Hear Bono’s isolated vocals for U2 song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’
Some songs pierce the eardrums, travel down your body and land directly in one’s soul. While U2 may have found themselves the butt of the odd joke over the years, they can at least feel vindicated in the fact that they are the owners of several of these very special sonic moments. One such track which will always land heavily on the heart is their landmark release from 1983, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’.
Wracked with national emotion, the song takes on some of U2’s most pertinent source material as Bono and the band describe the horrors of ‘The Troubles’, focusing, in particular, on the 1972 incident in Derry when British military shot at and murdered unarmed civilians in the midst of protest. It’s not only some of the group’s most overtly-political lyrics, but it also delivers one of Bono’s defining performances.
Featuring as the opening track of U2’s 1983 album War, the song has gone down in history as one of the group’s best. It acts as the perfect opener for an album Bono once labelled as “intentionally direct.” Far removed from the pop hits the group would have later in their career, this track is burdened by the bloody history surrounding everybody growing up in Ireland then.
While the song is often thought of as a direct nod to the heinous events of 1972, the group’s drummer Larry Mullen Jr. set the record straight when he claimed the song had a far larger scope: “You talk about Northern Ireland, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ people sort of think, ‘Oh, that time when 13 Catholics were shot by British soldiers’; that’s not what the song is about. 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?”
Bono originally wrote the song as a condemnation of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a group he believed were prolonging the conflict with the British military through their violent tactics. However, he soon realised that the only side of the conflict he was truly on was that of peace. Ever since the song’s release, he has routinely made it clear that the track is only for those hoping to attain peace for everybody.
The singer would often pronounce “This is not a rebel song” before performing the number live on stage. During those performances, he would occasionally wave a white flag, highlighting U2’s nonpartisan position when speaking about the bloodshed in Ireland. While the song may be signalling for peace, it is undoubtedly one of Bono’s best vocal performances. It makes the isolated vocal track of the song even more powerful.
Below, listen to Bono’s isolated vocals on the U2 song ‘Sunday bloody Sunday’.
