‘Walking In My Shoes’: the Depeche Mode song that Bono wishes he wrote
For anyone who’s been writing songs for decades, it’s easy to see the charts as some sort of competition. Although most people would be happy to have one song land at the top of the pile for one week during their career, it takes a master’s touch to be able to get multiple records on the hit parade and put the rest of the Top 20 to shame. While Bono might not have been that much of a stranger when it came to making hits with U2, he knew that some songs fell by the wayside for him.
Because looking through every one of U2’s albums, none of them seemed fully ready for the frontman. All of the songs did a great job at reflecting their times perfectly, but whenever Bono sings them nowadays, it’s always about reflecting on where he is in the moment rather than trying to make someone relive their glory days.
It was important to live in the now, and that was a big reason why the group chopped down The Joshua Tree when they had the chance. Anything that they released after their magnum opus was going to be compared to it whether they liked it or not, and by the time they started adopting different personas and making industrialised takes on rock and roll on Achtung Baby, they knew they had something to separate them from their past.
But that dark angle wasn’t anything new in rock and roll. U2 may have been the first to bring it to many people’s attention, but the industrial movement had been going strong for years with acts like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, and while each of them was a lot heavier than what ‘Zoo Station’ sounded like, it was important for Bono to separate himself from his messiah complex once the grunge movement kicked in.
“He was eavesdropping on the song.”
Dave Gahan
Then again, it wouldn’t be surprising if the frontman didn’t take a look at what Depeche Mode had been doing a few years before. For a group that had started as a glitchy new wave act, Dave Gahan and Martin Gore had steered the band through the darker corners of pop music, and when Violator came out right as the decade ended, people were shellshocked to hear something as dark as ‘Enjoy the Silence’ on the radio or being able to groove along to ‘Personal Jesus’.
When talking to BBC Radio 2, though, Gahan remembered Bono saying that he would have loved to get to a song like ‘Walking In My Shoes’ before they did, revealing, “We came out of the rehearsal room and Bono was standing in the hallway, and he was eavesdropping on the song, and we had a little chat about it after. He told me it was one of those songs that he wished he’d written.”
Looking at the lyrics, there are even a handful of Bono-isms that could have been twisted around a little bit. There is the implication of someone struggling that runs throughout a lot of U2’s best songs, and listening to the way that Gahan calls on the Lord actually ties in nicely with the Christian undercurrents that run through a lot of U2’s best work dating all the way back to October.
Given that it’s also from an album called Songs of Faith and Devotion, there would have been a lot more for Bono to unpack had he tried making his own version of the tune. Most people were interested in taking pop music more seriously in the 1990s, but if this tune could get popular and U2 could squeak by making Zooropa, there was room for something with biblical importance on the charts.
