“We had to start over”: The album Bono thought almost broke up U2
It’s hard for any band to realise when the dream is really over. Even though people can try their best to harness the same energy that they had back in their prime, it’s anyone’s guess whether that’s going to last for a few albums, one tour, or even a handful of decent songs. While U2 are fortunate enough to have many different facets of their career, Bono remembered that the band came dangerously close to calling it a day before they completed this modern masterpiece.
Because understanding U2 is also about understanding the way that they look at music. Even though every rock band has that same starting point where they want to make songs that excite them, Bono focused on the spiritual power of rock and roll to bring him out of the darkest depths of himself.
Look at where the band went on October, for example. Most bands would be called crazy if they dared to try and talk about religion on their second album, but listening to songs like ‘Gloria’ and ‘I Fall Down’, you can still hear Bono’s passion dripping out of every syllable that comes out of his mouth, almost as if he knows that this brand of rock and roll could move a mountain if it wanted to.
While the rest of the world saw the slow burn of U2 start to catch major fire during Live Aid, The Joshua Tree was the moment where they hit upon their true power. Compared to the other anthems in rock history, songs like ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ work because you hear the self-belief in the band, almost like they are trying to form some strange rock and roll cult where Joe Strummer writes their hymns.
So when someone makes a record that stunning, there’s no proper way to follow it up. In a perfect world, this would have been the moment when U2 had officially retired from music and went the way of a nostalgia act, but by the time they began work on Achtung Baby, they had more new sounds to work with. According to Bono, though, they did entertain the idea of leaving it all behind.
When talking to Billy Corgan about reinventing themselves as post-ironic versions of rockstars, Bono revealed that the band was close to killing off their career, saying, “I think it would be the end of our group if we didn’t make a record we believed in. We’ve broken our band up so many times internally. When we started working with Brian Eno early on, in a way we had to break up and start over. We did it again with Achtung Baby. We had to shoot U2 in the head before anyone else did.”
Then again, it’s probably for the best that they killed off that side of themselves. The version of Bono that turned up on ‘With or Without You’ could have never sung a song like ‘Zoo Station’, and as much as ‘The Fly’ worked for him for a while, there was a slim chance that caricature of a rockstar could have ever made something as earnest as ‘Stuck In a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.’
Because that’s what band evolution is all about. It’s easy for someone to scrape by playing those same old songs, but Bono knew that if he wanted to have a band that mattered, he needed to have songs that would last longer than the tracks that he made as a kid.
