Billboard talked to The Edge about the planned two-year tour.
How does it feel to have two years of touring laid out in front of you?
We're very excited to go on the road with this album. It's an album that I think is going to translate so well to the live context. The songs we've tried in rehearsal are sounding fantastic, so that's got everyone really fired up.
Going on a long tour is always difficult at first to say goodbye to the family and get on the tour bus, so to speak. But the shows themselves are always what really makes it worthwhile. There's such a special thing that goes on between the band and the audience at a U2 show, and we never get tired of that. It's always unique; it's always really uplifting. It's like a kind of semi-religious experience for the band and I think for the audience, too. I couldn't begin to explain why; it's just always been that way.
I think it's all to do with the music, and we kind of go there ourselves to serve the music and people's connection with it. For a lot of people it's the soundtrack of their lives. It's not just the band they're applauding, it's themselves and their own history and their connection with the music.
It's a very personal thing.
On the last several tours you played stadiums in Europe and around the world and arenas in North America. Does it sometimes feel like two different tours?
It's hard to say what constitutes a new tour. In some ways it's to do with the album and the new material. Every time we produce a new record it just throws up all these new possibilities for how we can stage the band and where we can take the show.
This [the Kiss The Future tour] is going to be very different and that's what makes it exciting; finding something new to do, finding something new to bring to the touring culture really. It's hard to come up with something that's fundamentally different, but we have, I think, on this tour. Where we're taking our production will never have been seen before by anybody and that's an amazing thing to be able to say. For a band like U2 that really thrive on breaking new ground it's a real thrill.
This is an interesting, even historic, time to be touring the world. People are going through a lot. Does that have an effect on the way you will play?
We respond very much to the mood in the house. I think there will be a very particular mood at these concerts and we'll be very sensitive to that. We hope that it will be not all doom and gloom but will also be a lot of fun and a chance to have a really great time. We're doing what we can with the ticket prices to make it affordable in this difficult time. I think people know we always offer great value for money and that's an important thing for us, to give back in whatever way we can. I'm looking forward to it. We won't know until we get out there exactly how things are going to work out but I'm very positive, and we all are, about this tour and we think it's going to be just a great experience for everybody.
Do you have a preference of a venue, or does it make a difference once you pick up a guitar and start playing?
It's all to do with the crowd in the house. If they're behind us and the communication is there, I don't really think so much about the bricks and mortar. The crowds vary night-by-night, city-by-city; it's really hard to say if I have a favorite place to play. Wherever the show's going off, that's my favorite.
You have this weeklong run on the "The Late Show With David Letterman," have U2 ever been a "house band" before, or had a residency?
Very early on we did in our hometown of Dublin; we played in a few bars on a regular Thursday night when we were first making our first album and first few singles. It was at the Baggot Inn on Baggot Street in Dublin. We also did a string of shows in July one year, it might have been 1979. We called them "the Jingle Balls" because we decked out the entire club in Christmas decorations in the middle of summer. Four or five nights with that theme, that was a lot fun. That was in a club called McGonagles, which is no longer there. Since then we've not done anything like this, so [residency isn't] a totally new experience, but something we haven't done in many, many years.
Let's talk about the new record, "No Line On The Horizon". It's one that really seems to take hold after repeated listenings. Your part on the record includes lots of slide work and soloing along with the type of playing you and the band traditionally are known for.
I had a great opportunity on this record to explore new guitar tones. In the compositional phase we were really trying a lot of experiments, which is always great for me. It means I can take solos here and there because we can actually write them into a song and make sense of them.
I hate just putting in a solo for no good reason, but in this case they all have important roles to play compositionally, and that's my favorite kind of guitar playing. I'm a big fan of guitar players who really work up solos that have themes and an emotional component, as opposed to just the pyrotechnic approach, which I think is all too common.
Some of the solos are in odd places in the structure of the song, but seem well conceived when they do show up.
I seemed to end up going to the slide a lot on this album. [Because of] the architectural way this record was put together, with these very intricate loops that we often played against, I think it really needed some sort of lyrical component which would offset that very structured quality to the sound.
We work a lot in contrasts, I think. We start off with something that's very inorganic, very synthetic, then we put on the organic elements. That approach has worked really well on a lot of these songs. We even have
Larry Mullen playing an electronic drum kit, which has all the feel of a drummer but sonically it just doesn't sound conventional. It's slightly at odds with the preconceived idea of what Larry's drums sound like. It was an interesting experiment. He at first wasn't 100% sure about it, but I think he really got into it and developed new ways of playing as a result.
That's the upside of experimenting; we make discoveries as musicians, as songwriters as composers as lyricists. We end up places where we just would not have gone if we had just sat down and approached things in a traditional songwriterly fashion.
One example is "Stand Up Comedy." You have a real hard rock riff going there and then it turns into something about as funky as you guys get.
That song has a great groove. It really started as a groove and the guitar came out of that. It was fun. I had just done a film with Jimmy Page and Jack White ["It Might Get Loud"] and I was kind of fooling around with the idea of the guitar riff. I hadn't really used that songwriting form that much over the years, I think "The Fly" would be the best example. This was like exploring what is a fairly well established form, but trying to give it a spin and a twist so that it wasn't a direct homage, more like a reinterpretation.
It's great that you can still surprise fans.
For ourselves, as well, to keep it fresh and new is so important for us. Otherwise we just sort of get bored.
Twelve records in, what is a constant in the studio for you guys and what was different this time around?
The spirit of the band is pretty much consistent. Egos are checked in at the door, we just want to make to make some great music together and we're all willing to do whatever is necessary to get there. Sometimes it means really means taking a back seat somehow, or allowing someone else in the band to offer up suggestions, really throw it open to the floor. Everybody did that, no one was being precious with what they do.
The biggest difference [this time], I suppose, was the starting out point for this record. We really didn't have a clear agenda as far as a release date or a particular feel for what this album would be. We had some clues, and we had one idea which was to go in and work some songs and music with Brian Eno and Danny Lanois as co-writers. We went to Fez in Morocco for two weeks to just work on music, it was like a sort of musical composition workshop.
We all got in a room together and I brought a few of my ideas in but most of the ideas would have been generated there and then. Some of the songs on the album -- "Unknown Caller," "Moment of Surrender" -- would have been songs that came together pretty much in the space of a couple of hours and therefore probably were played in the final incarnation maybe once or twice. There's a real feel -- which you don't often get - [that] everyone is totally present, nobody is just playing their part. Suddenly something great is occurring in the room. There's a real electricity to the performance and I think I can really hear it.
I guess you could say those are two of the "bigger" songs on the record and you really get to stretch your legs as a band. I would have thought the opposite, that they would have taken longer than some of the other songs on the album.
The songs that have the kind emotional weight and gravitas were the ones that almost came quickly and easily. What we wanted to try and do was balance out the album and find some songs with a bit more life force, a bit more for want of a better word, joy. And those were the ones that took a while. "Standup Comedy" took a while, so did "Get on your Boots" and "Crazy Tonight." "White of Snow," "Moment of Surrender," "Unknown Caller" were actually very quick.
The other song that came very quickly was "No Line on the Horizon." That's a song that we only ended up playing once. It's such a simple idea, a way of using a particular guitar sound that I hit on and sort of experimenting with guitar tone and the song came out of that. It was very instant, very quick. It's very rough, I think in a good way.
Our records are funny, we take a long time to make them but really we're always in search of inspiration. It's not a methodical approach, we don't have pattern of recording that we stick to. We can go for a while not really seeming to make much progress then suddenly a song will really take a huge leap forward for one reason or another, particularly towards the end of this album.
In the last 48 hours, I think seven mixes were completed and two vocals were sung. There's this huge ground rush that suddenly occurred on this project, we got it finished. I use the analogy of the Tibetan monks who do the calligraphy; it's all about mixing the paints first and that process takes a long time.
The way I understand it you put some stuff down with Rick Rubin earlier, will that ever see the light of day?
I have no doubt it will. We didn't so much put stuff down as we did a lot of songwriting sessions with Rick. Rick's approach is very different to our normal approach. He suggested that we should try to treat the studio as a sort of sacred place and only to go there if you really know what you're doing and have it all figured out. So we were trying that and we were getting places. But we decided we'd also work with Danny and Brian and that session sort of took off, so we still have the Rick stuff that we're working on. It could be part of the next project, I would think. We've got a lot of great material we worked up with Rick and also a lot more stuff we worked up with Brian and Danny.
What accounts for the longevity of this band? What happens when the four of you get in a room?
That's a good question and I don't think there's a simple answer to it. I think good luck in many regards and I suppose we just figured out the idea of a band ego being bigger than all other egos. We've got egos, the band members have, but we lay them to one side when we're working together.
All our agendas always align to the same ideal, to make some great music together and put on some great performances. Whatever makes for a great album or live show is everyone's priority. When you can simplify things in that way I think it avoids a lot of competitiveness and suspicion, and I think over the years we've all learned to trust each other totally with that. We've held onto our friendships, we're still the friends we were when we started way back in the late '70s.
We see each other a lot when we're not even working. We know it's sort of unique, but we're also trying to keep it going because not only is it fun but it also produces, we think, some great results in terms of music and live concerts. We all instinctively know we would really regret the end of it, should that come. So we're all anxious to try and keep it going and to maintain our commitment to the ideals of the band and what we can achieve for as long as possible.
source:www.billboard.com
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