The 1984 song Bono called impossible to make: “Very difficult to do”
The beauty behind any U2 song is about Bono and the gang trying to create a musical miracle in the studio.
Every one of their songs was meant to be a new creative endeavour, and even if there are many times where the experiment can be an utter failure, they are more than forgiven for giving people some of the greatest hymns in the entire rock canon throughout their career. But before they became legendary, there were still a few songs in their arsenal that were bound to be an uphill battle for them whenever they locked in on a groove.
Then again, the band being dissatisfied with their own work is half the reason why their records sound the way they do. No artist ever likes the idea of having to truly finish one of their songs, and even if the Irish legends have put out plenty of great material throughout their career, there are even moments where Bono has said that he wanted to go back and redo songs like ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ since they didn’t really have it right the first time they plotted everything out.
Given what those redos sounded like on Songs of Surrender, though, chances are they had it right the first time. Some of the biggest tunes in their canon are about trying to find something greater than themselves, and a lot of that comes from them working and working until they feel like they’ve created a certain energy between them. That was going to be a little bit tricky to do on an album like October when Bono threw most of his lyrics out, but after War, they at least had a knack for what made them great.
Their signature sound was coming into view, but The Unforgettable Fire is the first time that they sounded like they were going to take over the world. The Joshua Tree was a distant vision at this point, but ‘Pride’ was a wrecking ball of a song that they had been waiting for. Working with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois had opened up new possibilities for them when they started dissecting their sound, but ‘Bad’ was a much different animal than anything they had taken on.
Everyone was in the spirit of trying new things when they worked on the record, but Bono felt like getting the version that wound up on the album was going to be nearly impossible for them to pull off, saying, “’Bad’ was very difficult to do, almost an impossible collision of cultures for us. It was a different kind of songwriting, like Philip Glass meets Astral Weeks, Van Morrison crossed with German electronica. You have sequences which are rigid and metronomic and then you have a bass which is improvising all the way, and the voice too.”
At the same time, improvisation doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Astral Weeks came from Van Morrison riffing off of the basic sketches that he had with the rest of the band, and if he could manage to turn that into one of the most emotional singer-songwriter records ever made, Bono could do the same thing. The main pulse of the song is already there with Larry Mullen Jr, and even if The Edge isn’t doing anything too fancy, the main draw of the song comes from all of them feeding off each other’s energy.
But out of all their tunes, ‘Bad’ is one of the few times where their music took on a completely different identity live. Sure, everyone remembers Live Aid for the massive audience and Queen going down like one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, but when you see Bono with that glorious 1980s hair performing this song, it’s no wonder that people had their eyes on them as the next great band that was going to point the way forward for rock and roll.
Because in an era that was all about flashiness and the higher-ups at MTV, Bono didn’t want to spend his life being artificial. The band had music they needed to get off their chest, and if they could put an ounce of what they did on this song into any of their live sets, they were going to take their audience on a ride they wouldn’t soon forget when they came out with ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.
