How Jesus Christ almost caused U2 to split: “We both quit”
At the height of musical fame, it’s easy for artists to start developing a bit of a god complex. Swarms of screaming fans in front of you every night, with some of them even fainting at the mere sight of you, it would be unsurprising to hear rock stars thinking they could turn green room water into wine backstage. In fact, when U2 played the Sphere, they probably thought they could walk on water.
The legendary Irish four-piece thrust live music performance into a brave new world with their Las Vegas residency. Being one of the first bands to play in the immersive venue, they allowed their soaring reverberated guitar lines and transcendental choruses to flourish in the dreamlike backdrops of the graphics’ make-believe world.
It was fitting for a band that has seemed to capture that energy of fantasy and ambition in their music. Despite forming on the rugged streets of Dublin, the band was like ducks to American waters upon their emergence into the US charts. They embraced the drama and luxury of the American landscape and became fully fledged rock stars. I mean, Bono’s default aesthetic is centred around lightly tinted sunglasses, which isn’t usually the mark of humility.
It’s a lifestyle expectedly at odds with Christianity. From a lyrical standpoint, fans eagerly await lyrics that romanticise the grandiose nature of rock and roll lifestyle, sex, drugs, and rock and roll at the top of the order, not bread, communion wine and church on Sundays. For Bono, this contrast came to a head on the band’s 1980 debut album, Boy.
The frontman remembered: “On one level to try and be as true on a spiritual front as we could be, and then on the other level to be in the best rock n’ roll band we could ever be in. So there was an element of uncertainty going forward.”
But like all great frontmen, Bono kept one foot forward, into the brave new future he accepted he had to adopt in order to achieve success. But for the supporting players in the band, particularly guitarist The Edge, the tug of war between religious fidelity and showmanship was a bridge too far.
“Edge left the band,” Bono recalls. “But he didn’t tell the band, he just told me, and I wasn’t interested in being in the band if he wasn’t. He was saying: ‘This is great what we’re doing, but there is another world out there and that’s what I want to be part of. And the real cure to the world’s ills does not lie in a post-punk rock band.'”
It has since been pretty clear that it wasn’t so much an exit from the band as it was a break. Acutely aware of the stardom U2 were about to breach, The Edge removed himself for what he said was a mere two-week break to align his conscience for whatever chapter of rock immortality was incoming. And perhaps, with the benefit of retrospect it can be seen as an important pause in the development of the band, for not only did it give a chance for The Edge to realign his conscience, but most likely for the band to better understand how to merge their identities and subsequently create a brand of unifying stadium rock.
