The U2 album Bono said was way too overhyped: “It would have been grand”
Every artist at the top of the music world is in danger of getting overexposed at all times. It’s one thing to be able to play music for anyone within earshot, but even the biggest superfans of a certain artist reach a point where they want to listen to something else without seeing one person’s face everywhere they turn. There’s a beauty in restraint, but that was a lesson Bono needed to learn the hard way when U2 started their insane run of hits in the 1980s.
Granted, it’s not like anyone was telling the Irish legends to stop. They had been going for years and working to become the biggest band in the world, so when The Joshua Tree came out, it felt like all those years of hard work had finally paid off. Everyone had known them for their great singles and phenomenal performance at Live Aid, but songs like ‘With Or Without You’ or ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ became anthems for the entire world after the fact.
For a band all about paving the way for the future, pairing them with music videos made them look like some of the coolest people on Earth. It would be bold for any band to match the level of The Beatles by playing their music on a roof like the Fab Four did, but seeing them in the ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ video actually makes for one of the greatest shows of the entire 1980s.
So if the music looked great on MTV, surely it would look great in cinemas, right? The thought of playing concerts and having them filmed seemed like a novel idea at the time, but as soon as Rattle and Hum hit theatres, people started to have second thoughts. Because throughout the film, Rattle and Hum made everyone grapple with something that they hadn’t dealt with before: U2 can be boring.
While there are a few Spinal Tap moments in the film, a lot of what turns up in the movie does make the band look a little too high on their own hubris. Bono does admittedly look amazing when storming across the stage in certain shots, but since every single cinema was turning the movie into one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer, all that fans could see was a band that was taking their victory lap and looking ridiculous in the process.
Although Bono was proud of getting a lot of the footage down on tape, he did feel like the movie didn’t do right by the fans by overexposing them, saying, “If it had been released in a small cinema, like some arthouse cinema, it would have been grand. It was released in a thousand cinemas around America with a huge big hype. And, by the way, [director] Phil [Joanou] wasn’t responsible for that, or Paramount Pictures. That was us. We wanted that.”
And looking back, it’s not hard to see where things went a little haywire. A lot of what turns up on the Rattle and Hum album is fantastic, but since it was tied to a movie which revealed some of the most superficial sides of the band, seeing them day after day was bound to get boring after a while. It’s one thing to change the station if a song comes on that you don’t like, but when it keeps playing in theatres and on the radio, there comes a point where everyone wants it to end.
But since U2 have since been able to move on from the project and even course-correct later in their career after albums like Songs of Innocence, it’s nice to know that they are aware of when they screw up. Most rock stars could easily bury their heads in the sand and not realise when they have a world-class turd on their hands, but U2 have always been willing to accept feedback and see where they can take their sound later.
