The U2 song Brian Eno hated so much he tried to delete it from history
Brian Eno is the Nikola Tesla of the studio. As a unique innovator of sound and technology, garnering his involvement in production is a gold seal of approval for any band. This plaudit was afforded to U2 for a second consecutive time when they headed to Dublin to record The Joshua Tree, once more with Eno and Daniel Lanois in tow.
His influence on the record was profound from the start. He was searching for the soul of the band while trying to revivify their sound. But ‘how’ was the question.
For a man renowned for loving technology, the ever-eclectic Eno once firmly stated, “The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them”. He wanted to break the binary when it came to The Joshua Tree and introduce a new singular swell of instrumentation and grooves to the record.
“Africa is everything that something like classical music isn’t,” Eno told Kevin Kelly. “Classical – perhaps I should say ‘orchestral’ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitch-wise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes.” But he saw Africa as a flowing swell, and he fittingly thought that was also what defined the Irish rockers who were wondering where to go next with their sound.
Thankfully, Bono was on a very similar page at this point. He had just been to Ethiopia after Live Aid and was enthused by fresh musical ideas. During an interview with Rolling Stone, he explained. “All this stuff about deserts and the parchedness of the earth… I wrote those things on Air India sick bags and scraps of paper, sitting in a little tent in a town called Ajibar in northern Ethiopia,” he said.
Adding: “It’s a sort of odd, unfinished lyric, and outside of the context of Africa, it doesn’t make any sense. But it contains a very powerful idea. In the desert, we meet God. In parched times, in fire and flood, we discover who we are.”
That sort of imagery required the kinship of music that matched it. Ethiopian music is among the most unique in the world. Originally, the vast expanses the ranchers often had to travel meant that the resultant folk songs from the region were ballad-like, filled with longing and a ‘Wichita Lineman’-like longing for home. However, this all changed when the emperor, Haile Selassie, travelled abroad as the country’s regent.
On his travels, he encountered a marching band of 40 boys in St James Cathedral in Jerusalem, all of them orphans of the Armenian genocide. He was overcome by their emotive brilliance. Their chanted longing, indeed, bore similarities to the music of his home, but the melodic sensibilities and instrumentation were entirely different.
He wildly requested that they return with him to Ethiopia, where he would give them shelter, work and payment. This was agreed upon, and soon, their musical influence spread in Ethiopia, welcoming brass and tonality to the sound of the region. Suddenly, Ethiopia became the world’s musical sponge, welcoming sounds from all over the globe, wringing them out in a cultural revolution that resulted in some of the most unique, flowing music ever.
It was this flowing nature that Eno hoped to infuse into U2’s established rock vitality. The opening track, ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, was going to set the tone. Fittingly, Bono already referred to it as a mere “sketch” by the time it entered the studio, so the vagueness of it matched Eno’s loose intent perfectly.
The problem was that it was perhaps too unstructured, and honing it became an obsession for Eno, taking up “40% of his time” on the album. Haile Selassie’s serendipitous musical equivalent had been inadvertent, but Eno was trying to engineer it with intent – and it was proving a lot harder.
In turn, he grew so frustrated by the track that he ended up hating it. With every hour he toiled over it, the worse it sounded to him. He loathed it the way a bee loathes a window; he knew untold riches lay beyond an insurmountable hurdle, and his frustration was getting the better of him. He eventually told the studio’s assistants to destroy it.
Lanois told Mojo that for whatever reason, perhaps out of fear or better judgement, this never happened. “It was a bit of a tongue-twister for the rhythm section, with strange bar lengths that got everybody in a bad mood,” he recalled.
“I can remember pointing at a blackboard, walking everybody through the changes like a science teacher. There’s a part of Eno that likes instant gratification.”
With ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, he wasn’t getting it. He began to see his Ethiopian dream slide towards a half-baked farce, and he hated it.
Alas, it was finally finished and honed, and although it might not be to his liking and Bono has lived to rue some of the lyrics borne from the sketch, the free-form nature has turned the jazzy track into a Promethean force on the live front, as Bono writers in Surrender: “We must have played it a thousand times, and no matter how shite a show, how off form the band or, more likely, the singer, to this day when we play ‘Streets,’ it’s as if God walks through the room.”
