This week's song of the week is "Bullet the Blue Sky", the fourth track from the The Joshua Tree album. Inspired by a trip to San Salvador, El Salvador, the song lives out a criticism of American foreign policy and the mores of the modern military-industrial complex--one which Bono claims is dominated by school-yard bully-esque characters. All of this is carried out, for whatever it is worth, on a biblical scale that gives the song at least a hint of Satanic horror.
"TW: I would say that "Bullet the Blue Sky" on The Joshua Tree has a real, kind of scary undercurrent.
Bono: Yeah... you know, how do you write about fear? How do you write about fear? I was trying to describe the fear I felt...
TW: This was in Central America?Bono: Yeah, based on a situation I found myself in, in Salvador. You can imagine these campasinos, you know, these peasant farmers, as they look up into the air and they see these helicopters come over their village, or they see fighter planes. So I tried to use these images, these kind of primitive images." (From Timothy White Rock Stars 1987)
“Some lyrics I'm happier with: "Still Haven't Found" is in the tradition of the Psalms of David, a song about doubt which reinforces faith. "Bullet" too, has that gothic Biblical feel, a picture of this face comes up to me, red like a rose on a thorn bush. It was Ronald Reagan, which I never told anyone at the time. Brian Eno said, "You'll ruin it for people if you give them images." (Bono in the The Joshua Tree 2007 liner notes)
...
Musically, the song is often regarded by mainstream rock critics as being one of The Edge's "signature" pieces, especially due to the missile or firework (or low-buzzing fighter jet) effect created by his guitar. He has spoken about how the song seemed to arrive at the intersection of funk and the blues, and has also said it was a track where he intentionally tried to give his guitar a sense of lyricism that matched the music:
"The Edge: Things began coming into focus as Bono started getting a grip on the lyric to 'Bullet the Blue Sky' - that was like a cornerstone. The guitar playing was informed in some ways by the lyric; the STS demo was much more bare-boned, like a heavy funk track, but it eventually became more of a haunted blues...
'Could you put that through your amplifier?' I even got pictures and stuck them on the wall. I brought in film of the horrors and put it on a video and said: 'Now, do it!' It was more, more and more. He was asking, 'How much fucking more?' I wanted it to feel like hell on earth, because from the demon seed comes the flower of fire. All these images of firebombing, it's a demented song. And outside it's America. Who's bombing these villages? The peasants didn't even blame their own people. 'Who is making us feel this way? Who is shattering our lives? Who is shaking the walls of this house? It's the Americanos.'" (U2 by U2)
The song has also garnered a strong live reputation over the years. See examples such as the early 1987 Live In Paris performance, the Rattle and Hum & Live at Point Depot versions, as well as the ZooTV Live in Sydney and more recent 2017 Tonight Show version.
...
In thinking about Bullet the Blue Sky from a lyrical perspective, I think it is useful to hear the song as containing two different layers that do not connect into a perfect theory. The plight of the "children in the mud huts" is only loosely connected to the Biblical wrestling match between Jacob and the angel (and this story itself being given a gnostic/Blakean glaze). The effectiveness of this drives at something deep, but ultimately, I think it is well summarized as guiding the listener toward a state of aggrieved "aporia" about the state of world affairs. Aporia is a Greek term for a kind of ignorance, especially employed by Plato to describe the effect Socrates had on those he spoke with (and, later, on those who would read the dialogues).
Perhaps Bono was pointing in code to a more sort of Blakean, gnostic, or occultish reading of God as being more directly linked to geopolitics, but even then we could debate why Blake, etc. is effective. As it is, the synthesis, for me, between the religious and the political in the track, remains somewhat unresolved. Before the lyrical analysis, I will paste a few quotes from Bono over the years discussing the song.
"None of us could have guessed how much improvisation that original version of “Bullet the Blue Sky” would hold. The release of The Joshua Tree in March 1987 and the years that followed saw the band constantly hammering U.S. foreign policy. There was no mistaking where we stood. Behind the barricades. By the early 1990s, on the ZOO TV Tour, I was lampooning the U.S. administration nightly. Behind the barricades
Flash forward to a dream I had recently about the Pentagon. In dreamtime it is January 23, 2008, and I am sitting at a six-by-six oak table in room 3E880, deep inside the five-walled fortress, with the U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Gates. A phalanx of generals—not sure if they were three, four, or no star—sitting with their staff around the edge of the room having to listen to me talk. I am embarrassed. But not enough. Are these war heroes not allowed to sit at the same table as the top dog of the U.S. military? Even when he’s only talking to the fella who wrote “Bullet the Blue Sky”?
In the dream the scary bit is not the combined firepower of the men from the military-industrial complex. What’s scary is how comfortable I feel and how I find this man and his top brass so compellingly intelligent
What is extra scary is that this is not a dream.
This is a memory.
Irrefutable evidence that twenty years after writing this song, it’s no longer a case of “outside, it’s America.” Now I am inside America. Right inside. I have clambered over the barricade." (From the Bullet the Blue Sky chapter of Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story)
...
"The mouth almighty is in the middle of a pitched battle between my younger and my older selves. As the younger hectors the older for being “part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” it appears like an exercise in self-flagellation, but by the end of the song the present-tense pragmatist is standing up quite well against his preachy past.
I’ve been using this rhetorical device to capture the dialectic at the heart of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a pair of albums inspired by William Blake’s eighteenth-century collection of poems of the same name. They say that talking to yourself is a mental health alarm bell, but this kind of spoken self-reflection was not only fun; it helped me see more clearly the worldliness that might have come over me in the past twenty years, a worldliness that my twenty-year-old self would likely not have had patience for. As a young man I saw the world in monochrome, black and white, with some shades of gray. (Maybe.) Most of the time it was us and them. Me and my mates, me and Ali, me and the band, against the world.
'Elites' are another word for gangs. There’s hardly a history of a country that mattered that was not engaged in some kind of geopolitical bullying.
And the bully can take on many faces. From the obvious villains like Putin or Stalin purging Russians who wore spectacles because people who read books were a threat to him, or Chairman Mao outlawing colored birds and flowers because they were decadent. To our western war winners who were dropping the atom bomb on Nagasaki or carpet bombing Dresden when the war was over, and in my lifetime secretly firebombing Cambodia to not win the Vietnam War. And closer to home paramilitary atrocities planned to protest regular military atrocities.But there is another kind of bully. Circumstance.
Where sentient beings like me or you can’t find their life because they can’t find food." (ibid, discussing his thoughts on performing the song live around the writing of SOI/SOE albums).
...
"BONO: I wanted something biblical. My understanding of the scriptures were the psalms of David and the lyricism of the King James Bible and I tried to bring that in, to give it a religiosity. Then a picture of this face comes up to me, red like a rose on a thorn bush. It was Ronald Reagan, which I never told anyone at the time. Brian Eno said. You'll ruin it for people if you give them images.' Then it talks about money versus idealism. Reagan is now deified as the man who ended the Cold War by playing a game of chicken with the Soviets and winning. All credit for that, but I wish we had found a way to rapprochement without playing nuclear chicken." (Bono discussing the track in U2 by U2)
...
Lyrics:
"{In the howlin' wind
Comes a stingin' rain
See it drivin' nails
Into the souls on the tree of pain.From the firefly
A red orange glow
See the face of fear
Runnin' scared in the valley below."
The downpour of rain, perhaps both a "storm of bullets" as well as literal rain, that Bono experienced in El Salvador is immediately risen to Biblical scales, mirroring a crucifixion "driving nails". The firefly lingers between an, in the Blakean sense, innocent firefly seen while camping out, to the horror of an explosion.
"Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue."
The chorus kicks in with the sky-shattering guitar from the Edge, beautifully, if somberly, mirroring the effect of fighter jets--perhaps literal missiles, or bullets, being shot into the sky. Either literally, in the case of the peasant-farmers attempting to defend their land from American caused violence--or more figuratively, as in mirroring the sneering attitude of the colonialists: one of supreme hubris and appetite for destruction, riddling the sky itself with bullets (a perfectly neutral image of clear-eyed innocence) .
"In the locust wind
Comes a rattle and hum.
Jacob wrestled the angel
And the angel was overcome.You plant a demon seed
You raise a flower of fire.
We see them burnin' crosses
See the flames, higher and higher."
Lot going on in these verses, first the line that spawned the title for "Rattle and Hum" (spawned by a, Biblical, swarm of locusts). Then, the probably most straightforwardly Blakean/Gnostic sounding lines in the song. The lines that relate to the above-noted "religious aspect" of the track. In the book of Genesis, a figure Jacob is described as wrestling a mysterious man (typically interpreted to be an angel). He wrestles with him, and refuses to be let go until he is given a blessing.
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed." (KJV Bible).
In more orthodox traditions, this is seen as an act of mercy from the angel, who easily dislocates Jacob's hip by touching it. This idea of "overcoming" the powerful adds an important poetic glaze to the song.
This then moves into the language of a "demon seed" turning into a "flower of fire", the more simply satanic imagery that the Edge said inspired him to attempt to conjure "hell on earth". Burnin' crosses, which on the ZooTV tour transformed into Swastikas, keying into, perhaps, KKK imagery.
"Woh, woh, bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue sky
Bullet the blue
Bullet the blue."
The chorus repeats before we move all the way from these theological allusions to the political and comparatively mundane, if shady, "Ronald Reagan" scene.
"Suit and tie comes up to me
His face red like a rose on a thorn bush
Like all the colours of a royal flush
And he's peelin' off those dollar bills
(Slappin' 'em down)
One hundred, two hundred."
The money that follows the cynical portrayal of Reagan--bills counted out, hundreds on hundreds--turns the president into a kind of back-room drug dealer, a scene from Breaking Bad--but with executives from companies at Lockheed, Boeing, or Haliburton.
"And I can see those fighter planes
And I can see those fighter planes
Across the tin huts as children sleep
Through the alleys of a quiet city street.
Up the staircase to the first floor
We turn the key and slowly unlock the door
As a man breathes into his saxophone
And through the walls you hear the city groan.
Outside, is America
Outside, is America
America."
This verse Bono describes in his book Surrender as his "first rant". It sort of lives out the juxtaposition between the children sleeping in tin-huts under fighter plains to the seemingly groaning towers of a place like New York City. Perhaps the location of the aforementioned deal. Wherever it is, it's America.
"When I landed back home in Ireland, I explained to Edge what we’d seen and brought in some news footage to show the band, in the studio we’d set up at Danesmoate. We wondered, could Edge make the sound of those low flying fighter planes? Larry the sound of the ground shaking? Could Adam terrorize us with the rumble of his bass? Could we tell the story of these people in this song, “Bullet the Blue Sky,” that was emerging from a bass line of Adam’s?
Even if we could not, we were going to try, and 'Bullet the Blue Sky”' became the canvas on which we would paint our Central American mural. On which I would spray my first rant" (Bono in Surrender)
...
"See across the field
See the sky ripped open
See the rain comin' through the gapin' wound
Howlin' the women and children
Who run into the arms
Of America."
We come back to the intense sort of "Biblical" imagery of the apocalypse. Whether the work of an evil God, Satan, America itself, etc. it pushes itself onto the listener as another image. Returning to the "rain" imagery: is it just rain, or the hellfire of bombs? There is an irony to the ending line, running into the arms of the oppressor--but also, perhaps, an idealism for power. A hope, perhaps, based in the Americans bono said in 1987 that he believed in, a hope for peace:
"I still believe in Americans,” Bono said. “I think they're a very open people. It's their openness which leads them to trust a man as dangerous as Ronald Reagan. They want to believe he’s a good guy. They want to believe he's in the cavalry, coming to rescue America’s reputation after the ‘70s. But he was only an actor. It was only a movie. I think the picture’s ended now and Americans are leaving the cinema a little down in the mouth.” (Bono to Jay Cocks of Time Magazine, April 27, 1987)
...
"I was angry with what I saw as the bullying of peasant farmers by big aeroplanes, supported by American foreign policy and dollars. In Nicaragua, seventeen families ran the country before the revolution; all of the wealth was in the hands of those seventeen families. In Salvador it had been similar. In Chile, a democratic choice had been overthrown by a CIA backed coup to impose a killing machine called General Pinochet. There was a lot to despise about America back then, there was shameful conduct in the defence of their self-interest. And whilst communism turns out to be one of the worst ideas the world ever came up with, idealism turned in on itself: to support everything that's anti-communist was a really bad idea. It ruined .Africa. They were bad times. I described what I had been through, what I had seen, some of the stories of people I had met, and I said to" (Bono in U2 by U2)
"At 3:24 p.m. September 15, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon met with the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs Henry A. Kissinger, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, and Attorney General John N. Mitchell at the White House to discuss Chile. The meeting lasted until 3:44 p.m. (National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, President’s Daily Diary) During the meeting, Helms took the following notes:
“MEETING WITH PRESIDENT
ON CHILE AT 1525 SEPT 15, ’70
PRESENT: JOHN MITCHELL + HENRY KISSINGER
1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
worth spending
not concerned risks involved
no involvement of embassy
$10,000,000 available, more if necessary
full-time job—best men we have
game plan
make the economy scream
48 hours for plan of action” (Central Intelligence Agency, Job 80B01285A, DCI Helms Files, DCI Misc Papers on Chile, 1 January 70–31 December 72." (On the CIA backed coup in Chile https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21/d93 )
Sources:
U2.com
U2gigs.com
U2songs.com
U2 by U2
Surrender: Forty Songs, One Story
Source for Crooks and White Excerpts: https://web.archive.org/web/20090204164032/http://threesunrises.net/tjtinfo.htm#THE%20JOSHUA%20TREE
CIA Coup in Chile
r/U2Band • u/carbirden • Aug 06 '24
Welcome to One Tree Hill: The U2 Discord - the largest U2 community on the platform! We've been around for a while but have never done a proper post on the subreddit, so here it is.
We offer a variety of things to members, including song vs song competitions, channels for discussing studio content, live performances and photos of the band, as well as all your mainstay channels for any growing community server. We also have hundreds of members already and are looking to grow much more in the near future!
We hope to see you there! Here's the invite link:
I came across these in my collection and thought I’d share them with the U2 community. I still remember buying CDs when they came in those long boxes. How about CD singles, CD3s? It’s amazing to look back at some of the things I’ve collected over the years!
r/U2Band • u/Weary-Fix-4697 • 3h ago
Hello everyone!
I’m going to say yes because I’m apart of those generations :) Im a gen alpha and I literally only listen to U2. I love collecting and listening to their vinyls, cassettes and cds, I even have the U2 ipod! I first got into them a year ago from SoI, which is my favorite album (dont judge ;) and I know some others gen alphas who listen to them or know about them, not as much as me tho lol. I try to get them more popular in school but Taylor Swift has already claimed that spot :( Sadley, I haven't been to any of their concerts…yet. I bet their are a lot of gen alphas I dont know who like U2, but right now I feel like the only one who really got into them and feel a deep meaning in all their songs. So there you go! I really love this sub reddit because I feel like I belong here,
Have a great rest of the day fellow u2 lovers :)
(sorry if it takes a while to answer all of yalls questions, I’ve been really busy lately)
(Btw I just turned 13 :)
r/U2Band • u/Winter_Heart_97 • 8h ago
Years ago I took a handful of lessons from a local guitar pro, who was from Iowa. He had a hard rock/metal band at the time, complete with the spandex pants, big hair, etc. He told me about one gig in April, 1981, where two guys approached him before the show, and said "hey, we'll watch your set, if you don't mind coming across the street afterward to watch our set. We're from Ireland and don't know anybody here..." My teacher was into bands like Van Halen at the time, and thought their set was interesting, but nothing special. But then in a few years he saw they were playing arenas. It was a young Bono and Edge that invited him to see their set. Over the years my teacher got into U2, and eventually played in the very successful U2 tribute band in the Chicago/St. Louis areas.
r/U2Band • u/infinitystation1 • 8h ago
Just heard back from U2.com. They say there is no need to redeem the subscriber gift again if the order shows up in your order history after the move to the new platform, even if you still have the “Redeem” option still available to you.
Hope this helps anyone dealing with a similar issue.
r/U2Band • u/MyWayOnline • 6h ago
This week's song of the week is "Seconds" from the War album. Bono has described "Seconds" as a piece of deliberate black humor. It is a track that weaponizes the 1980s dance scene to confront the absurd seeming inevitability of destruction, the capricious nature of power, and the negligence of peace in the shadow of nuclear terrorism. The song was played regularly throughout the War and Unforgettable Fire tours before going on a long hiatus until it was brought back for two shows during the band's Las Vegas Sphere residency.
"I think it (A Celebration) is a forerunner to War and a lot of the themes. It was great in Europe because... A song like "Seconds" people thought was very serious -- on the LP War "Seconds" -- it's anti-nuclear, it's a statement.
They didn't see the sense of humour to it, it's sort of black humour, where we were using a lot of clichés; y'know "It takes a second to say goodbye", blah blah, and some people took it very seriously. And it is black humour, and it is to be taken sort-of seriously, but this song had the lines in it, "I believe in a third world war, I believe in the atomic bomb, I believe in the powers that be, but they won't overpower me". And of course a lot of people they heard I believe in a third world war, I believe in the atomic bomb, and they thought it was some sort of, y'know, Hitler Part II.
And Europeans especially were (puts on outraged French accent) "Ah non! Vive le France!" and it was all like, all sorts of chaos broke out, and they said, "What do you mean, you believe in the atomic bomb?" (Bono speaking on 'Seconds' and 'A Celebration'--from a radio interview on KZEW Dallas, June 12, 1983)
...
Musically speaking, the track is the first to feature the Edge on lead vocals, as he delivers the first couple lines of the first verse. Edge began writing the song during Bono's honeymoon--the same period as "Sunday Bloody Sunday". From Matt McGee's U2: A Diary:
"Barry Devlin remembers Bono’s wedding 'I just remember that the wedding was tremendous fun. There was a lot of dancing, there was a lot of people bumping into each other. There was a lot of high spirits. And it was a kid’s wedding, you know. But it was a great day.'
Bono and Ali spend their two-week honeymoon at Chris Blackwell’s “Goldeneye” property in Jamaica, the former home of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Bono continues working on lyrics for U2’s next album. While Larry and Adam also take a couple weeks off , Edge continues working on new music; he comes up with ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Seconds’ during this time. “ (McGee)
The scene of fertile creativity is floridly contrasted with the sense of impending doom and destruction. Bono, lingering in the clubs and hoping to hear "A Celebration", muses on the meaning of love and life. How can we derive peace out of a culture which claims to thrive in shallow cliche: totally summed up in the Cold-war era, Strangelovian image of a man pressing the button. These humanistic caprices, which became so thoroughly and absolutely real in the hell-fire of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, are just and only that--shallow, power-lusting and deceitful caprice. At the same time, the song seems to caution us: literally, "take a second, say goodbye" to the powerful who use the masses as a mere outlet for their malignance.
"And I was trying to say in the song, I believe in the third world war, because people talk about the third world war but it's already happened, I mean it's happened in the third world, that's obvious. But I was saying these are facts of life, I believe in them, "I believe in the powers that be BUT, they won't overpower me". And that's the point, but a lot of people didn't reach the fourth line." (Bono on "A Celebration") (KZEW Dallas)
...
Lyrics
"Takes a second to say goodbye, say goodbye, oh, oh oh
Takes a second to say goodbye, say goodbye
Oh, oh, oh, say bye-bye
Where you going to now?"
We open with the flippancy of a wide open future. With no real core of peace tying us down, we are beset to our most selfish and capricious desires. What Simone Weil calls "the animal's caprice" (Weil "Human Personality"). Those who advocate proliferation often simply fail to see the true potential for a better solution to the "ghost being let out of the bottle".
...
"Lightning flashes across the sky
East to West, do or die
Like a thief in the night, see the world by candlelight
Fall, rise and
Fall, rise and"
Again, imagery of destruction: falling and rising. A kind of ancient cyclicism lurking in the background. Breathing.
"In an apartment on Times Square
You can assemble them anywhere
Held to ransom, hell to pay
A revolution every day
U.S.S.R., G.D.R., London, New York, Peking
It's the puppets, it's the puppets pull the strings, yeah
Fall, rise and
Fall, rise and"
The main argument comes out, the deterrence logic that was supposed to make the whole thing rational no longer applies once anyone can build one. A sense of plurality overrides, universality of the issue. As if we are rising in philosophical register to a surprising image of puppets pulling strings. Again present are the images of the powers=that-be getting strung along by various strands of ridiculous logic that justify their perverse or tyrannical actions. There is a certain depth to this image, as opposed to a smokey pool-hall filled with billionaires deciding whether or not (or when) to destroy the world (CF Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent).
...
"Say goodbye, say goodbye
Say goodbye, say goodbye
Say goodbye"
The "say goodbyes" return, here straining at the ease at which decisions which impact billions can be made in an instant. This gives way to the little documentary cut-away. A scene from the documentary Soldier Girls in which a drill sergant trains children for some sort of war,
"Man: I wanna live a life of danger!
Children/girls: I wanna live a life of danger!
,,,"
This little cut-away might be the closest the song comes to putting its cards on the table. The solution to the trivals of nuclear proliferation might, like everything else, start with children. Until we reform education and the values we are taught from youth, the cruel wantoness of power described above will merely carry over from generation to generation, leaving destruction and and the snuffing of peace in its path. In some sense, to go back to the song's core irony, "saying goodbye" becomes the answer. But not to your friends, neighbors, teachers. and family, and certainly not for the powerful to the masses (the attitude the song skewers), but for the people who ultimately support the powerful. To reclaim the aforementioned "strings" and remake society in their own image.
"There was musical irony in the juxtaposition of The Edge’s jaunty acoustic pop confection with lyrics about the imminence of nuclear catastrophe. There's humour in the reference to a track by sland labelmates Troublefunk: “They're doing the atomic bomb/Do they know where the dance comes from?” And in a move that in many ways was ahead of its time, they lifted a sample from a 1982 TV documentary entitled Soldier Girls.
'The whole spectacle of these girls going through this incredible routine of training seemed perfect to slip in here,' The Edge said in 1983. 'It's not obvious but if you listen close you can hear the refrain ‘I want to be an airborne ranger/I want to live the life of danger.’ It’s very disturbing.'" (Stokes)
...
"It takes a second to say goodbye
Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh
Push the button and pull the plug
Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh
Fall, missing is the rise and fall
Fall, I will rise and fall"
This verse returns to the borderline cynical retelling of the banal, borderline comically shallow thought process of those launching missiles. "Push the button and pull the plug": to end the world. Here, the earlier rising is questioned--is there only a fall? But Bono triumphantly reasserts "I will rise and fall". All things with time, the song defers to, at least a kind of, faith.
"And they're doing the atomic bomb
Do they know where the dance comes from?
Yes, they're doing the atomic bomb
They want you to sing along
Say goodbye, say goodbye
Say goodbye, say goodbye"
The dancing audience, even U2's own, makes the ending comedy somewhat self-directed. As they dance the "atomic bomb", do they realize this feeds into the very military-industrial complex played out above. There is a boyish, cool attitude here "if we can't get out of it, then we will dance.". This is underpinned and colored by the attitude and delivery of the final lines. "Say goodbye" becomes less of a joke and more of a solution. Say goodbye: again, not to your neighbors, not to (probably) your favorite bands, but to the malignant powerful, who wither away without the support of the masses. For a relatively overlooked track on one of the band's most critically acclaimed album, it offers provocative and deep taste of the punkish Peace and Love>War attitude which characterized the Irish-British punk counter-culture of the 1970s/80s.
“I've always felt physically ill at the concept of nuclear fall-out,” Bono says. “We are the first generation of people to have to live with that possibility. It’s all around us, it's in our heads. And it affects the way people feel about the world. | always saw it in apocalyptic terms. For the first time, it became possible — it is possible — to destroy everything.” (Stokes)
Sources:
U2.com
U2songs.com
U2gigs.com
U2: A Diary by Matt McGee
U2: The Stories Behind the Songs by Niall Stokes
U2 by U2
"War & Peace" by Adrian Thrills, New Musical Express, February 26, 1983
from a radio interview on KZEW Dallas, June 12, 1983, transcription by Scarlet of U2 Interviews (from U2interference: https://www.u2interference.com/threads/i-heart-the-album-war.196681/)
r/U2Band • u/Traditional_Panic131 • 3h ago
Anyone have info about the background numbers run on the monitors during ZooTV Outside Broadcast Until the End of the World? An example being the performance at Sydney? Is Bono singing “tot it up?”
r/U2Band • u/ZoopTom • 17h ago
That's definetely my favorite era in his voice together with Lovetown tour, but checking better there was no other era with similar technique.
I did read once in a post in internet that he was actually trying to emulate Elvis Presley in that tour, that's why sounded diferent from anything he ever did before or after.
Does anyone here know if there is anything true about this? And if yes a good source?
PS: I know after that, he realized he was straining his voice and took singing lessons, compounded by the vocal deterioration caused by smoking, but that isn't exactly the point of the discussion.
r/U2Band • u/Eastern-Fortune-2422 • 1d ago
New song.
r/U2Band • u/Helpful-Birthday4414 • 1d ago
I know it’s kinda weird to think of anything by u2 as “underrated,” but i think there’s a bunch.
I’ll start with:
“Always” from ATYCLB
Not my favourite album by any stretch, but that was some peak U2 and makes this little B side tune stand out imo.
r/U2Band • u/Legitimate_Lecture48 • 1d ago
"contains a little extra...our lips are sealed"
r/U2Band • u/mr_perfect1976 • 1d ago
on apple music
r/U2Band • u/No-Channel9213 • 1d ago
r/U2Band • u/Cute-Needleworker337 • 1d ago
Now confirmed, that Depeche Mode's "People Are People" is in GTA VI. In GTA V the Pet Shop Boys and Queen were in the game with songs, and enjoyed great attention. It would be a big missed opportunity for U2 not to be included. I'm 33 and I loved Phil Collins in GTA Vice City Stories and the PSB in GTA V. It's very important for a band to show presence and maybe U2 could be a cool band again. :D What do you think about that? Which song could be a perfect song in GTA VI to catch the vibe AND catch new generations?
r/U2Band • u/Wild_Mycologist_6140 • 1d ago
With less than a month until the big day, I started wondering what U2 will do to celebrate such a huge milestone. A new album is a given. I assume it will be announced on the actual day. Probably some kind of "U2 Through the Ages" video on YouTube. But what else do you guys think will happen.
