Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen’s U2 album writings from Then Play Long blog

The Unforgettable Fire (#302; 13th October 1984, 2 weeks)

Track Listing: A Sort Of Homecoming/Pride/Wire/The Unforgettable Fire/Promenade/4 th Of

July/Bad/Indian Summer Sky/Elvis Presley And America/MLK

“Closely connected with the peasant’s recognition, as a survivor, of scarcity is his recognition of man’s
relative ignorance. He may admire knowledge and the fruits of knowledge but he never supposes that the
advance of knowledge reduces the extent of the unknown…Nothing in his experience encourages him to
believe in final causes, precisely because his experience is so wide. The unknown can only be eliminated
within the limits of a laboratory experiment. Those limits seem to him to be naïve."
 John Berger, introduction to Pig Earth

I didn’t expect to get here so quickly. I thought I would have to wait until entry #359, but no. We (Marcello
and I) listened intently to this album, one I bought when it came out (on tape) and my
unconscious/subconscious mind has swiftly done the rest. The morning after, just before waking, I had a
nightmare. The contents of it aren’t important, save that there was the comparative ease of the indoors and
the violence of the outdoors; a terrible contrast that would jolt anyone awake.

That is what this album is mostly about; it is about that cozy confine of peace and creativity that exists in the
same world as violence and brutality.

Let’s ignore for now, shall we, the previous album in this tale (easily done, I think) and go back to the last
song on Now 3, “Red Guitar.” This is as close as U2 have ever gotten to going there – to the yarragh, to
soul; to almost literally justifying their existence through this album, which I would say is their best (yes, I
know, Achtung Baby, but I remain firm on this).

Why? Because The Unforgettable Fire is so many things. A band on the run from itself; two producers from
different countries with different skills (but similar aesthetics) getting together to make a big album for the
first time together; an album that is about love without having any overt “love” songs on it.

But first; I didn’t expect to get here so quickly. Daniel Lanois, however, has brought me back first to late
1981 and this album, the first "rock" one he produced himself: Martha and the Muffins’ This Is The Ice Age.
In all likelihood Brian Eno heard this – he had already worked with Lanois (he went to Hamilton, Ontario to
work with him in ’79) and then maybe – maybe? – it was heard by U2. Made on a tiny budget at Grant
Avenue Studios, it wasn’t a huge success but couldn’t help but be influential anyway; note how the title
song has so much space, going for a minute ambiently (very 80s word) until the song suddenly snaps into
focus, then soars, and becomes even more spacious, until the beat, like a heart, continues onwards….

….this album was unlike the Go-Go’s/Joan Jett/Pretenders rock I was used to listening to. It reminded me of
where I lived, how I felt seeing the full moon rise across the street, above the bare dirt field, nothing more.
“This is the age…of innocent…paaaa-ssion” Martha sings at the end, as the song dips back and forth
rhythmically, propelling itself like the bike mentioned in the first line, pumping away into infinity.

So yes, hearing this brought that album from November 1981 to mind, and here we are in late 1984, with a
more famous band and Daniel Lanois, recording this time in Slane Castle in Co. Meath, Ireland, Lanois
doing the nuts and bolts of production while Eno guides and inspires a band who are all too ready to do
whatever is necessary to avoid making Son of War or War II. Bono convinced Eno, Eno brought Lanois with
him, and there in Slane Castle they lived and worked, recording first in the ballroom and then in the library,
in their old building working on new ideas….

But I did not expect to get to this, this moment, so soon. The first signs of it were in the late summer of
1987, the illness unmistakable by October, and his operation was early that December, in Hamilton. That
was where I saw him last, in bed, a day before his operation. Time and memory get murky and muddy here;
but I know that even if he didn’t remember who anyone was in the hospital, he knew me….
….Hamilton, that raw town, proudly working class, not fancy like Toronto. The sort of place where
throwing yourself into music and experimentation was a way out because there’s a freedom that happens
when you live in a place where what you do is more important than who you are. Apollo: Soundtracks and
Themes was done at Grant Street Studios, just as This Is The Ice Age was, and if you knew the roughness
and smelliness (the steelworks) and high winds and end-of-the-lake snowiness of Hamilton, you’d say that
was nearly a miracle. (Canada itself is an example in general as to how you can have snowy & cold places
like Winnipeg and Montreal and create great music, not forgetting Halifax, Guelph, etc.) My father, once the
operation was over, and didn’t regain consciousness, was sent back to Oakville. But I couldn’t go see him, in
his state; so it is in Hamilton that I last saw him, that effectively I said goodbye, without knowing I was
doing so…

And thus when I listen to The Unforgettable Fire I am in several places at once, before and after my father’s
death, but I am in 1984 as well, in Grade 13 (the ‘getting ready for college, this is hard’ year that was later
discarded, but was the dread of all Grade 12 students at the time) and this is, as you can expect, almost too
much for me to balance out and write. U2 are an Irish band and this is indubitably an Irish album, but
Canada, and specifically what had already been recorded in Hamilton, grounds the aesthetic of the thing.

As with all great albums, they grow and change with you over time. Or perhaps only now can I appreciate
everything U2 are doing here. The first song starts, drums and guitar pulsing, as the door is opened up to
winter…

…to a land that is snowy and thundery and windy; a figure moves across the field, past the ‘fields of
mourning’ and the song gallops along, pausing here and there (“I’ll be there”, Bono sings in a near whisper)
and the John Berger sense of country roughness (“faces ploughed like fields that once gave no resistance”)
leads to a fleeing from violence itself, whether natural or man made (“a bomb-blast lightning waltz”); this
culminates in one of the many moments where Bono just gives up on the English language altogether and
the song immediately somehow becomes clearer. “No spoken words- just a
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM -
AAAAUUGHHH-AAUUHHHAAAAWAAAY-AAAUUUUOOOOOWAAAYYYYOOOOOOOO-
HHHHHHHHHHHAAAWAAAAAAAAOOOOOO” And it ends with a line that makes me nearly cry, “she
will die and live again – TONIGGGGGGGGHT.” And then the tambourine comes in and the song resolves
with that real homecoming, and the light in the distance now more real than before. “Oh come away oh
come away” Bono sings in the midst of this swirling storm of a song, as if you were with him, and the open
and yet intimate space of Eno and Lanois you are, invited to listen to the rest of the album, as if to say, yes
things are rough, there is mourning, but there is a place, at last, in the snow…

…and then the song unlike the others here, the single, the air guitar moment – “Pride.” For some this song is
a little too much, in comparison to the rest of the album (I can imagine Eno wasn’t too fussed with it, so it’s
Lanois all the way here, forward and direct). This was the song that brought many to the album, the mighty
Trojan Horse of stomp, of bombast; and yet it is about love, the agape of humans giving of themselves with
no expectation of reward. The men are famous and ordinary, all motivated by the same thing – a great love.
Jesus is invoked, and so is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – it is his death that is commemorated here, and once
again there is mourning, but also pride, not self-regarding pride but knowledge that no matter what, you
stood for the right thing: for love, for people, for principles that live on long after death. This is what gives
life meaning, for U2; they have that immersion of experience and feeling that is there in all great Irish art,
whether it’s Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, My Bloody Valentine*…and with that slight sop to “commercial
radio” out of the way...here comes something different.

One of the joys of listening to albums at this time was the lack, ironically, of resources. Unless the words
were printed in Smash Hits or came with the album itself, you had to listen and listen again and try to figure
out what the heck the singer was trying to say. “Wire” is an excellent example of this. To this day, even with
the internet, no one can really figure it all out. This is due in part to Bono’s improvised lyrics (only three of
the songs were written before recording) and in part due to the speed of the song itself. (The Unforgettable
Fire was in part inspired by Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream, but is more immediate and less calm than it.)
“Wire” starts with The Edge doing what sounds like an African highlife guitar, and then the rhythm section
bombs in like a runaway train (Adam Clayton’s bass sounding, well, sludgy – in a good way, in contrast to
Larry Mullen’s precision), and Bono is there nearly rapping, yelping at times, more like an instrument than a
voice. The song suddenly opens up with his laughing and singing “Is this the time to win or lose?” And it
peaks after a break, as if he needs air or water, and then sings, roughly, “Any time you’re on it – KISS ME
– WHOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAMM–OOOOOOOOH–WWHEEWEEWWWWW–
WHEEWWOOOOHHH” in a way that makes mere printed lyrics, in comparison with listening to the song,
kind of pointless. A voice (is it Christine Kerr, as in the previous song, in the background, or one of U2?)
wordlessly chants in time to the fast beat, and “Here’s the rope – now swing on it.” Bono says, out of breath
at last. The SOUND of his voice counts more here than words; indeed with a lot of the album it’s the music
and feeling that’s the point. (Oh, how many girls were converted to U2 during this time because Bono was
so clearly a passionate singer? I knew one, in Oakville, Gina, who was a Scorpions fan but then was
converted by War and convinced by this.)

After the frenetic “Wire” comes the title song, and the profound subject of the year – never mentioned
directly, but in the air, as a thing remembered. (How eerie is the cover photo of Moydrum Castle? How the
people seem so small, the light too bright, as opposed to the photo of U2 regarding it, solid figures in a field
looking at the past, inviting you to look at it.) The mood of the song is portentous, a darker version of “New
Gold Dream.” Again this song is trying to capture a specific feeling as much as anything else, a powerful
sense of place. It’s about being in Tokyo for the first time and being overwhelmed.

“The city of Tokyo is an amazing sprawl – something out of William Gibson or Philip Dick – seeming to go
on forever. The bus from the airport wound over bridges, down through tunnels, up fly-overs that wrapped
around the upper floors of apartment and office buildings. I passed canals, industrial parks, factories, indoor
ski slopes, rooftop driving ranges. As I got closer to my destination, it was getting dark, with giant,
screaming video screens advertising beverages and cellphones and recording artists, garish signs in English
and Japanese, lines of cars, crowds of people – row after row after row of them, surging through
intersections in orderly fashion. This was not America or anyplace remotely like it. Things on the other side
of the world were very, very different."
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential, “Mission To Tokyo”

A few years before this Bruce Cockburn** (on his 1980 album Humans) recorded a song called “Tokyo”
which was about seeing an accident scene while on a similar bus going over a fly-over, finding out that a car
had gone over the rail and into the water. He is shaken up, the bustle of the city reduced to this loss, and his
missing the city even though it is so random and yes, different. U2 are looking at that moment magnified
horribly and nearly 40 years on, doing their best to bridge those gaps, make the past meaningful to the
present. “The Unforgettable Fire” is based on an exhibition of artwork done by survivors of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and that art is what pushes the feeling here. U2 are doing their best to convey…that yarrgh…and
the Trevor Horn orchestral strikes, blows, in the break…are followed by a near-quote from that Cold War
anthem, “Stand By Me”: “and if the mountains should crumble, and fall into the sea…no not here, no not I.”
Bono’s voice is grasping, Billy MacKenziesque, going once again before the break into wordlessness, as if
every song he’s ever heard is being reduced to the one song: the lines about the city lights, the red wine
puncturing the skin, the longing to be taken away home, the piano lending some solidity to what otherwise
seems like a swirling mass of unease. It is night and the too-muchness of the place, the event, is getting to
him; just as the constant nuclear threat that has been hanging over everyone for years has gone about as far
as it can for everyone sensible to it. The song sinks down, wavers, and settles; the storm of the album is
over.

“Promenade” is the first grasping of a survivor, a bit dazed, coming up from the bunker, up the spiral
staircase, to something higher and better. Through psychological and emotional pain, the world still stands,
and is waiting. Importantly, the survivor here is not alone. “Words that build or destroy” he says, those
words building or destroying buildings, such as Moydrum Castle. But here is the sky, with fireworks, back
streets, sidewalks, and the Other “stares into space” – that space is open, untroubled. The world continues
with its football and radio, but a new start is possible…
“4th of July” is an instrumental, evoking that night, after the fireworks perhaps, the vague smell of something
burnt in the air, of flags in the air, not so much a celebration but its aftermath, as seen by someone who isn’t
American…quiet and contemplative…

It is hard to contemplate this song – improvised, building itself as it goes – without leaping forwards a few
months to that moment, when U2 performed it for the world. But I will try. The song is solid, not tentative
like the previous two; the Other is now suffering. (This song is specifically about addiction, but is general
enough to encompass any kind of pain.) Again, this is a kind of reduction of music to its essence – Bono
sings AS music, music the liberator and healer, and that freeing aspect of music is evoked here very hard.
“I’m WIDE AWAAAAAAAAAAAAKE” he sings, as if he has had enough of the nuclear nightmare, of
nightmares period. The song builds to that line…”I would…let it go.” And the band, who have been
building up the same simple, elemental rhythms (The Edge staying calm while the rhythm section gets more
worked up, and keyboards come in and that widescreen effect kicks in) breaks into a run, the beats broken
like a chain coming apart… the rhymes (desperation, dislocation, condemnation) build up to “isolation…
DESOLATION – to LET IT GO, and so to FAAAADEE AWAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY.” The song is a
chant, and so it repeats, Bono virtually wills the liberation to happen, just as Eno and Lanois have liberated
the band to begin with. The song is a huge extended hug to the listener, to the audience, and ultimately to the
world.

This song proved to be a peak moment of Live Aid, in part because it (and Bono in particular) did what New
Pop did in essence, only this time literally – taking the song to the people and letting the music and the
moment stand for what music about at its best. Connection; a sense of wholeness and oneness; a merging of
souls, if you like – punctum. The music is on that higher ground – achieved with a sense of purpose,
adventure, humility – and reaches out, in that agape sense of love for everyone. It was a stunning moment
and made much of what happened around it, however good, beside the point. That U2 made a mistake (the
song went on way too long as Bono did his empathetic thing, so they ran out of time and couldn’t do
“Pride”) adds to the New Popness of the moment. But that is July, 1985…

And that is important – the moment. The Unforgettable Fire could only have been released in late 1984, it
could only make sense then, in the immediate surroundings of autumn and the Brighton Bombings by the
IRA***. “Two Tribes” had been nearly replaced by the headdeskingly awful “The War Song” by Culture
Club (in chart position, if not popularity); things were changing quickly in 1984, from start to finish, led by
Liverpool the whole way – Frankie Goes To Hollywood, sure, but also Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean
Rain, released too late to have much impact on U2 at this point, but “The Killing Moon” surely must have
been absorbed and felt. U2 may not have been New Pop but “Pride” led many to think this album was like
the previous one - I can imagine more than a few U2 fans were taken aback. (Island, their label, wasn’t too
hot on having Brian Eno come in and mess around with the formula, so to speak.) Bowie, with Tonight,
proved that he had lost his understanding of what music was capable of, what it could mean; U2 race and
tumble and fall and get up, struggle with language, improvise, and make the album that Bowie was quite
clearly unable to make.

But back to the album itself…”Indian Summer Sky” emerges as fast as “Wire” but with a sense of gathered
purpose and focus; the sky itself, there above the forest, deep holes, the ocean, wide, blue and beautiful.
“The wind go through to my heart; the wind blows through my soul” is a giving up of the self to the world,
letting the world in, just as in “Bad” the narrator seeks to give life to another. The song ends definitely, that
blue sky absolute, and yes, I think Eno is singing here, making this a gospel song of sorts, though nature is
the thing being worshipped here, the elements of air, fire, water, earth...

“Elvis Presley and America” is a clearly improvised song, the music a slowed down and altered version of
“A Sort of Homecoming”; Bono’s voice is low, the music is loose, and anyone looking for a definite
statement here on Elvis or America will be disappointed. “Drop me down but don’t break me” is something,
a gesture to Elvis, to this emerging rock star looking at another and how he has been written about,
remembered; no one told Elvis how to do things, no one told America how to do things either, and Bono
struggles with the enigma of both. It is left in pieces, indistinct, understandable only if you mess around and
make mistakes and feel more than think. The rain comes down, but Elvis and America remain, linked and
close/distant…

“MLK” ends the album with a prayer; there is hardly any U2 here, just an ambient hum and Bono’s voice.
Elvis can only be pointed to abstractly, but here the language is plain. “Sleep, sleep tonight, and may your
dreams be realized.” The storm and confusion and relief of the album come to this short and quiet moment,
where the living (the narrator) and the dead (MLK) are joined up not so much in remembered terror but are
joined in the present and hence the future, where “if the thundercloud passes rain, let it rain, rain down on
me.” How simple; the words do not build anything but are invoking the possibility of something, not a grand
project but something common and universal as that rain, a rain here that is calming, cleansing, away from
the English idea of rain being a dour, dreaded thing and to its being part of a cycle, necessary, needed…a
happy ending, of sorts, for an album that is about death, sure, but resolves into one about life, about one
man’s life inspiring countless others, about life after death, if you like. It is one thing to have pride in the
name of love, but it is another to do the work of love, to make something happen. 

It is this faith that U2 have that is the real fervor of The Unforgettable Fire, and if they brought in
technopeasant Brian Eno and his oblique strategies cards to widen their experience and avoid final causes,
limits, then clearly it worked; but not without Lanois encouraging them to take their time, to somehow
merge with the music (the album sounds professional, sure, but as fuzzy and indistinct as the band’s photo
where their faces are blurred). U2 are holding on to the unknown here, trying to bring it to light but are
humble enough to know that saying something exact or precise about it will get them nowhere. And yet in
doing this they take a huge step forward, and being such a big band already they naturally redraw the limits
as to what can be done…

….and did I listen to this after my father’s death? Hard to remember now, but I may have, as a purge of
emotion, a longing to be linked to something, if only music. (Chances are I would’ve been listening to the
next U2 album instead.) Did I listen to This Is The Ice Age? Probably not, as its coolness would have made
me cry (“One Day In Paris” is unbelievably lovely and sad). And the joy at the end of that album would be
something I wasn’t ready for yet. But I would have understood – and do now – U2’s reaching toward the
past’s figures as a way of getting to the future; which is to say the past somehow is the present and hence the
future. That I have reached, via Slane Castle and back to Hamilton, my father’s death and that hapless,
grappling in the dark I had afterwards makes perfect sense in this light.****

And that is why this album radiates (if I can use that word) so much meaning for me, though it is an album
that most clearly evokes homecoming after a long journey, not just through a rough winter day but through a
spiritual journey too. Big concepts, abstract concepts maybe, and I know some will bridle at the idea of
popular music getting away from normal love songs and normal tempos and comprehensible lyrics. Those
will return soon enough; but for now this is U2 as gospel, jazz, avant garde, the New Thing; U2 with the
window open and the eye off the clock.

*Who in 1984 were a Cramps-like band, only to have their heads turned around by Husker Du’s Zen Arcade,
one of the many key albums from this year. 

**Eventually U2 would directly quote Cockburn in a song, but I’m not sure they knew who he was at this
point; perhaps Lanois told them about him?

***My nightmare may well have been a merging of U2’s recording in a library and the Brighton Bombing,
one a site of creativity, the other of destruction.

****Eventually U2 will make an album that is in part about his own father’s life and death and his coming
to terms with it.
The Joshua Tree (#343: 21 March 1987, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Where The Streets Have No Name/I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For/With
Or Without You/Bullet The Blue Sky/Running To Stand Still/Red Hill Mining Town/In God’s
Country/Trip Through Your Wires/One Tree Hill/Exit/Mothers Of The Disappeared

“I’m looking for something.

Someone who wants to see and can.
Nothing’s alive anymore.
Is this the universal plan?
And I can see ahead my eyes are infinite.
Speaking with the dead but nothing’s definite.”
(Annette Peacock, “A Loss Of Consciousness,” 1968)

You know the story – how a rock singer travelled the world, on tour with his group or on humanitarian fact-
finding missions to Ethiopia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, experienced, saw, heard and read about one
America while dreaming of another, and then came back to Dublin only to find the same desert around him
wherever he went, a metaphorical desert which, even at home, told him that there was no longer a place
called home, that this was a destroyed or destroying world in which nothing could grow, and left him with
the question of how to survive in a world which was almost totally against him.

Was it 1986 or 2014? The same villains and culprits, but with different names; a common cause for the
blood, suffering and deaths. The Joshua Tree is the story of an attempt by that rock group to make, or
persuade, something grow in this desert.

Like The Unforgettable Fire, Eno and Lanois were more or less in charge; they oversaw the recording on an
alternating weekly shift basis. Unlike The Unforgettable Fire, the group wanted to make more tangible
songs about things that mattered to them. Anecdotally, the division of labour seems to have been as before,
the balance slightly weighed in favour of Lanois, although the band called in Steve Lillywhite at a very late
stage, and much to the two producers’ chagrin, to remix three songs with a view to making them stand out
more on the radio, as singles, although he did not remix “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and
remixed the album-only “Bullet The Blue Sky.” The final running order, subject to Bono’s insistence that
“Streets” and “Mothers” should top and tail the record, was decided by Lillywhite’s wife, Kirsty MacColl.

Despite this, The Joshua Tree largely sounds like an Eno-dominant record, whereas Robbie Robertson’s
eponymous debut solo album, released a few months later, and partly involving U2, was unmistakably a
Lanois job. Moreover, it sounds like one of Eno’s ambient studies which continually gets gatecrashed by a
rock group. Hence the residual drift from Apollo which slowly sails into sight at the album’s beginning is
eventually joined, and then superseded, by the Edge’s urgent, delay echo-aided, high-toned six-note guitar
arpeggio, Mullen’s thunderous drumming and Clayton’s Jah Wobble-ish bass; it is unrealistic to expect the
U2 of 1986 to have been aware of Acid House, something that only began to gain popularity slightly later in
1987, but there is that same hyperactive propulsion, the need not to stop moving.

Lyrically there are enough winds, storms, nails, stones, poison and rain in this record to fill several Bibles.
But it’s clear from Bono’s delivery that he is running away from something; so he is not merely thinking of
the unnamed streets of the parched backlands of Ethiopia, but of the streets in Belfast where people can be
named and their religion identified on the basis of the street in which they live. The song’s proposal, if we
take Bono’s “you” as meaning “us,” is for humanity to rip it up and start again.

“I Still Haven’t Found…” is half the speed, but Mullen’s very familiar drumming tattoo puts us in mind of a
sequel to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and while I am sure that Eno, a devotee of gospel music, prodded the
group to record a gospel song (“You say you’re Christians – well, here’s your chance to prove it!,” although
Bono was at the time listening to groups like the Swan Silvertones), this remains a song of profound doubt.
In spite of all the torment the singer puts himself through, we are back in the land of “My Elusive Dreams,”
and Bono’s is an uncertainty which even the backing “choir” (multitracked Edge, Lanois and instantly
recognisable Eno) cannot assuage. If anything, the most telling musical commentary here is made by the
Edge, whose guitar growls and swoops like an onomatopoeic heir to Keith Levene – despite all the talk
about going back to roots, this remains post-punk music.

Likewise, “With Or Without You” builds up slowly and patiently, the Edge deploying Michael Brook’s
“infinite guitar” to create drones and atmospherics rather than soloing or riffing as such – I read somewhere
that one major influence on the Edge’s playing during this period was Bill Frisell, and if you listen to the
latter’s work on two other important 1987 releases, Power Tools’ Strange Meeting and John Zorn’s Spillane,
there are definite affinities – with Bono sounding remarkably like Ian McCulloch (“With Or Without You”
is on record as being the first U2 song that McCulloch liked!). Is he singing about a lover, or his audience, or
his music, or to God? As his suffering incrementally increases, the music patiently gathers in intensity,
before bursting open – this is where Lillywhite comes in – before settling down again, away from the
foreground.

The nearest that the Edge comes to playing a “solo” is on “Bullet The Blue Sky,” but again he goes for
swooping downward runs – like the eagle come to peck the last bones out of Reagan’s America – or lines of
feedback and sustain which stop just short of chaos. Bono solemnly sings, then breathlessly narrates a dream
ofAmerica versus what Reagan ‘s administration was actually doing to the people of El Salvador, as though
the idyll is repeatedly being interrupted, intruded upon, by a money-mad gangster. Aided by Mullen’s
clattering drum figures, which could have come from the introduction to Elvis Costello’s “I Don’t Want To
Go To Chelsea,” we have to realise that what we are witnessing here is a remoulding of rock which doesn’t
have any clear precedents, and is different in kind to what the Smiths and New Order are doing. “Bullet”
sounds like the middle section of “Whole Lotta Love” stripped of all machoness and posturing – reducing
rock, or enlarging it, with the aim of making “rock music” exceed itself. When Bono speaks of the howling
women and children running into the arms of America, and the music dissolves, we think of that last line’s
double meaning where “arms” could mean weapons – it is one of the most chilling final moments in any
rock music (see also “America Is Waiting,” the opening track of Eno and Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of
Ghosts).

But side one ends, or culminates in, piano, with occasional stray pedal steel and harmonica figures, as
though heard from six floors above, and the numbing requiem “Running To Stand Still,” about a couple,
hopelessly addicted to heroin, in Dublin’s Ballymun flats, around which the young Bono played as a child
(“I see seven towers, but I only see one way out”). You go all around the world, but always end up where
you started because you cannot escape yourself. The rhythm section rumbles in for a brief spell to remind us
that once the Velvet Underground recorded a song called “Heroin,” but otherwise the landscape, and the
protagonists’ lives, steadily diminish – and not once does the singer call moral judgment on their plight. I
note the scat refrain which may derive from “Whiskey In The Jar” and wonder whether the band had Phil
Lynott in mind.

If side one had all “the hits,” then side two goes somewhere very different – and where have we heard that
before in terms of major rock albums involving Eno? Not so different that it jettisons lyrics, or the group – at
least not initially. But we are barely halfway through “Red Hill Mining Town,” a more conventional, if still
pained, emotive rocker which reminds us of where people like Radiohead got their start – Bono probably
means his “I’m still waiting”s more than Diana Ross did – before synthesisers again appear on the horizon
and those booming gospel harmonies return (a brass band can also be heard). And yet this is no cod-
American mythology – the cover shots in the desert-cum-national park (if you’re wondering why the band
look so pained, it’s because it was bloody freezing out there when Corbijn took the photos) may actually be
a red herring for the record as a whole – since it’s a song about a community torn apart by the 1984-5
miners’ strike (based on the late Tony Parker’s observational study Red Hill: A Mining Community). Like
Parker, they take no sides – and at the time came into some criticism for not so doing – but merely report on
what they see.

“In God’s Country”,” a sceptical salute to the Statue of Liberty, is a fine if standard example of uptempo U2.
But “Trip Through Your Wires” – salvation through love – underlines a few parallels in its 6/8 gait,
particularly the Smiths (“Back To The Old House”), the Cocteau Twins (the way in which Mullen’s
drumming is mixed, booming and cavernous) and R.E.M.; if Life’s Rich Pageant practically picked you up
in your chair, deposited you in the outside world and instructed you to look at, appreciate and absorb it, then
The Joshua Tree ponders what you should do with the world once you’re out there. Bono plays harmonica
(in between gleeful vocal whoops) and the Edge plays guitar as though they don’t know how to play the
harmonica or the guitar (cf. Miles’ instructions to John McLaughlin on In A Silent Way).

“One Tree Hill” is remarkable; an ode to U2 roadie Greg Carroll, who was originally a Maori from New
Zealand but was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin in 1986 (and to whom the album is dedicated)
sung over what sounds like 1981 electronica, but what gradually reveals itself as being a trio of string
players (the Armin family from Toronto, no less), and also in part a tribute to Victor Jara, Bono’s vocal goes
from restrained to disturbed to howls of uncontained grief. Some critics see Bono as the sticking point on
this record, but I can think of no other way to deliver these thoughts, these messages – Bono, if anything,
sounds more like a medium for the words. The song ends with an electronic requiem (“Oh, great ocean…”)
which is essentially just Bono and Eno, and the parallel example of the Waterboys' This Is The Sea cannot
have been far from their minds.

But “Exit” remains one of the darkest things U2 have ever done; reconstituted by Eno from elements of a
jam session, the music lurks about in corners of night before twice breaking through into a riff so decisive,
intense and frightening that it’s little wonder that the music finally backs away from it. The recording is like
a mis-assembled jigsaw puzzle of U2 (see also Roxy Music’s “The Bogus Man”). In the foreground,
meanwhile, Bono murmurs of – what? Who? A killer, of others or of himself? Somebody with too much
misapplied power (“So hands that build can also pull down the hands of love”)? This is far, far away from
the easy answers of “Two Hearts Beat As One.”

The closing “Mothers Of The Disappeared,” about the bereaved mothers of the El Salvador conflict (and
indirectly also the Chile one, and there may have been others in Bono’s mind), hardly sounds like there’s
any U2 left, beginning with fourteen seconds of rain falling on a roof, and then a melody which, although
Bono came up with it in the course of writing a song to teach the children of Ethiopia about basic hygiene,
sounds, as it is played, like an offcut from Another Green World. As Bono urges, at the close of the song and
the record, that we “see their tears in the rainfall” – the album at times sounds like one elongated crucifixion
– and we wonder exactly where we’ve heard that combination of bass guitar lead and drum pattern before,
not to mention what is going on with the synthesisers in the background. They come, respectively, from
“Atmosphere” and “Warszawa,” and as the song ends, U2 disappear, and we are left with the Eno record
that we had at the beginning, as though U2, and hope, were but hopeless dreams, and the reality that, even in
1987, we couldn’t yet escape the ghost of Joy Division.

I’m sure, however, that many of the twenty-five million people who have, to date, bought The Joshua Tree,
had another 1980 ghost in mind. Charles Shaar Murray unhelpfully referred to them as the “Irish rock
messiahs,” but the fact remains that for an awful lot of people – both of the Joy Division (i.e. our) generation
and the Woodstock one of the sixties – The Joshua Tree’s impact was as if rock music had been saved; here,
going against all odds, was a rock group who believed in something, just as rock groups were supposed to
have done in the sixties, and were not afraid to comment on the world around it. Many in 1987 still hadn’t
got over the death of Lennon – the Beatles’ back catalogue finally began to appear on CD throughout the
year, and Sgt Pepper very nearly made a return visit to number one that summer – and therefore viewed The
Joshua Tree as a record worthy of what a Lennon might have done.

But the record’s ultimate importance lies in how radically the group and its producers were prepared to
reshape and recast the basic building blocks of rock, as well as the message which it finally conveyed,
namely that even in a desert where nothing can apparently grow, and living in a world which is almost
totally against you, you still have no choice but to do what that other Dublin fellow, Mr Beckett (eighty-one
in 1987, still alive to hear the record), proposed, namely to keep going. Its achievement is to say that death,
metaphorical or otherwise, does not have to be definite. The Joshua Tree is one of the classic number one
albums.