ACHTUNG
BABY (1991)
.::
ZOO STATION ::. [back
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[Shooting
the video for "The Fly":] At eight in the evening everyone has
ascended to the roof of the Pavilion, where you can touch the darkness
that has now descended over the center of London and its bright shining
lights. Across the way, the huge electronic advertising hoarding
which transmits slogans for advertisers round the clock, has stopped showing
Maxell Tape and is suddenly bearing strange slogans from its huge screen:
Believing… Dog… God…
It's
all part and parcel of Zoo TV, a concept linked to "Zoo Station" on the
record. Zoo Station in Berlin is a place the band discovered when
recording there, the train station where East Berliners disembarked when
they visited the West. "Search me," says Paul McGuinness when asked
what "Zoo Station" is about. "Search me." It will become clearer
as the songs are released and the show hits the road in the Spring.
The electronic words flash up again…
(from
"Shooting The Fly", Propaganda,
Issue 15)
[The
Berlin subway (U-bahn) lines are numbered U1 to U15, so there is a "U2"
line running through Zoologischer Garten station, a.k.a. "Zoo station."]
Which
cut most effectively captured the entire band's sentiments and was a U2
statement as a whole?
Edge:
I don't want to be a spokesperson for everyone else, but I'd say, without
a doubt, "Zoo Station." It's basically a very simplistic statement
pronouncing that the band is ready to come back out and strut our stuff.
We went through a reclusive period and went off and did the family thing,
which was the right thing. But now we are fresh. I can honestly
say that all four of us are totally committed to Achtung Baby and the Zoo
TV tour. That's why we open with "Zoo Station" on this tour.
It's a statement of recommitment to our music and ourselves.
(from
"Exclusive Interview: The Edge" by Kevin Connal, Hit Parader Presents U2,
June 01, 1992)
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.::
ONE ::. [back
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[...]
The impish corrosion of songs like "Zoo Station" and "The Fly" is boldly
undercut by darker musings such as "Love Is Blindness" and "One," Bono's
disenchanted take on the nouveau hippie revival: "'One, man, one world,
one love.' I liked the idea of taking that and saying, 'One man,
but not the same.'"
(from
"U2 Finds What It's Looking For" by David Fricke, Rolling
Stone, October 01, 1992)
Before reacting with the Edge to my list of the 10 best U2 moments on record, Bono had a question of his own.
"Is it true that 'One' was played over the radio a lot during the Los Angeles riots?" the singer asked, referring to the most acclaimed song from the Achtung Baby album, and one of the songs on the list.
"That's what I heard from some friends," he added, "which is surprising because I never saw the song as something hopeful or comforting. To me, it was a very bitter song."
[...]
Edge:
It was a very pivotal song in the recording of the album -- the first sort
of breakthrough in what was an extremely difficult set of sessions in Berlin.
I like the lyric a lot because it treads a very fine line between becoming
too clear, too jingoistic, but in the end it never does... stays personal.
Bono:
We spoke about this before. It is a song about coming together, but
it's not the old hippie idea of "Let's all live together." It is,
in fact, the opposite. It's saying, "We are one, but we're not the
same." It's not saying we even want to get along, but that we have
to get along together in this world if it is to survive. It's a reminder
that we have no choice.
(from
"U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate
One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow'
To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los
Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
Recorded
in Hansa Studios, formerly a Nazi mess hall, the song came from nowhere.
Bono had a couple of middle-eights that fitted together, and it was while
fiddling around with these mongrel tunes that the inordinately emotive
lyrics of "One" began to seep through. "They just fell out of the
sky," says Bono. "A gift from above."
This
much he knows: the Dalai Lama had asked U2 to participate in a festival
called "Oneness." Having sensed the unsavoury whiff of hippiedom,
Bono sent back a note saying, "One -- but not the same." Unconsciously,
this became his hook. As the melody flowed, he was thinking about
untouchable sadness, disharmony and disease and relationships that end
too soon. Within half an hour, they had recorded the bare bones of
what Noel Gallagher now calls "the greatest song ever written."
(from
"Gold in the house", GQ Magazine,
October 2001)
Amazon.co.uk:
Another song that seems to have changed meaning -- so much so that it seems
to have become an anthem for pretty much everything -- is "One," from Achtung
Baby.
Bono:
Which astounds me. What's great about "One" is that it's not about
oneness, it's about difference. That's the trick of that tune.
I'm always shocked when a drunk couple come up to me in a club and tell
me they want to walk down the aisle to it. It's a song about difference,
and it's gnarly. It's a long way from "Up with People."
Amazon.co.uk:
Can you remember what you thought you were writing about at the time?
Bono:
There were a couple of things going on, and as usual I meant to resolve
them, but the best U2 songs seem to occupy this place of contradictions.
I had a lot of things going on in my head at the time, about forgiveness,
about father and son angst. I was trying to write a story song I
think, and I'm just not good at that. The lyrics came really quickly.
The humbling bit about songwriting is that anything above good usually
feels like an accident. A lot of U2 songs are first drafts.
(from
an interview on All That You Can't Leave Behind, Amazon
UK)
[Edge:] "It was autumn 1990. We were in Berlin, at Hansa Studios where Bowie recorded 'Heroes,' trying to get traction with some new songs. It wasn't going well. Adam and Larry's rather jaundiced view of Bono's and my songwriting ability was becoming more and more evident as our various experiments went nowhere. We were listening to a lot of industrial music, and the sounds we were making were quite intense.
"In the midst of all this I go off into another room to put together some ideas for 'The Fly.' I came back with two, neither of which worked where they were meant to, but on Daniel Lanois's suggestion we put them together and Bono was really taken with it. So we all went out into the big recording room -- a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war -- and everything fell into place. Bono's melodies and phrases were following, and by the end of the day we basically had everything, the whole form of the song.
"Everyone recognized it was a crucial moment in the development of what became 'Achtung Baby' -- ironically it went in a totally different direction from everything we'd been working on. But everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we'd caught a glimpse of what the song could be. Then it was about capturing its essence, but also trying to keep our hands off it. Those songs that seem to arrive perfectly formed -- you don't want to mess with them too much.
"The lyric was the first in a new, more intimate style. It's two ideas, essentially. On one level it's a bitter, twisted, vitriolic conversation between two people who've been through some nasty, heavy stuff: 'We hurt each other / Then we do it again.' But on another level there's the idea that 'we get to carry each other.' 'Get to' is the key. The original lyric was 'we have to carry each other' and it was never quite right -- it was too fuckin' obvious and platitudinous. But 'get to'… it's like our privilege to carry one another. It puts everything in a different perspective, introduces that idea of grace.
"Still, it blows me away when it's played at weddings. I wouldn't have played it at any wedding of mine. But I suppose it's because, despite all the other stuff in there, the power of 'we get to carry each other' overwhelms everything. And the honesty of it helps -- the bare-knuckle telling-it-like-it-is-ness.
"I also think it opened up new horizons for U2. It's not a song we would ever try to rewrite. We wouldn't want to go there again. But the small scale of it, the intimacy, has been revisited for various other records and songs. The restraint was something new -- we learned how holding back can be even more powerful than letting go."
(from
"The 1001 Best Songs Ever" Special Edition, Q Magazine, November 2003 (?))
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.::
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD ::. [back
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Mat
Snow wrote that "Until the End of the World" is sung in the voice of Judas
addressing Jesus. Is that true?
Edge:
Yeah. There's an Irish poet named Brendan Kennelly who's written
a book of poems about Judas. One of the lines is, "If you want to
serve the age, betray it." That really set my head reeling.
He's also fascinated with the whole moral concept of "Where would we be
without Judas?" I do think there is some truth that in highlighting
what is rather than what we would ideally like to be, you're betraying
a sort of unwritten rule, but you're also serving.
(from
"The View From The Edge -- Living In U2: From Boy to Achtung Baby" by Bill
Flanagan, Musician, March 01, 1992)
The song "Until the End of the World" has the lyric "In the garden I was playing the tart / I kissed your lips and broke your heart." When I hear that, I think of Judas betraying Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
[Bono:] Yeah. Well, I played Jesus for so long, I decided I needed a break! Judas, from whatever way you look at it, is a fascinating creature, because in one sense, by committing his crime, he introduced us to Grace. It's kind of bizarre.
[Bono:] With Scorsese -- we've always been interested by filmmakers -- and Scorsese's anger with Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ, isn't exactly my own point of view, but I enjoyed it. It's like Judas kinda had to do it.
(from
"Rock And Roll Should Be This Big!" by Stuart Bailie, New Musical Express, June 13, 1992)
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.::
THE FLY ::. [back
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"He's
[The Fly] the kind of character," explains Bono, chatting between
takes, "who has all the answers… who shot the Kennedy's. A barfly,
he's made himself a self-appointed expert on the politics of love, a bullshit
philosopher… who occasionally hits the nail on the head but more often
it's his own finger nail he leaves black and blue…"
(from
"Shooting The Fly", Propaganda,
Issue 15)
Bono
wrote the lyrics to "The Fly" as a series of truisms.
Edge:
Yeah, it is, I suppose. It's typical Bono in that his greatest gift
is his imagination, but it's also sometimes his worst enemy in that to
tie himself to one idea is like torture for him. He'd sooner have
10 ideas in one song. I suppose the list of truisms in "The Fly"
is pretty close to following the device from beginning to end. But
even there, he brings in a character.
What
saves that song from being just a clever exercise is that the things he
says are all very powerful.
Edge:
Yeah. What's amazing is that he gets so many ideas into a song and
somehow makes them work.
(from
"The View From The Edge -- Living In U2: From Boy to Achtung Baby" by Bill
Flanagan, Musician, March 01, 1992)
The character in the song "The Fly" seems to know your game and what skeletons are in your cupboard.
[Bono:] There's a lot of those characters in Dublin, and I'm sure they're in London and Manchester and Glasgow. And they're sitting at the bar, and they know why the Gulf War was started, because really, you know, George Bush didn't go to Israel on his holidays, the whole thing was a nixer he did for Shamir so that he could stay in his little holiday home in the Red Sea. You know those kind of guys who just make it up as they go along, and have these great conspiracy theories. But sometimes they're right.
[Bono:] The way I saw "The Fly" was like an obscene phone call from Hell, but the guy likes it there. He's like calling home, saying, I like it. It's a deranged kind of character. We have all these kind of people that we are, and there's some that you just don't want to let out in public. He's one of them.
(from
"Rock And Roll Should Be This Big!" by Stuart Bailie, New Musical Express, June 13, 1992)
A line like "Ambition bites the nails of success," from "The Fly" -- what are we supposed to make of that?
Bono: That song was inspired by the work of the New York artist Jenny Holzer. She works with illuminated boards on which all sorts of texts, like "Protect me from what I want," are written. I wanted to put a few of those aphorisms in a row to get a certain effect. To be good at something you have to be selfish and greedy. Without that greed you won't make it. For me that is one of the sad truths of rock 'n' roll, and I hate that. I don't necessarily mean in the materialistic sense, but more in the sense of you want everything for your music. That's why you should never look up to pop musicians; they're all egotistical bastards, motherf**ckers. They translate their pain into song. I hate that element, and I know I myself am not immune to it. Sometimes I want to get out, turn my back on the whole convulsion. Rock 'n' roll is a limp dick at the moment…
(from
"Angels And Devils" by Bert Van De Camp, Music Express, July 01, 1992)
"It's
like Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart, in my mind, are the same guy,"
Bono explains [referring to the Fly alter ego], noting that the
song "The Fly" was written "like a phone call from hell, but the guy liked
it there."
"It
was like this guy running away -- 'Hi, honey, it's hot, but I like it here,'"
he says. "The character is just on the edge of lunacy. It's
megalomania and paranoia."
"'The
Fly' is not just about irony," the Edge suggests. "There are these
characters, certainly in Dublin and I'm sure everywhere else, who sit on
these stools by the bar all day. And they know everything.
They seem to have moles in the White House and seem to know exactly what's
going on in Moscow. They're bar-stool philosophers, with all these
great theories and notions. And they're on the edge of madness and
genius. Some of the things they say can be incredibly smart.
And yet they are probably mad. I think that's what Bono was playing
with."
(from
"U2 Finds What It's Looking For" by David Fricke, Rolling
Stone, October 01, 1992)
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.::
MYSTERIOUS WAYS ::. [back
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[...]
"It's a song about a man living on little or no romance," Bono says.
"It's a song about women -- or a woman -- but it's addressed to him."
Bono talks a bit about theology and about El Shadi -- the third and least
used name for God in the Bible, which translates as "the breasted one."
"I've always believed that the spirit is a feminine thing," he says.
"Mysterious Ways" is not about a particular woman. It is about women
in general, and the way they entrance -- and often dominate -- men.
"Ali often says, 'For God's sake will you let me down off this pedestal?'"
Bono laughs. "At times I do tend to idealize women. It's easy
to fall into the trap of separating them into angels and devils for the
sake of the drama. But there's no way that there's ever anything
anti-women involved. Our songs are not politically correct.
They are written from a man's point of view. He's wrestling with
different things, there's a flash of anger and hurt here and there.
But I don't think women come out badly."
(from
"Into The Heart" by Niall Stokes)
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.::
TRYIN' TO THROW YOUR ARMS AROUND THE WORLD ::.[back
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[...]
"That's a song about drunk ambition," Bono says. "As in 'I'll be
home soon.' There's just warmth in that image."
(from
"Into The Heart" by Niall Stokes)
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.:: ACROBAT ::.[back
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"Acrobat" carries a dedication to Delmore Schwartz, the writer/teacher who had a big influence on Lou Reed. How does he interest you?
[Bono:] Well, he has this one book called In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and it's a book that was on my mind when I was writing the words for "Acrobat." It's hard to wrap the book up in a few lines, but Delmore Schwartz is a kind of a formalist, which is why Lou Reed is beyond all the wank that people write about him. He's actually a very sharp writer. He's very clean, and that comes from Delmore Schwartz, who taught him.
[Bono:] I'm the opposite; I'm in the mud as a writer, so I could do with a bit of Delmore Schwartz, and that's why I enjoy him. I enjoyed his short stories. I enjoy short stories as a medium, whether it's Raymond Carver, or whatever.
(from
"Rock And Roll Should Be This Big!" by Stuart Bailie, New Musical Express, June 13, 1992)
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.::
LOVE IS BLINDNESS ::. [back
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Bono:
It was written for Nina Simone and we just started playing it one night
and the band liked it, so we decided to put it on the album. But
the best thing about the record is Edge's guitar playing. To me,
it's like a prayer.
(from
"U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate
One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow'
To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los
Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
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