The 1997 album that made Bono hate his own voice: “The singing isn’t very good”
There’s probably a good portion of rock stars that would prefer if Bono never picked up a microphone ever again.
U2 are too important to simply dissolve themselves just for the hell of it, but when you look at their career trajectory, seeing them become one of the more pretentious bands of their generation made them a target for controversy before they even got up on their soapbox, but even if Bono could rely on his voice to bring people together, he could acknowledge when his voice failed him more than a few times.
He was already a bit rough around the edges when he started making records for the first time, but that almost comes with the territory – no one expected a band to knock it out of the park on their very first try, but when working on The Joshua Tree, everyone had a new standard for what Bono was supposed to sound like. He was slowly inching towards becoming a phenomenal singer all the way back on War, but even if that album had one fantastic tune after another, there are pieces of this album that almost sound too beautiful to be done by a human.
It’s almost impossible for anyone to hit the high notes on ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, but Bono practically attacked it like it was nothing, which makes it even more impressive when you realise that the song is actually slightly flat. But if you end up pushing yourself that hard for so long, there has to be a moment where your voice ends up flipping you the bird and quitting after a while.
Bono was certainly doing his best to take care of himself along the way, but when the band started to evolve their sound in the 1990s, it did come at a price. Anyone would have needed to rest their voice a little bit after making a song like ‘One’, but even if Zooropa showed them taking a few more chances and Bono singing even higher on a song like ‘Lemon’, Pop was the moment where everything came to a head way too quickly.
The record has already been called one of the biggest mistakes that the band ever made during their classic run, but a lot of that wasn’t necessarily Bono’s fault. He was dealing with the possibility of him having throat cancer, and since that could have spelt the end of the band’s career in most regards, he could admit later that he heard some of the problems that were going on with him when listening back to the record.
The songs aren’t as strong as they should be to start with, but Bono remembered his voice being too bad to go back to, saying, “My voice had been on low par for about five years. It started after the Zoo TV tour. You can really hear it. It seemed to just come down in power. The singing on Pop isn’t very good. The tour, I found difficult to do. I didn’t know if it was my voice or whatever.”
“I don’t want to get too melodramatic about it, but actually it is pretty melodramatic if you think you mightn’t be around to see your kids.”
Bono
There are even a few moments on the record where Bono seems to take a back seat to the rest of the band half the time. The whole album was meant to be more danceable, but while they may have been going for the same kind of feeling that people got when hearing Peter Gabriel sing ‘Sledgehammer’, they weren’t exactly cut out for it, especially when looking at the B-sides, where Bono sounds a lot more synthetic than he should.
Because looking at U2’s track record, the one thing that they were able to do better than pretty much anyone else is to be undeniably human, and when you put a lot of synthetic stuff around them, they were only going to sound cheap. It might have been in service to get Bono’s voice back in shape, but it’s not like everyone was absolutely fawning over the dancefloor version of the Irish legends.
