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When the band reunites in the studio after a yearlong break, the result is a kind of rhythmic techno-dance/’60s-pop-songwriting thing. OK, let them explain it to you.

DUBLIN, Ireland–For most of its celebrated career, U2 has preached the gospel of rock ‘n’ roll tradition, toasting at every turn such personal heroes as Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

So, why is Adam Clayton, the group’s bassist, talking about such ’90s techno-dance favorites as the Prodigy, Massive Attack, Tricky and the Chemical Brothers as he drives to U2’s recording studio on the banks of the Grand Canal Basin?

“See what you think of this,” says Clayton, who has just flown in from London, where he and drummer Larry Mullen represented the band at the MTV Europe Music Awards. He slips a cassette into the car’s tape player, and music suddenly explodes from the speakers.

It’s a burst of the sonic color you’d expect from a prized dance-floor entry–not the light audio confections associated with mainstream dance music in the United States during the last two decades but the hard-edged british dance music that bristles with attitude and bite.

Though the style is hugely popular in England, it has not secured much of a commercial foothold in America. For one thing, most of the Bitish dance stars have tended to be relatively faceless, and the emphasis in the music is on textures rather than conventional pop songwriting techniques.

Just when you begin to wonder which of those hot British acts’ music is playing in the car, you hear a voice through the speakers that sounds suspiciously like that of U2’s Bono and some sharp, vibrating guitar lines that seem awfully similar to those of the band’s the Edge.

Some dance outfit imitating U2?

Clayton smiles.

“It’s our new single–’Discotheque,’” he says. “What do you think?”

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Welcome to U2 Labs, where progress is their most important product. The latest experiment by these rock scientists was originally to be an EP — or mini-album — to accompany this summer’s European leg of their extended Zoo TV tour. But the Dublin quartet got carried away in the studio and produced a full album of 10 songs instead. The hurried nature of this project has taken the band even further into the gritty garage where they parked 1991’s Achtung Baby. By letting spontaneity rule, U2 has defeated its tendency toward heavily layered, sometimes mannered music. But some of these songs needed more planning and polishing.
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In mid-megavolt Zoo TV tour, U2 switches channels with an introspective new album.

How do you wind down from one of the most electrifying rock shows ever staged? If you’re U2, the indefatigable Irish quartet, the answer is you don’t. Riding the wave of its audacious 1991 album, Achtung Baby, the group has spent the past 15 months hop-scotching the globe with the Zoo TV tour, a futuristic, high-voltage extravaganza that has packed stadiums from Berlin to Los Angeles, and is scheduled to end in Australia next November. But just when most bands would be lurching for the finish line, U2 has struck while the muse is hot and re-energized itself by releasing an album of fresh material.

As its title suggests, Zooropa is both a reflection of and a reaction to Zoo TV, which uses giant video screens, satellite technology and automobiles swinging from cranes to evoke the surrealist, fast-forward distortion of the digitalized global village. In the title track, garbled voices, piano and a pulsing bass emerge from a haze of static like a radio receiver tuning in to a distant signal. Read the rest of this story »

Click.
You’ve pressed the remote.
Zoo TV flashback.

Bono is at the wheel of his green Mark 2 ‘63 Jag and he’s saying how the idea of Zoo TV came from when U2 played at The Point in Dublin in 1989 on New Year’s Eve, when their concert was broadcast live on radio to some 500 million people across Europe and the Soviet states.

“Beaming across borders” Bono beams. “The concept behind broadcasting live from one point to a whole host of points… what we were doing there in audio we are now doing in and audio _and_ visual way with Zoo TV”.

And now U2 are rehearsing at The Factory in Dublin and you’ve been watching them for five weeks, hanging with them at Windmill Studios where they’re being filmed for the giant t.v. monitors that grace their Zoo TV tour, grooving on them at STS Studios as they record their song ‘Salom?’, driving around with Adam one day, Edge the next, Bono another…reaching into the no-longer-guarded silent psyche of Larry.

One night up at your sister Patricia’s house, you’re having chinwag with Bono, talking about how love and sexuality is in a complete crisis in the 90’s. And Bono, he says “But it’s too much to make it all holy, too much to make it all trash…”

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Dashing and Demanding: With a superb new album, U2 reinvents itself

Jay Cocks

Here we all were, fretting over the parlous state of rock, and help was on the way even while we were dithering. All of a sudden there’s a clutch of superb albums out there: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes’ Better Days; Robbie Robertson’s Storyville; Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence. And now, to put the capper on the company, U2’s dashing, demanding Achtung Baby.

This new 12-song collection, the first since the band’s Rattle and Hum of 1988, has something in common with all the other good stuff currently in circulation. It has the raucous, free-for-all spirit of the Jukes; it shares the narrative ambition and sense of musical mystery of Storyville (the band collaborated with Robertson, in fact, on a tune on his first album); and it taps into the same deep Irish roots, at once weird and winsome, as does Morrison, who is a kind of godfather to all Irish rockers. Read the rest of this story »

U2
Achtung Baby
(Island)
Rating: 10 out of 12

There is no question about it. He may look as if he’s been dipped in a bottle of red ink but it is Adam who stands there bollock naked before the camera and the world on the back sleeve of the latest, long playing opus from the band whose name begins with U and ends with 2. And is that Eve who hovers topless behind Bono on the front?

It’s a long way from the palpable innocence of Boy, this seething odyssey into the dark underbelly of inter-personal exchange, signalled on the cover by a series of images of shameless lust for low-life and exotic. It’s a long way too from the clarion-like conviction of those early years, best characterised in the religious dedication of “Gloria.” “I try to speak up,” Bono sang back then, if you remember, “but only in you am I complete. Gloria in eo Domino.” And the guitars rang and the angels sang and the heavens rejoiced. Rejoice! I cannot think of a more alien concept to Achtung Baby.

Instead we are confronted here with a world of intense uncertainty, a world in which bearings have been lost, in which and betrayal, lust and infidelity walk hand in hand — a world in which the metaphors of religion have quite clearly given way to the metaphors of sex. “If you want to kiss the sky, Better learn how to kneel,” Bono sings on “Mysterious Ways,” and in another context it might have been taken as a reference to prayer. But here humility gives way to humiliation, as he interjects with the authority of a dominatrix. “On your knees, boy.”

Pleasure and pain. The desire to deny those to whom we are closest the freedom we crave for ourselves. Confronting the terrible truth that in love there are no rules — these are the kind of themes that refuse to be ignored when all your own assumptions of certainty and security and fidelity are blown apart on an intensely personal level. Read the rest of this story »