The one band that Bono thought destroyed themselves: “It breaks my heart”
One of the biggest hurdles for any band looking to make their mark on history is dealing with the concept of fame. It can feel like the most important step in one’s musical career, but after a while, people start to wonder if they are marginalising their fans by stepping out of their comfort zone. While Bono was always free to switch things up, he felt sorry for those who fell by the wayside before they got the chance to make it big.
Granted, there were always going to be limits on where certain bands could go. While post-punk was a transatlantic phenomenon, Joy Division never got the opportunity to be as big after the death of Ian Curtis, and despite Britpop being a phenomenon, a band like Oasis only managed to place a small dent in the country before they kept getting derailed when they came over to tour.
But Bono was always in it for the long haul. Outside of their post-punk credentials at the beginning of the band’s career, he had an endless fascination with what America had to offer, whether that was the scenic landscapes or the different pieces of American history that U2 would snapshot when making albums like The Joshua Tree.
Then again, embracing new sounds also means being willing to embarrass one’s self, and looking at Rattle and Hum, they weren’t safe from having a few kinks in the armour. A lot of what Bono had said during the concert may have been profound for the time, but considering they weren’t yet the rock gods that they would turn into, seeing them trying to call their shot as one of the biggest forces in music history can come off as unbelievably pretentious, particularly in one section of the documentary where Bono chastises the audience for not giving the right reaction to his speech.
I will give it to Bono in that situation; he is at least trying. A lot of what made U2 accessible was their ability to take on new ideas whenever they made an album, and despite many artists viewing that as selling out, the frontman knew that needing to stay true to what one sounded like in the beginning was bound to come back to bite them in the ass.
Despite them being a staple in post-punk and goth rock, Bono felt that the concept of not “selling out” destroyed Echo and the Bunnymen’s chances of going global, saying, “Great groups were broken up because of ridiculous concepts like not selling out. It breaks my heart. It’s the cultural revolution in China all over again: Let’s rid rock music of thinkers, let’s rid rock music of big ideas. I saw it destroy great groups like Echo and the Bunnymen, extraordinary talents who crashed and burned on these things.”
Even if U2 managed to sell out properly in a lot of respects, that didn’t mean that they were safe from a few sharp turns, either. Rattle and Hum had already put them on shaky ground, but seeing them eventually turn towards making dance music on Pop or try their hand at rewriting their own songs on Songs of Surrender was far from the powerful switch-ups that people got used to on Achtung Baby.
But the point wasn’t always about making something that would please the old-school fans. It was about never putting out the same record twice, and while many of his colleagues stayed with their typical sound, Bono knew that the only way forward was to keep chipping away at what he could do with a microphone in his hands.
