The U2 of the 1980s
U2 could have called it quits at the end of the 1980s and cemented their legacy. The rock quartet of singer Paul Hewson (Bono), guitarist Dave Evans (The Edge), bassist Adam Clayton, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. formed in 1976 in Dublin, Ireland. Their first three albums – Boy (1980), October (1981), and War (1983) established them as a college rock darling. 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire suggested this band had a chance to be embraced by the mainstream when “Pride (In the Name of Love)” became their first top-40 hit.
Still, no one was quite prepared for their next move. 1987’s “excellently righteous” EW’12 “panoramic, wide-angle”sup>EW’93 The Joshua Tree catapulted the band to superstardom, with a newfound “arena-rock sound” RV going multiplatinum and reaching #1 on the strength of chart-topping hits “With Or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
“They could’ve coasted forever on the cinematic storytelling they mastered” EW’12 with Joshua Tree.
They followed up with “the patchy and imitative Rattle and Hum” CM in 1988. It was another chart-topper and sold fourteen million copies worldwide, certainly a drop from the 25 million Joshua Tree moved worldwide, but still an achievement unheard of by most bands. Nonetheless, the album’s odd mix of studio cuts with live material suggested the band were struggling to know where to go next. “If they’d continued on that path, cliché and stagnation awaited them.” CM
What Next?
“Dance music [was] really breaking and making itself heard in the charts all through 1989 and 1990.” AD “The likes of Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and others were breaking big and threatening to become ‘the new music.’” AD “It was indeed important, almost essential, that U2 came back with a different sound.” AD
They addressed their “future with a percussive liveliness that suggested an appreciation of hip-hop and club sounds.” CM They “ended up sounding different, very different to how they’d sounded before but still ended up being recognizably U2.” AD “Grunge and electronic music would render many of U2’s contemporaries from the 1980s redundant, but Achtung Baby delivered greatness.” CM
Before they reached this point, though, “U2 spent several chilly months arguing over how they wanted to sound in their second decade.” UCR Larry and Adam “were in the ‘Ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ camp while Bono and The Edge campaigned for changing everything.” TL They “ultimately emerged from a period of internal strife with another landmark album.” UCR
U2’s Reinvention
“Reinventions rarely come as thorough and effective as Achtung Baby.” AM U2 “ripped up the rule book” EW’12 and created new music that favored “feedback, electronic beats” RV that created a “dark, bump-and-grind mood” EW’93 with “introspective lyrics” RV and “up-front emotions.” EW’93
“Drawing equally from Bowie’s electronic, avant-garde explorations of the late ‘70s and the neo-psychedelic sounds of the thriving rave and Madchester club scenes of early-‘90s England, Achtung Baby sounds vibrant and endlessly inventive.” AM
“Unlike other U2 albums, it’s filled with sexual imagery, much of it quite disturbing…Few bands as far into their career as U2 have recorded an album as adventurous or fulfilled their ambitions quite as successfully as they do on Achtung Baby.” AM “The result is arguably their best album,” AM” the record that reinvented U2 and created an exciting new framework for arena rock.” CM
They “detour[ed] into the darker realms of irony, decay and turmoil on accessible avant-garde rock tunes.” UT In addition, U2 loosened up “after fostering a dour public image for years…cracking jokes and even letting themselves be photographed in color.” 500 Bono said, “It’s a con, in a way. It’s probably the heaviest record we’ve ever made.” 500
The Recording
Berlin served “as both a destination and an idea hefty enough for their ambitions.” CM The city had previously served as inspiration for alternative rock icons David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed in the 1970s. Now producer Brian Eno, who’d worked with Bowie in Berlin, headed to the city with U2 “where a year’s worth of sessions began that resulted in Achtung Baby.” CM They recorded “in a studio that once served as a Nazi ballroom, amid the groans of an industrial town. Metallic dance music leaked out of every discotheque and passing car.” UCR
The Songs
Here are more detail about each song individually.
“Zoo Station”
U2’s “radical shift in style is loudly declared on Zoo Station.” RV “The song’s intro sounds like a train rattling ever closer on the Berlin S-Bahn system, with industrial guitar squalls and a distant rhythm dawing into alignment. Bono sounds like he’s on a shortwave radio, negotiating at some kind of surreal stand-off.” CM The song “represents the jagged line between the U2 of the past and the U2 of an exciting new future.” UCR “Gone were the grand statements of purpose, the calls to action, the sometimes mockable earnestness.” UCR
“Zoo Station” featured “playful, nonsensical lyrics” AD in which “Bono built a theme of dangerous escapism from pieces of a World War Ii-era tale where animals escaped from the Berlin Zoo after an overnight bombing.” UCR It was one one of the last tracks completed for the album because Bono wasn’t satisfied with the vocal.
“Even Better Than the Real Thing”
This started as a leftover idea from Rattle and Hum. Eno spiced up the “Stones-y main riff” UCR with an effects pedal, which Bono said made the song “much more reflective of the times we were living in, when people were no longer looking for the truth. We are all looking for instant gratification. It’s not substantial as a lyric, but it suggests a certain sexual tension and desire to have some fun playing in the shadows.” UCR
“One”
“U2 capped its reinvention with…One,” RV “a tremulous ballad of supple keyboards and a genuine bassline.” CM It serves as the “centerpiece for these songs.” CM “In some ways, this is U2’s most important song.” UCR It was “one of the most beautiful songs U2 ever recorded.” 500 It is “a fragile ballad that shines amidst a whirling soundscape of strings, guitars and Bono’s anguished voice.” RV “Bono wonders whether individuality also means eternal loneliness and comes down on the side of hope.” 500
“In such a dense musical setting, it isn’t surprising that U2 have abandoned the political for the personal on Achtung Baby, since the music, even with its inviting rhythms, is more introspective than anthemic.” AM “Bono has never been as emotionally naked as he is on Achtung Baby, creating a feverish nightmare of broken hearts and desperate loneliness.” AM
“One” “started as a bitter take on Bono’s relationship with his father, twisted into a commentary on the state of the band, became a staple at weddings and now is used as an anthem to fight global poverty.” TL It also represented the band coming together after arguments over their new musical direction.
“Until the End of the World”
Throughout the album, U2 “use the thick dance beats, swirling guitars, layers of effects, and found sounds to break traditional songs out of their constraints, revealing the tortured emotional core of their songs with the hyper-loaded arrangements.” AM They experimented “with a wall of sound, using waves of melody emanating in Until the End of the World and Ultra Violet.” RV It “is stupendously dark and menacing.” AD “The guitar mixes well with dance programming and technology.” AD
This song emerged from a demo called “Fat Boy.” Bono became “intrigued by the idea of a mythical conversation between Jesus Chris and his betrayer, Judas Iscariot.” UCR They gave the song to director Wim Wenders for his movie of the same name, but told him they stole the title and would be using it on their Achtung Baby album as well. UCR
“Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”
U2 originally demoed this song in 1990. The song nearly fell by the wayside until Steve Lillywhite came on board for some late production work on Achtung Baby. His mix sounded a lot like the original demo – a selling point for the band’s label management who were “wary about the album’s more industrial-sounding elements.” UCR
“So Cruel”
This “lilting, little mid-tempo song” AD grew out of an improv session with Bono playing around on guitar. The rest of the band “caught the groove” and Bono gave the song “lyrics that touch on the heartbroken themes of divorce, among other things.” UCR The Edge, the band’s guitarist, had just separated from his wife, Aislinn O’Sullivan.
“The Fly”
“Yep, there's a dance beat!” AD This was the first single from the album and, therefore, the introduction to the band’s new sound. “Americans didn’t seem thrilled with U2’s change in musical direction.” UCR The band whose last three albums were launched with “Pride (In the Name of Love,” their first top 40 hit, the #1 “With Or Without You,” the #3 “Desire” now found themselves stalled at #61. However, four other singles from the album reached the top 40, including the top-10 hits “Mysterious Ways” and “One.”
Bono also used this song to introduce his “new leather-clad, wraparound-sunglasses wearing persona.” UCR In the song, The Edge “buzzes around like the title character, twisting his guitar to the breaking point.” UCR “a new guitar sound not heard on previous U2 records.” AD “The lyrics…are totally different to anything we'd heard from them before.” AD “Bono goes into this little beautiful Falsetto part, singing harmony over himself. The bass sounds supernova, groovy as hell. It doesn’t sound like a U2 bass sound, although a few previous U2 songs had certainly hinted at what a great bass player they had…The drum beats continue, the guitar keeps coming back in.” AD
“U2, seemingly effortlessly (although, they’d spent a HELL of a lot of time in the studio for this album), had acheived a dance/rock crossover that worked.” AD
“Mysterious Ways”
While there was agreement that“Clayton’s performance on the early demo was outstanding” UCR Bono and producer Daniel Lanois had one of their most intense arguments regarding how to proceed with “Mysterious Ways.” Bono called it “a bass line in search of a song.” UCR The Edge was able to propel the song forward with a funky riff and Mullen added his parts last, “giving the song a heavier presence than anything on the drum-machine-propelled demo.” UCR
“Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World”
The band called this “a drinking song,” UCR inspired by “a lost weekend when U2 were finally able to blow off steam after years of working so hard.” UCR It “joined a teetering pile of sorry-babe songs from Bono, who we find stumbling home after a night of over-imbibing.” UCR
“Utra Violet (Light My Way)”
This was pieced together from what were originally two different demos – “Ultra Violet” and “Light My Way.” The latter finds “its hopelessly dependent main character ‘in the black’ where he ‘can’t see or be seen.’” UCR Bono references “baptism and the Book of Job’s image of God serving as a lamp as he walked through darkness.” UCR
“Acrobat”
This grew out of a riff from a 1989 soundcheck in New Zealand. This is “a furious and enjoyably aggressive assault” AD with “a super-weird time signature” and “plenty of rage at the ready.” UCR Lanois didn’t think it sounded like U2; Bono argued that was the point. He said, Daniel “was trying to get us to play to our strengths, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to play to our weaknesses. I wanted to experiment.” UCR It may be “the most venomous moment on Achtung Baby and perhaps all of their discography.” UCR
“Love Is Blindness”
This song was originally intended for Nina Simone. It dated back to Rattle and Hum but “took on new resonance when the Edge’s marriage ended.” UCR It is “dark and funeral like…desolate and beautiful.” AD Bono called it “the first cracks on the beautiful porcelain jug with those beautiful flowers in it that was our music and our community.” UCR Mullen slowed down the drum pattern from “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” to “a grief-stricken pace” UCR and the “Edge’s exorcising solo put everything in context for a song about acts of terrorism, emotional and otherwise.” UCR
Notes: A 20th anniversary reissue packaged the album with 1993’s Zooropa, two discs of remixes, a fifth disc with B-sides and bonus tracks, and finally a sixth disc of an alternate remix of Achtung Baby.
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