The Unforgettable Fire’: the U2 album Bono thought was “beautifully out-of-focus”
Some of the best rock and roll albums ever made have a fair few blemishes. No band can claim to make the perfect record every time they go into the studio, and even when they do have immortal songs that will touch people over multiple generations, there are still happy accidents that bands will never be able to reach again because of how ramshackle they were. But whereas most bands can kick themselves for making such mistakes, Bono has always seen it as a human strength half the time.
Then again, no member of U2 seems to have had a problem with the golden halo that fans have put into their work. Although many of their records have been poured over like they were the second coming of The Beatles back in the 1980s, everyone in the group had said that it was a nightmare trying to find a way to make their songs work half the time, often joking that their songs were never finished.
But that messiness gave them a shred of credibility when Achtung Baby came out. Bands of their calibre simply didn’t exist when the grunge movement took over, but their willingness to embrace the irony and self-indulgent parts of their sound is what made them endearing to people like Pearl Jam, who thought enough of the group to open for them during the album’s run.
Before they even made their makeovers, though, they still had pieces that were best kept in the past. Boy holds up as a great post-punk record for its time, but there are still moments where the band had yet to settle into their stadium-rock boots. And even when they managed to embrace their new sound on The Unforgettable Fire, they weren’t going to cater to what everyone expected out of a stadium show.
While their live shows had become the stuff of legend, their fourth record works better in pieces rather than as a whole. ‘Pride’ is still one of the staples of their live show and a great protest song, but when looking at the record as a whole, Bono felt that there were a few moments that could have been zeroed in on a bit more.
Despite being home to some of their finest works, Bono had struggled to see the central theme of the record by the end of it, saying, “The Unforgettable Fire was a beautifully out-of-focus record, blurred like an impressionist painting, very unlike a billboard or an advertising slogan… In America there was such a backlash when we put out The Unforgettable Fire. People thought we were the future of rock’n’roll and they went, ‘What are you doin’ with this doggone hippie Eno album?’”
Even if Americans were a bit pissed to see them going in newer directions, that “hippie album” was half the reason why The Joshua Tree worked later. Some of the songs might not have been to everyone’s taste, but a track like ‘Promenade’ walked so ‘With Or Without You’ and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ could run.
While that might have made for some of the most pretentious moves in U2’s career when Rattle and Hum began, that doesn’t diminish the shine of The Unforgettable Fire at all. After coming out of their political record, U2 entered the big leagues, and if they had the ear of their generation, they would rather put out a record with something to say than mindless jams.
