The two people The Edge called the fifth and sixth members of U2: “An organic process”
Countless bands in rock and pop owe their success to an unofficial extra member hovering around the certified line-up, U2 as much as anyone else.
Be it EMI producer George Martin’s coveted ‘Fifth Beatle’ tag or photographer Anton Corbijn’s visual stamp on Depeche Mode’s aesthetic flair as they cracked America, there’s always a manager, marketer, studio whizz, or routinely recruited sessions maestro that can enjoy a near-celebrated stature as the band members themselves among hardcore fans.
U2 have boasted several such personalities since their Dublin formation. There’s Steve Lillywhite’s brimming production that helped launch U2’s wide-eyed new wave to chart success across their early records, or longtime manager Paul McGuinness steering the Irish teens to global behemoths before hanging his hat in 2013. Then there’s Gavin Friday, the Virgin Prunes frontman and childhood friend of Bono, who’s reported to have stood as the band’s encouraging artistic pusher toward stylistic pastures across their decades in the rock game.
If you had to pick, the joint production duties of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois trump the competition, however. Not only have they endured as a routine studio team, working together on around seven major releases and projects stretching back to the mid-1980s, but the twosome stood instrumental in shifting U2 away from the moorings of the post-punk world toward their widescreen vistas of anthemic scope and atmospheric stadium soundtracks that would carry Ireland’s biggest-selling artist across the decades to come.
In addition to Lanois’ sonic finesse and Eno’s leftfield theorising, the pair’s knack for intuitively responding to one of creativity’s little lightning bolts when they’re struck could elevate some of U2’s most beloved numbers. Such magic occurred during the sessions for 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Just as the end of the 1980s triggered the Zoo TV makeover for the upcoming decade, the experimentation with electronic dance music and Pop’s further immersions into rock star satire began to crumple under the weight of its own ironic theatre. U2 knew the new millennium demanded another hit of the soft reset button.
During this transitional period came their last bona fide classic. Just as fans began to tire of U2’s PopMart Tour bombast, a surprise hit with 1998’s ‘The Sweetest Thing’ would whet the appetites for their big single comeback two years later, when ‘Beautiful Day’ kickstarted their 21st century and reestablished their mantle as the world’s biggest band in a very different world than the one they started in over 20 years earlier.
They have Eno and Lanois to thank for its eventual completion. ‘Beautiful Day’ was the result of numerous tinkering from a mediocre rock jam to its eventual celestial gospel thumper, finally seeing the light when Eno improvised a drum machine and electronic stringed rhythm sequence, while Lanois gifted the sessions a lick from his Fender Telecaster that expanded its harmonic arrest. It was starting to shape up. One day before leaving the studio, guitarist The Edge tried to think of a backing vocal to complement Bono’s lead, figuring out a high fifth while Lanois sang a doo-woop baritone. It was here that everybody knew ‘Beautiful Day’ possessed single potential.
“That was the final key element that the song needed,” The Edge reflected to Rolling Stone in 2020. “That is typical of our way of working with Brian and Danny. They really become fifth and sixth members of the band for the recording sessions. It’s kind of an organic process that’s really about maintaining and stimulating inspiration in each other. That’s the bottom line, the thing we’re all trying to do.”
‘Beautiful Day’ would score a UK number one and tease the American Top 20, and stand as the last live standard any fan can expect with guaranteed certainty to be performed on stage. Eno and Lanois would join the U2 studio again for 2009’s No Line on the Horizon, arguably the last record where U2 were trying new ideas, despite its initial mixed reception.
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