Deseree Stukes ([email protected])
Sat, 23 Jan 1999 06:44:56 -0500
Dance demons
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Bono and The Edge's continuing quest to 'stay tuned in to what's happening'
has led them to launch their own dance label. The future, they tell Jim
Carroll, is all about co-operation
The Joshua Tree National Park would make a grand place for a wild party. A
good location, it has plenty of wide-open space and is far away from anyone
who would complain about the noise of a few hundred sound-systems blasting
out any variety or amount of dance music. But when U2 posed for Anton
Corbijn's cameras under the Joshua Tree back in 1987, they hadn't come to
party. No siree, U2 had come to pout.
The thought of these four individuals on the cover of The Joshua Tree,
sporting standard-issue rock-star clobber and expressions, one day embracing
the groove would have been amusing, unlikely. Fast-forward 12 years and much
has changed. The dance bugs which seemed mildly contagious in the late 1980s
have become full-blown phenomena, changing everything from the way you dance
to the way you dress.
And U2? Yes, they've changed too. Sitting in the study of the Clarence
Hotel, Bono and The Edge are about to launch their second label, with
manager Reggie Manuel. Unlike Mother, the label set up to release singles in
the 1980s by the likes of Cactus World News, The Subterraneans, Roger
Doyle's Operating Theatre and The Word, Kitchen Recordings is a dance label.
The first release is from prolific Dublin producer Rob Rowland, an artist
who specialises in spatial, minimal techno which is more Detroit than
Detroit itself. The second release will be from Belfast duo Basic, an act
who stretch the breakbeat blueprint in new and fascinating ways.
U2 and dance music? It's a good story which begins when they snogged the
groove with the help of Paul Oakenfold and discovered a new lease of life.
>From that eyeopening remix of Even Better Than The Real Thing, they have
toured with DJs, recruited Howie B, opened The Kitchen club in Dublin and
now launched a new label.
Kitchen Recordings will be run by Reggie Manuel, long-time pal and the
person who persuaded the duo to take on the Rowland release. "It's Reggie's
show," Bono explains. "We are the bouncers but he has to open and close the
doors and get the show on road. We've known him for years and years. He has
no experience really of how to deal with the music business but he brought
us Rob Rowland and he knows his turf. Some people will be very confused by
it all!"
Of course, some people will ask whether it's merely some ploy for
credibility. "What would you do if you were in a big band with loads of
money?" asks Edge. "You have to stay alive, you have to stay tuned in to
what's happening and this is the perfect way for us to do that. It's our way
of keeping on top of everything that is happening. It's not just going off
buying loads of 12-inches but having our own label to release stuff which
catches our attention."
U2 and the groove first clicked in 1982 when they worked with legendary New
York house DJ and producer, Fran�ois Kervokian. "We did three remixes with
him around the time of Sun- day Bloody Sunday," Edge recalls. "I hung out
with him in New York and he turned me on to some fantastic stuff. We were
lucky because we were signed to Island Records and they were very interested
in sub-culture stuff so they introduced us to this scene and these people
like Fran�ois."
So you weren't checking out the discotheques and clubs in the Dublin of the
late 1970s and early 1980s? Bono smiles: "In the 1970s, club culture was the
enemy. It was girls' music and we were boys. I did buy Love Ma- chine. Was
it by The Stylistics? There was an instrumental on the B-side which had a
serious groove. I bought that record but I don't think I told anyone because
it was just at the time punk rock was breaking and punk rock was about as
male, white, hormonal music as you could find.
"It's funny - as you get older, the music you loved as a boy now just sounds
so wrong and especially so long! And the music that was supposed to be so
trivial and throwaway has lasted the test of time. Pop music and dance music
from then sound so cool now, whereas progressive rock and the like, well . .
." He laughs. "Rock and roll critics used to shit all over the Bee Gees.
Fair enough, the hair-dos were appalling but to think they were dismissed in
favour of" - his voice rises - "prog rock!"
U2 discovered rhythm in the strangest of places. "We didn't get rhythm until
we went on the road with B.B. King," Bono remembers. "R'n'B was where we
discovered rhythm and that wasn't until the late 1980s. While everyone was
doing drugs in the summer of love in London, we were in Memphis hanging out
with the Muscle Shoals brass section, getting into rhythm that way."
It came as a surprise to Bono that they had a connection with the
then-burgeoning rave scene. "I remember Paul Oakenfold saying to me: `Do you
know what people are playing at the end of these huge raves in the middle of
nowhere outside the cities? They're playing With Or Without You. And they
were! But that was our connection with that scene because our music was
ecstatic. In the 1980s, U2 made ecstatic music.
Whether you want to call it a religious thing or not, the music was big and
universal and it was open in such a way that people who were off their nuts
and who were not in raincoats any more and getting into all these drugs were
completely thrown by it."
Did you ever get the urge to swap it all for a life as a DJ? Ever fancied
becoming DJ Edge, Edge? "I stood next to David Morales for his whole set in
a club in Toyko one night. Seeing the relationship between a DJ and his
audience up close for the first time and the whole vibe to what he was doing
- it was the only time I felt I'd love to do this."
So what has dance music done for U2? "It made us jealous," Edge says,
quietly. "It's wonderful to be in a rock 'n' roll band but it is limiting in
so many ways. There are so many more possibilities with dance music as a
form."
Bono, though, has other thoughts. "We have something that dance music will
never have because what we do is not off the shelf. That's one of the things
we realised when we were making Pop. We could be like archaeologists digging
for some really rare sticky groove but why should we do that when we have
Larry Mullen? Larry can do beats like no one else. And we have a bass player
called Adam Clayton who is the only bass player you would miss if he wasn't
there. What I learned from dance music is the value of what we do. At first,
there was jealousy but then we realised what we had ourselves. We're a rock
'n' roll band at the end of the day."
You seem very certain about that. "Yeah, because at the end of the day, what
we're about is a much different thing than club culture. Sure, we're going
to work with beats and we're going to work with beatmasters like Howie B and
sure we have a club with a beautiful sewer running through in the bottom of
this posh hotel! But you're not going to walk in there and hear a lyric!" He
laughs. "That's not going to happen and I don't want it to.
"Up to recently, I thought one of the most exciting things was going to be
when rock 'n' roll hit club culture. Right at that point, that was where it
was going to be for the future. Now, I'm not so sure. Now, I'm actually
enjoying the difference. Speeding up and slowing down is quite cool, we're
digging the friction."
Bono sees other lessons besides musical ones to be learned from the dance
world. "Club culture is much more democratic than rock 'n' roll ever was,"
he enthuses. "It is much more about a community. Rappers have a network and
they want to big up everyone in that network. So you have Snoop Dogg or
whoever and he's bringing the next Snoop Dogg into the system and into the
chain ...
"That's what we have to do, we've got to co-operate. We've been tagged as
white niggers so let's wear it well, let's be black in that sense. We've got
to start to break each other as well as ourselves. It has to be a community
in all senses of the word. It's against our nature but it might just happen
and that's where dance music comes in. Like Donal Scannell has his
Quadraphonic drum 'n' bass label and he's been on to Reggie saying whatever
help he can need, he'll give it. And Nick at Pussyfoot has said he'll do
whatever he can. That's a start."
So what shades of dance music are you listening to and liking at present?
Edge: "I like techno, I'm not big into drum 'n' bass, I like hiphop. I like
the fact that the Fugees clan are coming out with some unbelievable stuff."
Bono: "Lauryn Hill is just amazing, that album, man, is just one of the
defining records of the last few years. Really, she's head and shoulders
above the pack. Autchere, I dig them. Squarepusher, those beats are mad.
I'll also go for Dave Angel and for Surgeon."
And what clubs have turned the pair of you on? "Toyko!" Bono exclaims with
some enthusiasm. "In Toyko, I learned about one really important innovation
- girls' music. Girls always play the best party music, always. They know
what to put on, they're intuitive, they know what's going on in the room,
they know where people need to go and they have no rules about particular
tracks or styles. They play what works and they play what inspires.
"There was this club in Toyko and the people were just joyful because the
music was so up, so melodic, so right. You were just lifted by these
beautiful melodies, these amazing soulful strings, soulful singing, hard-on
grooves. Yeah, it was a sexual experience. All this mixing and matching, it
was post-modernism running amok. That was something else."
"In New York on Puerto Rican day," Edge recalls, "there was this club and I
had never been in a club like it. Everybody was dressed in the most
incredible, exotic clothing but what was really cool was that people were
dancing sexily to Puerto Rican beats. The whole place was just charged. I
was thinking could I ever imagine this on St Patrick's Day in a Dublin club?
The vibe was just something else."
This sets Bono off. "The thing with clubs like that one Edge is talking
about is that you'll find three generations there. It's people hanging out,
from the mamas to the kids. Funnily enough, I used to see that with the
Pogues. What I loved about Shane McGowan was that he brought three
generations together. You'd have some old geezer holding on to these young
kids who were at their first gig in some GAA hall or other."
For now, they will be trying their hand at overseeing a cutting-edge dance
label, while continuing the search for the sounds and sources for the
follow-up to Pop
Note: if you go to the actual article there is a picture of Bono, Edge and
Reggie. However, you have to click on it to expand it to see all 3 (as they
cropped it to just show Bono).
http://www.irish-times.com/cgi-bin/highlight.plx?TextRes=U2&Path=/irish-time
s/paper/1999/0123/fea4.html
des
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