“Some of the legends of our time”: The 1987 song that shaped Noel Gallagher into an icon
Whatever you may personally feel about U2’s music, just know that Noel Gallagher is among those who recognise their artistry and has come to their defence.
Not that U2 need ardent defenders, necessarily; their success and resonance over the decades speak for themselves. Yet, where Gallagher has become known for his blatant sharing of his opinions on musicians of the past and present, his love for the band has remained constant, dating back to his youth.
“If you don’t get it,” he once asserted of U2’s discography, “more fool you”.
Gallagher even once named the opener to their 1987 album The Joshua Tree, ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, as a personal favourite, explaining, “When they play it live, [it] still remains one of the greatest moments in rock. The video is amazing; they’re amazing”.
The music video in question opens with a snippet of another single from The Joshua Tree, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’, before voiceovers from radio DJs announce that the band will be filming a video on the rooftop of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles. Filmed in March 1987, the concept was an homage to The Beatles’ final rooftop concert, and shows U2 performing for thousands amidst the police attempting to intervene and eventually shut down the concert.
“The objective was to close down the streets,” bassist Adam Clayton later explained to Q magazine in 2010, “If there’s one thing people in LA hate, it’s streets closing down, and we’ve always felt bands should shake things up. We achieved it because the police stopped us filming. Were we worried about being arrested? Not at the time…”
‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ finds its lyrics from a story about Belfast, Northern Ireland, that Bono once heard, which talked about how what street someone lives on can indicate their religion and income. “I was just trying to sketch a location,” Bono explained to Propaganda 5 in 1987, “Maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling”. That feeling, then, became one of escape, running to an imagined place where rules and conventions are nonexistent.
With Gallagher later becoming one of rock’s most celebrated songwriters, his work, arguably, would not have taken shape in quite the same way if not for Bono’s own songwriting, a catalogue that influenced Gallagher long before the two musicians became personal friends.
“The thing I like about U2 is, at the end of The Joshua Tree, they kind of threw it all up in the air, and they came up with the album Achtung Baby,” Gallagher continued, referring to U2’s 1991 album. “I remember queueing up to buy Achtung Baby the day it came out, outside Our Price Records in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester,” he shared, “And when I got it home to play it, I couldn’t believe, I genuinely couldn’t believe, how good it was”, naming ‘Mysterious Ways’ as “a song that I love to play at home on the acoustic guitar, sometimes”.
After Achtung Baby’s release, U2 reached yet another level of unprecedented success, diverging into a more experimental side of themselves that paved the way for what they would create throughout the 1990s. As Gallagher surmised, “These are some of the legends of our time”.
