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Super Channel to Air U2 Doc

Posted by SPun2U on Nov 17, 2011 in News & Rumors | 1 comment

TORONTO: BBC Worldwide Canada has licensed the U2 documentary From the Sky Down to Super Channel in Canada.

From the Sky Down became the first documentary to ever open the Toronto International Film Festival. The doc marks the 20th anniversary of U2’s 1991 album, Achtung Baby, which won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance. It features new interviews, stories and unseen footage from the band’s return to Hansa Studios in Berlin, the site where they first recorded Achtung Baby, with Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman).

Hilary Read, the COO of BBC Worldwide Canada, said, “Long-time U2 devotees and new fans alike will be drawn to this up-close, intimate portrait that Davis Guggenheim has created of one of the world’s most talented and influential musical acts. The film was incredibly well-received at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. It’s great to be partnering with Super Channel to give From the Sky Down its TV debut in Canada.”

“We are very pleased to have the opportunity to bring Canadians a viewing opportunity of this quality in HD and commercial-free,” said, Sandy Perkins, the VP of programming for Super Channel. “From the Sky Down is certain to be embraced with enthusiasm by our viewers.”

- Worldscreen.com

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Win U2′s ‘Achtung Baby’ Reissued Vinyl Box Set

Posted by SPun2U on Nov 17, 2011 in News & Rumors | 0 comments

: U2 Box Set

SPIN celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, and released a definitive list of the 125 Best Albums of the SPIN era, from 1985-2010. Among many worth candidates

for No. 1, we chose U2′s 1991 game-changer Achtung Baby to top the list. Now, to celebrate the album’s 20th birthday, SPIN and Universal are teaming up to give one lucky fan a special-edition Achtung Baby 4-LP vinyl box set, featuring the album itself plus seven epic remixes. Enter below to win!

“Initially recorded at Hansa Studios, a former SS ballroom near the reopened Berlin Wall (and later completed back home in Dublin), Achtung was an effort, stoked primarily by Bono and the Edge, to ‘deconstruct’ the band and rewire it with jolts of beat-generated clutter and collage, nicked from industrial music, hip-hop, dance remixes, and the Madchester scene,” wrote SPIN editorial director Charles Aaron of the album. “U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby. Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational.”

Contest ends December 1.

>> Read the official rules.

>> Enter the contest.

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Unforgettable fire flickering out as U2 ponder end of the road

Posted by SPun2U on Nov 5, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off

LEGENDARY rockers U2 are thinking “very seriously” about breaking up, one of their closest friends believes.

Artist Derek ‘Guggi’ Rowan, a childhood friend of U2 frontman Bono, says the band are weighing up their options, and a split remains very much on the cards.

Bono fuelled frenetic speculation about the future of the band, who have been together for 35 years. He has been questioning the band’s relevance, despite recently completing the highest grossing music tour in history.

Guggi said yesterday: “I get the impression that they’re thinking, and thinking very seriously about it (breaking up).”

But he also said there has been no confirmation one way or the other from Bono as regards the group’s future intentions.

“I was walking through Easons and the break-up story was on the front cover of a tabloid newspaper. I was with Bono days before I read it and he didn’t say anything to me about it,” he said.

Asked whether he believes now is the time for such a landmark decision, he stressed the band will know when the time is right to call it a day.

“I love hanging out with them when they’re on the road. What I would like them to do is whatever is best for them as artists — that has got to be the number one priority,” he stressed.

Guggi’s comments at Inclusion Ireland’s 50th Anniversary Competition at the Art Fair in the RDS will spark fresh fears that the end is nigh for the Irish rockers.

The four U2 members have been playing together since they were teens, and under the careful management of Paul McGuinness, have become one of the most successful rock groups of all time, raking up multi-million euro fortunes in the process.

Last month, ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine interviewed Bono, when he first began hinting that the U2 juggernaut may have finally run its course. He expressed fears that the band may have lost its momentum and perhaps the time had come for himself, Larry Mullen Jnr, The Edge and Adam Clayton to part company sometime in 2012.

“I’m not so sure the future hasn’t dried up,” said the 51-year-old. “It’s quite likely you might hear from us next year but it’s equally possible that you won’t.

“We have so many new songs, some of our best. But I’m putting some time aside to just go and get lost in the music. I want to take my young boys, and my wife, and just disappear with my iPod Nano and some books and an acoustic guitar.”

Frenzied rumours quickly followed, with fans and critics alike posting messages on the internet, lamenting the possible end to one of the greatest music odysseys of recent decades.

But Bono also admitted that he has been getting some stick from bandmates about his ongoing doubts over U2′s future. “The band are like, ‘Will you shut up about being irrelevant?’”

The group recently re-released their 1991 classic album ‘Achtung Baby‘, but Bono has expressed worry about whether the band holds the same clout it once did.

But he said re-releasing the classic album has proved something of a cathartic experience and may pave the way for a new direction for U2.

“Being forced to look back at this period reminds me of how we might re-emerge for the next phase,” he says. “And that doesn’t mean that you have to wear some mad welder’s goggles or dress up in women’s clothing. Reinvention is much deeper than that.”

Over more than three decades in the business, U2 have released 12 studio albums and have sold more than 150 million records worldwide.
- Mark O’Regan

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U2 need to dream it all up again. Part 2

Posted by SPun2U on Oct 22, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off

Bono says U2 are under more pressure to make a good album now than they were when they recorded the career-defining Achtung Baby 20 years ago.

Echoing his “we need to dream it all up again” words when U2 played Dublin’s Point Theatre on New Year’s Eve in 1989, he told The Irish Times: “It’s actually worse for us now than it was when we went to Berlin. We can play the big music in big places. But whether we can play the small music, meaning for the small speakers of the radio or clubs, where people are living, remains to be seen. I think we have to go to that place again if we’re to survive.

“There are so many U2 albums out there. We need a reason for another one. The whole point of being in U2 is that we’re not here to be an art-house band. Our job, as we see it, is to bring the art house to the mainstream; our job is to puncture the mainstream.”

The singer says he sees the future of the music industry in new technology and new formats. “Our last album was the first album to be made available as an app with BlackBerry devices, but it didn’t work: the functionality was not what it could have been,” he says.

“New formats are going to happen. I’m always banging on about this. The app format brings you back to that world of gatefold sleeves, of being able to read lyrics – and being able to play the album at home on your plasma TV.”

Bono also defended the sales performance of the band’s 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon. “We’re just about to come to five million sales on No Line on The Horizon, and that, these days, is the equivalent of selling 12 million records,” he says. “You can actually do the figures on that. So when you look at it like that, it has the same sales as All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

“That’s despite the fact that No Line doesn’t have A Beautiful Day and doesn’t have a Stuck in A Moment. There’s no pop song on No Line, but it’s still sold that amount. It’s been an amazing success for an album which is quite a complex piece of work and doesn’t have one single pop song on it.”

“People say Get on Your Boots was the wrong single, but it’s great live. Unfortunately in the last few weeks of finishing the album, we didn’t have the objectivity. We figured out Get on Your Boots later, when we were on the road and it became a much better song. I think Unknown Caller is a classic, as is Moment of Surrender.”

U2 release the 20th anniversary edition of Achtung Baby next week.

- RTE