this several ideas emerged and they worked up ‘Electrical Storm’ and ‘The Hands That Built America’ (which earned both a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for its inclusion in Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York), both of which were included on their second Best Of collection. The Edge then put the hours in at his gaff in Malibu, working off loops provided by Mullen, and groping towards the enigma-riddled rock of ‘Vertigo’, amongst others, before the band hired a producer.

Listening to How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, you get a fresh sense of the sideways approach U2 often adopt to song construction. The opener, Picture Of You (X+W)’, was included, albeit in an inferior mix, on U&R under its original (and perhaps more interesting) title ‘Xanax & Wine’ and comes from the sessions with producer Chris Thomas, the man who famously got that guitar sound out of Steve Jones on the Sex Pistol’s Never Mind The Bollocks and helped create some of Roxy Music’s greatest work (with and without Brian Eno). Thomas and the band eventually parted ways – “We wore Chris out,” Bono says – to be replaced by the ever reliable Steve Lillywhite.

History has shown this to be the right move, but it’s hard to know why they didn’t put ‘Picture of You’ out at the time: there’s a real rockin’ joy to it. The Edge in particular appears to be having a ball, knocking out several riffs that lesser bands would have based whole albums around, as does Adam Clayton, whose nimble bass runs underpin the acoustic guitar breaks. The various parts went back to Morocco when it was repurposed as ‘Fast Cars’, the last song recorded for the original album and included on some versions at the time. On this rendition, Bono is hollering like a man trying to sell you a carpet in a bazaar – and it works.

While we’re talking Mr Thomas, his production on ‘All Because Of You 2’, which would also be reworked once Lillywhite took over, has a rougher aspect than the more familiar version and kicks its share of arse, especially on the superior chorus where Bono and The Edge are almost falling over each other to get the words out. ‘Country Mile’ could be mistaken for a very distant relative of ‘Electrical Storm’ or an ancestor to ‘The Little Things That Give You Away’. Driven by Larry Mullen’s urgent shuffle, it is indisputably one of the best things here. Larry’s opinion on the Chris Thomas recordings, as recorded in their U2 On U2 book, was that “they had no magic”. Fair enough, he’s the boss, but he was wrong about ‘Country Mile’ at least.

“We fell in love with these other songs that finally did make the album,” The Edge says. “‘Country Mile’, I think we just forgot about it.

“It wasn’t quite lyrically there, and melodically, in the chorus – it almost had a chorus but not quite,” he adds, directly contradicting yours truly. “We left it in our wake. But we were excited at the time. I remember it. That was one of the ones that was in my mind when I went looking.”

Making Their Own Luck

‘Evidence Of Life’ was recorded after they parted ways with Thomas and appears to be pretty much a solo Edge effort. A bassline which sounds like it was dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, as well as the ‘enthusiastic’ drumming are his, as is the vocal. It might not be the greatest song he’s ever put his name to but it was shelved because it reminded him of something else.

“I snuck into the studio with one of our engineers and cut the tune on my own,” the man with the plan recalls. “I was really happy with it day one. I went back to it the next day and went, ‘Uh, man, I’ve rewritten ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. That’ll never work’. Coming back to it now, it’s nothing like ‘Seven Nation Army’. I got it completely wrong.”

When the original running order of HTDAAB was found to offer little change out of an hour, cuts were called for and one of the songs to go was ‘Mercy’, although the curious did get to hear it when a dodgy digital file was shared out not long after the album’s release. On the subsequent U2360 tour, the band played a few songs still awaiting official release, including ‘Glastonbury, ‘Return Of the Stingray Guitar’ and ‘North Star’ (of which an enticing few minutes would turn up, of all places and for a presumably large cheque, on the soundtrack to the woeful Transformers: Dark Of The Moon). They also debuted ‘Every Breaking Wave’, the future highlight of 2014’s Songs Of Innocence. ‘Mercy’ was played several times and a live in Brussels recording was included on the 2010 limited edition Record Store Day release Wide Awake In Europe.

Here, it’s retitled ‘Luckiest Man In The World’, with additional lyrics (“You wanted violins and you got Nero”), some production jiggery-pokery from the redoubtable Jacknife Lee, and a reupholstered chorus. Out goes the couplet “You want to kill me and I want to die / We were meant for each other, you and I” and in comes “Love hears when I lie, love puts the blue back in my eye / The sand inside the pearl, you were the luckiest man in the world.” When Noel Gallagher recently told The Edge that he wanted his money back because he was assured, when he stumped up for the original HTDAAB CD, he was getting the best songs, this is probably why he felt cheated. You could be uncharitable and say it’s U2 motoring along at their most skyscrapingly U2-ish, but what’s wrong with that?

“‘Luckiest Man In The World’ is the maddest melodic journey you are going to hear from a post-punk band out of the North Side of Dublin because I’m stepping through different characters and parts of my life and hitting those notes, then not repeating them.”

Bono seems to have mulled this one over a few times. “We all knew there was something ‘other’ about it,” he adds, “but we were not sure of its lyrical destination until the line ‘You were the luckiest man in the world, but you didn’t want to be.’ That was the key that unlocked it for me… It’s a violent piece of work… You don’t know who exactly the singer is hitting out at, it might even be himself.”
So it’s about themselves? Do U2 consider themselves lucky?

“I don’t think it really is luck,” says The Edge, which is fair enough really considering the decades of work they’ve put it. “It’s about a sense of gratitude and acknowledgement because our band has enjoyed success that very few bands have had – and we don’t take that for granted one little bit.”

Photo by Anja Grabert.

MUSIC IN REAL TIME

The yearning, falsetto-tinged ‘I Don’t Wanna See You Smile’ – simply called ‘Smile’ on The Complete U2 – with lyrics by Bono’s mate Simon Carmody (which should keep him in shades for the foreseeable), and the Edge-tacular ‘Are You Gonna Wait Forever?’, which came out as a ‘Vertigo’ b-side and stems from the ATYCLB sessions (produced by Lanois and Eno), are another two tracks that capture the raw energy of a great rock and roll band playing in each other’s faces. These ‘new’ songs still have a few corners on them.

“It was all about an essential energy and a concise way of putting your ideas across. No room for any kind of padding,” The Edge enthuses. “It had to be lean, mean, what we described at the time as sort of rock & roll 45s, in the tradition of the mod music of the ‘60s, The Who, the great bands from the UK. We really wanted to make it very raw and essential and all about energy. And the early demos were all that.”
U2 are always working on the next record, but stepping back to revisit their past may help them decide where they’re going.

“It’s a bit of a throw down,” according to the man in charge. “It’s very much where our heads are at right now – music made in real time by a band in a room, all the things that add an inherent value that you just cannot achieve other than being a band that’s recording in real time… the tightness, the discipline of the ideas.”

“These new old songs are also a clue in their ‘live-ness’, their ‘present-tense’-ness,” Bono adds, seizing as is his wont the last word. “How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, in its directness, is certainly an inspiration for us now as well as then. There’s no hiding, it’s very demanding. I would say Edge, Adam, Larry and I are in violent agreement on this, and we rarely agree on anything.”

Mind you, not everything here is a total success. The Miami groove of ‘Treason’, written and recorded with Dave Stewart, and the over-insistent, shouty sections of ‘Happiness’, diverting stylistic sidesteps that they are (“We’ve never done anything remotely like this before,” says the guitarist of the latter), should have perhaps remained under lock and key, and while The Edge’s ‘Theme from The Batman’ – from an animated TV show – is kinda cool, it’s hardly essential.

Aftermath

If they’d called me for my opinion, which they mysteriously never do even though I’ve repeatedly given them my number, I would have included ‘Native Son’, which under Steve Lillywhite’s guidance would transform into ‘Vertigo’ and become a massive hit single, an Apple theme tune, and a Grammy winner (so fair enough, I suppose). I would also have found room for their rather excellent cover of Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’, which also turned up on the flipside of ‘Vertigo’, and the aforementioned ‘North Star’ (although perhaps that was written later on). But is the reassembling U2 decided upon without my consultation worth forking out for?

The answer is an emphatic yes. Take the best songs here that we haven’t heard in this form before – ‘Country Mile’ and ‘Luckiest Man In The World’ – and think about them in the context of where U2 went later on. The three studio albums they released since HTDAAB have a lot going for them – most notably ‘Unknown Caller’ and ‘Breathe’ (No Line On The Horizon); ‘Every Breaking Wave’ and ‘California’ (Songs Of Innocence); ‘Lights Of Home’, ‘You’re The Best Thing About Me’ (Songs Of Experience).

But would those albums, which for whatever reason didn’t quite connect with the general public in the same way as HTDAAB (my infant daughter was dangerously ill at the time so ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ and ‘Miracle Drug’ resonated deeply with me for a start), have been improved by the addition of ‘Country Mile’ or ‘Luckiest Man’ even if they didn’t fit conceptually? Yes, without question. Is HTDAAB – one of their strongest records in the first place – enhanced by their, and the other ‘rough’ cuts’, inclusion? Absolutely.

They also engender a silent prayer that someone in the organisation manages to pull out the firing pin before the flames consume whatever else is in the safe if and when the time comes.