The U2 song Bono thought he couldn’t sing properly: “My voice was shot”
Certain limitations are bound to be put on every singer to walk the Earth. The vocal range can only go so far, and unless one reaches the level of Freddie Mercury, where almost every note sounds perfect, some notes are just unattainable without either some pitch correction or going through some drastic means to produce the right pitch. Bono would be the first to tell everyone that he doesn’t have the greatest range in rock and roll, but for the song ‘Last Night on Earth’, he came up absolutely empty.
When looking back on Bono’s live shows as of late, though, it’s not like he’s lost what he had. Even during the tour for The Joshua Tree, every vocal take that he performed was more than worthy of being featured on an album, whether that meant him belting out ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ or getting softer on tracks like ‘With Or Without You’.
During the Achtung Baby album cycle, Bono realised that he needed to change his voice a bit. He had already developed the nasty habit of acting like he was the second coming of Rock and Roll Jesus whenever he took to the stage, so hearing him play up the most exaggerated rockstar of all time ‘The Fly’ as an ironic statement at least gave him credit in the age of grunge.
That kind of experimentation does have diminishing returns, though, and while Zooropa was teetering on the edge of pretentious, Pop is far from the kind of massive statement that the group probably thought it was. It wasn’t the worst idea to combine rock and roll and dance textures in the late 1990s, but their way of blending both worlds just sounds like the parody version of the Village People they played in the video for ‘Discotheque’ if they were taken seriously.
Despite the god-awful production and the lack of nearly any coherent melodies, there are pieces of brilliance on there as well. ‘Discotheque’ is at least ironically hilarious most of the time, and ‘Please’ does have some strong lyrics, but ‘Last Night on Earth’ was the moment even Bono admitted was far from his best.
Aside from working themselves down to the bone, the frontman admitted that his voice was completely gone when it came time to record, saying, “We were supposed to be making an uplifting expression of what happens when rock ‘n’ roll meets club culture. Instead, it felt like a load of men on an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea. My voice was completely shot, which is why we put so much echo on it, and Edge sang along with me to cover it up.”
While Bono still had a certain level of quality regarding his vocal takes, it’s clear that he’s going through some trouble on a few of the lines here. There are pieces that jump out as brilliant, but compared to every other vocal he made during the 1980s, this sounds closer to the demo recording of what would have been the finished song.
But as producer Daniel Lanois alluded to when he worked with the group, U2 albums are never truly finished, and this might have been a case where the deadline was upon them and they just created the best version that they could. Even with all of those synthesisers and electronics dominating the mix, though, there are certain lines that no artificial enhancement can cure.
