The 1983 U2 song Bono said that everyone misunderstood: “Very different approach”
It’s hard to see Bono as anything other than a pretty readable character. You have to give the man his dues: he wears his heart on his sleeve.
But in his peace crusade with U2, campaigning to save the world and create a rock revolution while doing it, in his eyes, it seemed that their mantra was pretty plain. They weren’t freedom fighters, and they weren’t looking to further any sort of ulterior agenda. They were just standing up for what they believed in, and you could hardly discredit them for that.
There are, of course, a myriad of songs you could pick from to exhibit this, but if you were to single 1983’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ out of the line-up, you might be met with a bit of an ironic laugh from the frontman himself. That’s not because the song wasn’t steadfast in its view to stand up for the people of Ireland – it was just certain receptions within the political circles that felt a little misguided.
“A lot of people on the Republican side – like Gerry Adams, who ran Sinn Féin, which was the political wing of the paramilitaries – had a picture of War in his office,” Bono chuckled with a wry smile. “[He] looked to this song, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, which is reminding everyone of the Injustice the British did to us, and then he found out it, you know, that we’re nonviolent and we were taking a very different approach. Things changed for us a little bit with that community.”
Indeed, it did seem obvious that the song would have been linked to the events of January 30th, 1972, in Northern Ireland when innocent civilians were killed by British soldiers. But as much as it was certainly making a point, the symbol of that incident was only representative of a wider condition of violence for the band.
The sentiment was concurred by U2’s drummer, Larry Mullen Jr, who said in the year of the song’s release: “We’re into the politics of people, we’re not into politics… That’s an incident, the most famous incident in Northern Ireland, and it’s the strongest way of saying, ‘How long? How long do we have to put up with this?'”
“I don’t care who’s who – Catholics, Protestants, whatever. You know, people are dying every single day through bitterness and hate, and we’re saying why? What’s the point?”
Larry Mullen Jr
To be fair, there’s no valid argument you can really put up against that. U2 are a band not devoid of its philanthropic faults, but in terms of their message for unity and strength, from one little corner of the world to another, no one can dispute that this is the cause they have valiantly campaigned on behalf of their entire lives.
In this sense, as much as ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ became a pillarstone of the band’s songbook, it was one that Bono never stopped explaining for a long time afterwards, simply because he didn’t want to risk any misinterpretation of the meaning. This was not about picking a side or pitting people against one another.
It was all about coming together. No one should try to suggest that the song single-handedly achieved that, because it would be a miracle if any one track did, but U2’s attempts to further and platform this need for global unity were never to be ignored. In the fuel from their own wartime experiences, they wanted to connect to the rest of the world.
