‘Get On Your Boots’: The U2 song nobody was asking for
Of course, the obvious response to “which U2 track did no one ask for?” is “any of the tracks on Songs of Innocence”. Quite literally, no one asked for any of those songs, and yet there they were, plonked on your iTunes account with absolutely no ability to remove them. Bono and Co invading your privacy and then standing back to bask in the worship they were expecting, the way your cat does when she deposits a mutilated mouse onto your kitchen floor.
Yet despite that, there is actually an even more egregious example of the band swinging and missing with regard to what anyone wanted from them. You see, while Songs of Innocence more or less destroyed any lasting hope that people would care about new music from U2 going forward, one album alone couldn’t do that. We know this for a fact as we danced this dance before with the 1997 effort, Pop.
While the record wasn’t the calamity people view it as today, it was a pretty dramatic stumble. However, it was one they recovered from with aplomb, 2000s All That You Can’t Leave Behind putting them right back up on their ‘biggest band in the world’ pedestal. No. U2 were still U2, and it would take two absolute clangers in a row to make them irrelevant for the first time in their careers. Unfortunately for them, Songs of Innocence was following up an absolute clanger.
I’m not even really talking about the previous album, No Line On The Horizon. I’m talking about its infamous first single – the song that basically made a laughing stock of the entire project. It swung for the fences so hard that the bat ended up flying out of their hands and cracking them in the mouth. If you know anything about the band, you know exactly what single I’m talking about.
What were U2 thinking when they made ‘Get On Your Boots’?
Few bands have struggled with levity quite like U2. Their standard vibe is that of po-faced, overwhelming seriousness, and listening to one of their records can be an exhausting experience for that reason. In picking themselves up after their difficulties with Pop, a record that saw them dress up as the Village People in the lead single’s video, they reverted to type, releasing two very serious, relatively stripped-down rock albums to huge success.
No Line On The Horizon, and especially ‘Get On Your Boots’, was meant to be an explosion of colour and silliness after two very dour records. There’s a part of me that respects how much they committed to the bit. This is a song whose working title was ‘Sexy Boots’ and those cursed words make it into the song during as the link between the first and second verses. A song that sees Bono sound somewhat exhausted as he groans, “I don’t wanna talk about wars between nations”.
It’s not all bad. The whole song is wrapped around an actually pretty cracking stoner rock riff that’s one of the more memorable things The Edge has created in recent years. However, that’s the problem. The song feels like a collection of ideas hurled at the wall to see what sticks, and not like an actual song. Perhaps Queens of the Stone Age meets Moroccan dance music, and a ‘When The Levee Breaks’ style middle-8 could have worked with a bit more fine-tuning, but as it is, it just sounds confusing.
Then you get Bono in full “horny mid-life crisis” mode and it strides straight into uncomfortable. So yeah, ‘Get On Your Boots’ is the U2 song nobody asked for. However, I do think there’s something admirable about trying something so absurdly out there at their level. It’s a much more respectable way of falling flat on your face than what came afterwards.
After all, ‘Get On Your Boots’ was U2 failing at being as un-U2 as possible. Better than than Songs of Innocence, which was U2 failing at being U2.
