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U2 bandmates recall near split
Posted by admin on Sep 9, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
U2 frontman Bono says the band came “very” close to breaking up during the tension-filled studio sessions while making their pivotal 1991 album Achtung Baby, as seen in TIFF’s opening night documentary From The Sky Down.
Bono made the statement during a 40-minute Friday afternoon TIFF QA, in response to a twitter question that asked him and U2 guitarist The Edge to judge, on a scale of one to 10, how close they came to splitting 20 years ago.
“‘Very’ is Irish for ‘nine,’” joked Bono.
Added The Edge: “I think what was really at stake was the end of the trust that bound the boys together. It was pretty close.”
The Edge basically played the straight(er) man to Bono’s comedian at the session, with director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) also on stage.
The singer got things off to a musical start by serenading the press with Love Me Tender as they were ushered into a TIFF Bell Lightbox sixth-floor room, where all news conferences are held, via two elevators that couldn’t keep up with demand.
Bono said of being filmed and interviewed by Guggenheim: “I feel like I was mugged.”
“I’m still trying to figure it out how we let him in,” added The Edge.
When asked via twitter what the Achtung Baby song Even Better Than The Real Thing was all about, Bono cracked: “I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s line: ‘There’s no such thing as bad sex.’ I think the carnality of it is an important part of what was going on in our lives.”
Bono reported more seriously that Q magazine in England had commissioned an entire covers album of Achtung Baby songs, featuring Jack White covering Love Is Blindness, Depeche Mode doing You’re So Cruel, Patti Smith’s rendition of Until The End of The World and Damien Race covering One.
He said the band learned some important lessons about their creative process while making the movie.
“I found it a little humiliating to realize that we were so inept,” said Bono. “And yet it was self-imposed crapness. Like we were trying to make music that we didn’t understand. And the band seems to do its best work when it’s in that environment. And when it gets comfortable it’s not as interesting. And so, there may be some more crap coming up.”
He added later: “We’re at that moment again. U2′s been on the verge of irrelevance for the last 20 years — made some great work, I hope, along the way, occasionally faux pas, but this moment, where we’re at, feels like real close to the edge of irrelevance. We have to go to that place again if we’re to survive.”
U2 and The Edge said they are currently inspired by new bands such as Foster The People and Montreal’s Arcade Fire, as well as veterans such as Neil Young and Patti Smith.
“For me a seminal album for us would have been Patti Smith’s Horses,” said Bono. “Talk about brutal honesty. That opening line, ‘Jesus died for somebody else’s sins but not mine,’ when I was 16 (I was thinking), ‘I do not know what this woman’s on about but I better find out.’”
A new documentary about Young from director Jonathan Demme (shot at Massey Hall) is at TIFF, Bono said: “Clearly a sacred talent. Listening to his music you feel like you should take your shoes off.”
