Achtung Baby
(21/100 Greatest Albums Ever)

When U2 announced they had to go away and dream it all up again on New Year’s Eve 1989 in The Point, this is what they meant. Creatively blocked and miserable, the band floundered away for weeks. Months went by without producing much usable material. Then, as the band were struggling to come up with a middle-eight for ‘Ultra Violet’, Edge stumbled on the signature figure for ‘One’. Rejuvenated, the band soldiered on.
The finished album’s overall atmosphere was murky, ambivalent, and not a little evil, particularly in the subterranean club hell scenarios of ‘Until The End Of The World’ and ‘The Fly’.
Some of the record’s darker moments – ‘One’, the Roy Orbison/Scott Walker/Jacques Brel-isms of ‘So Cruel' and ‘Love Is Blindness' – were undoubtedly written in the shadow of the break-up of The Edge’s marriage, but Achtung Baby seemed to have a revitalising impact on the band, giving them a fresh impetus and a renewed zeal to remain the biggest rock band on the planet.