Jack White on U2's 'Achtung Baby': 'I Listened to That on Repeat as a Teenager'

Guitarist talks 'Great Gatsby' contribution, 'Love Is Blindness'

Jack White was a teenager in blue-collar Detroit when he purchased U2's heavy left turn of a seventh album, Achtung Baby. "I listened to that a lot in my headphones," he says. Almost immediately, the bluesman was drawn to the LP's closing track, "Love Is Blindness." "I listened to that on repeat quite often," says White, whose cover of the U2 classic appears on the soundtrack for The Great Gatsby.

Before White entered the studio, the guitarist engaged in brainstorming sessions with Jay-Z (who, in addition to his duties as executive producer, also wrote and performed the original song, "100$ Bill"). "I talked to Jay-Z a lot," White says. "We went back and forth on a lot of ideas. But the one that I kept thinking about, the one that was interesting just for me, was the "Love Is Blindness" track."

White was confident that his grimy rendition, one he characterizes as "almost violent," would fit in well with director Baz Luhrmann's vision for F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic tale of wealth, privilege and deception. "I could imagine it in hundreds of different scenarios," he says.

The guitarist first recorded his cover of "Love Is Blindness" in 2011 at the request of the Edge (the pair had previously joined forces for Davis Guggenheim's guitar documentary, It Might Get Loud, in 2008). Afterwards, the U2 co-founder asked White if he'd contribute a U2 cover to the band's 20th-anniversary Achtung Baby release, Ahk-toong Bay-bi Covered.

"I get requests for some kind of compilation, duet or tribute album twice a week," White explains. "And I always say no. I can't stand 99-percent of them – they're just wastes of time. But this one was different, because I've been connected to Edge since we made the guitar film."

"I thought, 'Well, this feels real close to me,'" he continues. "As long as I can do 'Love Is Blindness.' As long as no one's taken that."

White ended up so pleased with his version of the U2 track – which was originally inspired by the Edge’s breakup with his then wife, Aislinn O'Sullivan – that he asked for (and received) permission from the guitarist to include it as a b-side to his 2012 solo debut, Blunderbuss.

"This was bigger than just a tribute record," he explains. "It came off so powerful, we had to ask if we could put it somewhere else."

The Great Gatsby`s Soundtrack `s review.

http://www.rollingstone.com

2013 Grammy Awards:From The Sky Down, Nominated

 the Davis Guggenheim directed documentary about the making of Achtung Baby, has been nominated for Best Long Form Music Video at the 2013 Grammy Awards.

The first ever documentary film to open the Toronto International Film Festival, Guggenheim travelled  with the band back to Hansa Studios in Berlin to reveal the hidden story behind the recording of a landmark album in the band's career.   'Quite simply, ' reported Entertainment Weekly, 'It's one of the most transcendent close-up looks at the process of creating rock & roll I’ve ever seen.'

From The Sky Down is up against some strong competition at the Awards in February including Big Easy Express (Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros and Old Crow Medicine Show), Esperanza Spalding's Radio Music Society, Get Along (Tegan & Sarah) and the Sade concert video Bring Me Home.

www.u2.com//http://www.grammy.com/

Bono Contributes to "Tosca Pops-up" Auction Event

A Bono-autographed copy of the "Uber Deluxe Edition" of the recent Achtung Baby re-issue is being auctioned as part of the Tosca Pops Up charity event this week in Dublin. 

A truly unique pop up to benefit the work of Self Help Africa and help people across Africa to lift themselves out of poverty.

“We’re delighted to be popping up for Self Help Africa. They’re all about empowering people to grow more food, giving people a help up, not a hand out and we’re proud to be doing our bit. It’s gonna be a cracking night, a real celebration of the very best of Irish – music, food, people, and all with a bit of Tosca attitude. It’ll be fantastic to see all the old crew and customers again after 10 years! I’m really looking forward to it.”- Norman Hewson, Tosca.

Tosca Pops Up refers to the one-time re-opening of Tosca, a popular Dublin restaurant that Bono's brother, Norman, used to own. The restaurant crew is re-opening for one night to raise money for Self-Help Africa 

Achtung Baby, 20th Anniversary Ultimate Collectors’ Edition signed and donated by Bono

Reserve Price: €300

Market Value: €800+

Tosca’s best known patron and little brother of Norman has donated this one-off collectors’ item – a must have piece for dedicated U2 fans!

Recorded over 6 months in 1991 in Berlin and Dublin, Achtung Baby was U2's seventh studio album. This limited, numbered Über Deluxe Edition is a magnetic puzzle tiled box and contains: six CDs including the original Achtung Baby album, the follow-up album, Zooropa, B-sides and re-workings of previously unheard material recorded during the Achtung Baby sessions; four DVDs including "From The Sky Down", Zoo TV, all the videos from Achtung Baby plus bonus material; five clear 7" vinyl singles in their original sleeves; 16 art prints taken from the original album sleeve, an 84-page hardback book, a copy of Propaganda magazine, four badges, a sticker sheet, and a pair of Bono’s trademark "The Fly" sunglasses.

http://www.selfhelpafrica.org//http://www.selfhelpafrica.org/selfhelp/Main/tosca-auction.htm//http://www.atu2.com/

How The Edge Created a Classic Guitar Sound

Not many people can boast about being in the same band for thirty-five years, with the same three guys you met in school. But that is the case for Dave Evans, or The Edge as he is more commonly known. The U2 guitarist started playing with Bono, Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton while at the Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, Ireland. The four pretty much learned to play their instruments after forming the band. The Edge and his brother Dick, who initially played with the band, had actually built their own guitar that they would take turns playing. It took a while for The Edge to develop what is now the classic U2 guitar sound. In the beginning his playing style was more blues-rock oriented, like that of fellow Irishman Rory Gallagher, which can be heard in the early U2 song “Street Mission,” that was scrapped before time came to record their first album.


The Edge would acquire the first piece of the puzzle to his guitar sound when he went on vacation with his family to New York City in 1978. He ended up buying a 1976 Gibson Explorer Limited Edition. The Edge paid $248.40 for the Explorer (there's a picture of the receipt in U2's autobiography U2 By U2), which was most likely a substantial amount of money for the young guitarist in those days. But today it's safe to say that it is a priceless instrument, considering its significance in creating U2's sound and it's use on countless recordings.

When The Edge put up his 1975 cream Gibson Les Paul for auction in 2007 it brought in $240,000, and while that guitar had been used by him on tour since 1985 it still does not even come close in terms of importance to the U2 sound, since the Explorer was around from the very beginning. The Edge talked about buying the guitar, and his band mates reaction to the instrument in the BBC series The Story of the Guitar: “I just picked it up in the store and it felt so great, this is it. I actually went in to buy, I think I was going to buy a Les Paul, but I just fell in love with this guitar. I brought it back and I was slightly like...it's a little strange looking...are the guys in the band gonna look at it and go 'what?'...there's a few strange looks for the first day, but everyone just loved the sound of it. I think it became like a signature look, no one else was playing Explorers at that point, and so quite soon it became the thing we were famous for. Apart from a few other things obviously.”

The Explorer has taken a bit of a beating from all its years on the road, with one particularly nasty accident, as told by The Edge in The Story of the Guitar “It's had a few accidents over the years. This happened in Radio City about the mid eighties. We were playing a show and the bouncers were particularly heavy in the venue, and there were some kids in the front getting pummeled. So I actually threw the guitar off, sort of to intervene, and stopped it. Bono stopped the show and we got it sorted out, but I came back, picked the guitar up and the head was hanging off. It was totally broken...We got it repaired. I'm not sure it has affected the sound, I couldn't tell the difference when I got it back.” But the repair is quite visible on the back of the neck, since the replacement piece of wood is newer, and has assumed a different color over the years.

The Edge still use his original Explorer to this day, but it has now been relieved from touring duties, and is only used in the studio, explains Dallas Schoo, The Edge's guitar tech, in an interview with MusicRadar: “We finally retired it. It's such an important guitar for recording that I finally convinced him to leave it home. Nothing serious ever happened to it, but it's spent years in the sun, getting rained on - outdoor shows do that. I wanted to nip things in the bud while I could.”

But if you thought any 1976 Explorer would do, you'd be sorely mistaken, as Schoo explains: “The right ones are hard to find because Gibson had two different Explorers in production that year. The ones that were produced from June through December had a thin neck, but the models that were produced during the first part of that year had a thick baseball bat neck. Those are the ones Edge prefers. Gibson didn't make many of them, only about 1800 of them or so, and people hang on to them.”

The second piece of the puzzle in creating the classic U2 sound came in the form of an echo unit. The Edge got himself an Electro Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe, a delay pedal that allows you to modulate the original tone with a chorus or vibrato effect. Edge experimented with different delay intervals, and changing the modulation of the original tone. The one most closely associated with the U2 sound is perhaps the dotted eight-note delay heard in “Pride (In The Name of Love)” and “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.”

Since it is quite tricky to set a specific delay time on the Memory Man, The Edge would switch to using two Korg SDD-3000 digital rack processors instead sometime in the mid eighties, later also incorporating the TC Electronic 2290 Digital Delay. He has two processors since some of U2's songs, like for example “Where The Streets Have No Name” use two parallel delays with different delay times.

The final piece of the puzzle for that early U2 sound came in the form of the amplifier The Edge has been using for decades. It's a 1964 VOX AC30 Top Boost chassis in a 1970s cabinet. The Edge would stay with this signature sound, or variations thereof, for all of U2's recordings during the 1980s. During the nineties The Edge and the rest of U2 felt the need to reinvent their sound to great success, especially on their 1991 album Achtung Baby. But The Edge has since returned to the classic delay driven AC30 sound on some songs on the albums All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb - guess you really shouldn't mess too much with a good thing.

Daniel Eriksson

http://www2.gibson.com

Nostalgic of past days: Night and Day

"Night and Day" is a popular song by Cole Porter, written in  1932 for musical play Gay Divorce.

U2 recorded it  in 1990 and appeared on the Red Hot + Blue compilation album. 

A great version of a classic performed by now a band which is a classic!!!

Achtung Baby Best Album of the Past 25 Years

 

Spin magazine´s  editors rank the top releases since the magazine's beginning in 1985. In mumber 1, they have chosen Achtung Baby , among other albums by so different artists such as Queen Latifah, Blur, Nirvana, Green Day and R.E.M. U2 has another album into the list: The Joshua Tree is ranked N° 62.
But why has AB been chosen?
Here are the editors´ reasons:


With the middling reaction to last year's better-than-you'll-admit No Line on the Horizon, U2's chest-heaving big-box spectacle seems to be fatiguing more of pop's body politic than it's inspiring. Weirdly, this was exactly the case more than 20 years ago. After the critical and commercial sweep of Joshua Tree, the Irish conglomerate followed its bombastic muse with the ponderous 1988 docu-fiasco Rattle and Hum, which featured a Bono mot that would haunt many of us for years to come: "Okay, Edge, play the blues!" Flailing and directionless, the band retreated and reconsidered whether it was time to fold up their flag for good.

Instead, three years later they emerged with the album — Achtung Baby, cheekily titled as a nod to German reunification — that would energize their career and genetically engineer rock music into the hybridized mutant we know today. 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. That method almost collapsed the band — bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., as well as coproducer Daniel Lanois, were left bewildered and cranky.

But the frisson found expression in U2's most immediately dynamic music since 1982's War, and its most emotionally frank songs to date, capturing that particular early-'90s rub of boundless possibility and worn-down despair. Bono's lyrical flights had a battered grit, like a defrocked cleric stirred to regain his flock without the usual trick bag of bullshit. "One" became an indelible anthem because it admitted "we're not the same" but urged that we've gotta "carry each other" nonetheless. The squalling swagger of "The Fly" resonated due to the rock star at its center confessing he's a liar and a thief. And for "Mysterious Ways," the Edge somehow concocted a jubilantly snarling riff that transformed Bono's gospel come-on so it didn't feel gross the morning after.

Daniel Lanois Discusses Achtung Baby

Ahead of his induction into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame, CBC Music asked Daniel Lanois to sit down and reflect on five albums that he's worked on over his acclaimed career.

Lanois walks us through the making of U2's Achtung Baby and how Bono and company took to Berlin to mix "flesh and machine" for their new record:






http://music.cbc.ca

Winners of the AB Contest

U2.com has announced the winners of the competition launched to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Achtung Baby 
The winner is called 'without' and the artist is Jana Beier and she's won her very own Trabant in the competition to celebrate the 20th anniversary edition of Achtung Baby.

'The original painting is from 1991. I was 12 years old, just left behind my safe but also restricted childhood in East Germany, facing future with the new 'west'. I felt like drowning from all the new impulses in that time. The painting had stayed in the cellar until today, colours faded but the theme is more present than ever... ' 
While Jana from Germany was the 'Host's Choice' in the competition, the People's Choice award - winning the popular vote went to Ukrainian photographer Zoya Shu with 'On The Fly', an eye-catchingly surrealist perspective on the fall of the Wall. 'So pay attention, the babies that were born in 1991 are now the adults and still going strong. It's no secret...' 

Also named winners were Ana Coello; Roman Soloviev; Olga Bannikova; Gene Jimenez: Lucie Bascoul; IIona Muis; Ryan O'Neill; Eugenio Gonzalez; Julian De Angelis; Susan Hamilton Peterson; Lilit Simonyan; Irmak Akcadogan; Keri Huber and Jacob Baldwin:  

www.u2.com

RS 10 Greatest Hopes and Fears for 2012.

U2 Plot Their Future

Hope: U2's 2009 album No Line On The Horizon was an extremely ambitious record that sold millions of copies all over the world. Songs like "Moment of Surrender" and "Magnificent" rank with the band's best work, but the singles failed to connect with a mass audience and by U2's standards it was a disappointment. We hope that they realize that radio is unlikely to put any song they ever write into heavy rotation; instead, they should just focus on making another great record, and then hit the road on an arena tour that drops some of the old warhorses in favor of great songs from the past. How about "Acrobat," "Drowning Man" and "Numb"? "Pride (In The Name of Love)" is a great song, but enough's enough. 

Fear: U2 tends to end each decade with a commercial disappointment, and then begin the new decade with an album that's the exact opposite of their last work. The failure of Rattle and Hum gave the world Achtung Baby and the failure of the (criminally underrated) Pop led to the back-to-basics approach on All That You Can't Leave Behind. They have spent much of the last two years working with a rotating cast of producers, including Danger Mouse and RedOne. We fear their primary focus is competing with Lady Gaga on the radio. It's a fight they're going to lose. Hey Bono, don't overthink this next record. Just make it great. It'll serve you better in the long run. Remember that awful charity single "Stranded" you cut with Jay-Z and Rihanna? Never do anything like that again. 

Rolling Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com

U2 by Interview Magazine

By DAVIS GUGGENHEIM, STEPHEN MOOALLEM

Photography ANTON CORBIJN

Since coming out of Dublin in the late ’70s, U2 has released 12 studio albums, the majority of which are great, and a handful of which are even greater—which is to say, sharper, deeper, tighter, and more adventurous and all-consuming. Near the top of that list is 1991’s Achtung Baby, a dark record birthed during a series of fraught sessions at Hansa Studios in Berlin in late 1990, and one that’s as important for the succession of dirty, experimental, and indelible songs that it spawned—“The Fly,” “One,” “Mysterious Ways”—as it is for the radical and willful break from the past that it came to represent.

By the time the members of U2—Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr.—decamped to Hansa with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to begin work on what would become Achtung Baby, they were already the biggest band in the world. But as work on the album progressed in Berlin, and later back in Dublin, the widescreen romance and earnestness of earlier records like The Unforgettable Fire (1984) and The Joshua Tree (1987) gave way to a noisy meld of Manchester-dance and German-electronic influences shot through with a mix of irony, ecstasy, and high-modernist wit. For the tour in support of the album, the band’s previously stripped-down road show was supplanted by the elaborate Blade Runner-esque stage-set and oversize video screens of Zoo TV, with its between-song channel surfing, audience confessional videos, in-show satellite hook-ups, and theatrical flourishes. Then there was Bono, decked out in Jim Morrison’s pants, Elvis’s jacket, and, of course, Lou Reed’s bug-eye sunglasses—the rock star remixed. It was at once like nothing anyone had ever seen or heard before—at least on purpose, in one place, from a rock band—and, at the same time, all too much like everything that everyone was seeing everywhere at a moment when the map of the world was being redrawn, a media revolution was afoot, and the culture itself was in the midst of a tectonic shift.

From The Sky Down, Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about U2’s struggle to find a new direction—and to stay together—during the making of Achtung Baby, delves into the genesis of the album through the lens of a return trip to Hansa that the band made earlier this year. (The film is airing right now on Showtime.) This month, U2 is also releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of Achtung Baby that includes both the full original album and 1993’s Zooropa, as well as an array of B-sides, outtakes, and alternate versions of songs.

I spoke with Guggenheim, The Edge, and Bono in early September in Toronto, hours before From The Sky Downwas set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. —STEPHEN MOOALLEM

U2 Achtung Baby – a look back

The Achtung Baby early sleeve drafts

ampvisual.com (the design consultancy based at  Dublin , which has been responsible of many of the visual work of U2) has published  a very interesting post on Achtung Baby and its covers.

When I first heard the opening salvo of U2 Achtung Baby and the channel flipping darkly distorted sound of Zoo Station, I literally thought that the CD player had broken, or that the speakers had blown, or that we had mistakenly been sent music by another band, it really was that different, that NEW, that un-U2 like.
It’s difficult to sum up the days before the internet, wall-to-wall media and the power of online networking – the days before instantaneous speed of the transfer of information. But after U2′s Lovetown tour ended just after the Dublin Point Depot shows and Bono saying that the band would have to, ‘go away and dream it all up again’, there was an almost 2-year silence, broken only by the band’s appearance on the Red Hot And Blue Cole Porter tribute album with their version of Night And Day in 1990 – the first real inkling of the band’s new direction. Otherwise just silence.


Then suddenly, The Fly, the first single off Achtung Baby. It was as if a very different door had opened for the band that allowed them to not only sound re-invented, but that also allowed them the freedom to act in a brand new way also. There were suddenly now so many new colours and shades to the band’s palette that it was mesmerizing to hear and to see it happening.


When Achtung Baby was released three weeks later, it was to astonishing reactions. The album had a visceral heat pouring from it. It crackled with brand-new sounds. It throbbed from your sound system with its expansive, distorted metallic textures and deep rhythmic sound with a sheer intensity. Bono’s double-voice, his falsetto and deep distorted low-register vocal spat out words of dark personal angst, sexuality and intimacy unheard before in his lyrics.


I was a youngster not too long out of college working with Steve Averill’s design studio Works Associates, when he asked me to work with him on U2′s as yet untitled new studio album in early 1991, my first job for U2. I was used to seeing the panoramic, monumental and monochrome imagery of The Joshua Tree sleeve and so on, but suddenly boxes of photographs were arriving in to us of new U2 photoshoots from Anton Corbijn that were very different to what I’d ever seen for U2. They didn’t have the serious sincerity of his previous work for the band, instead Corbijn had strove for a lighter vibe and the photos were a great combination of spontaneity and of a vivid kaleidoscope of colours from arctic blue to desert red mixed with ink black and sepia-toned lith prints of intense portraiture; of new landscapes, of various animals, of serious masculine men in frocks in full-on wigs and makeup, of band members smiling, fun… and nakedness. There was an astonishing amount of photographs – hundreds of beautifully printed photographs.


For us to make a sleeve that would break the mould of any previous sleeves done for band we had to see this as a brand new phase of the band, it had to be quite different from what had been done before. We wanted the sleeve to reflect the multiplicity of themes on the album, its shades of light and dark, its sense of place and time at the dismantling of the Berlin wall. We didn’t want a fashion sleeve, something that would be out of date soon after. We strove hard to make a ‘classic’ album sleeve that would thematically have both depth and meaning and that would go to form the complete album both sonically and visually. No one image was enough to convey the shades and personalities on the record and so out of many experiments we ended up with a regular grid of images with examples shown to the band of sleeves by the likes of Pink Floyd and The Who.

The U2 Paradox

Never has a band been more mockable, never has a band been more successful.

Extracts from  Eric Hynes´s essay posted in Slate 

Paris 1987, Joshua Tree Tour.

Photograph by Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images.

In a piece written for Rolling Stone 20 years ago this month, producer Brian Eno identified why the rock band U2 is singularly enduring and enervating. “Cool,” he wrote, “sums up just about everything U2 isn’t. The band is positive where cool is cynical, involved where it is detached, open where it is evasive.” For 35 years, rock journalists, culture’s self-appointed guardians of cool, have monitored U2’s ups and downs, smash hits and embarrassments. The relationship between critics and the band was fraught from the start, with their anthemic, highly emotive music winning them millions of fans but just as many skeptics. The rock of rebellion and decadence seemed allergic to a band this earnest, emotive, inclusive, politically engaged, and, worst of all, openly Christian. You couldn’t invent a more mock-worthy outfit.

Cool or not, Bono and co. have done quite well for themselves. They’ve sold a gazillion records, have been the no. 1 live act for a few decades, were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility, and are globally unavoidable—advocating for U2 is like telling someone to pay more attention to Steven Spielberg. This fall marks the 20th anniversary of their best and most important album, Achtung Baby. A remastered, deluxe box set of the album drops this week, and Showtime will debut the Davis Guggenheim documentary From the Sky Down, which revisits that album's tumultuous recording sessions. With R.E.M. recently giving up the ghost, U2 is basically the last band standing from the Album Oriented Rock era. Inspired by punk but drawn to pomp, suckers for abstract textures but addicted to pop, the band has straddled the realms of art and commerce more audaciously than any other in rock's history. They've sincerely tried to change the world and have strived to remain the best band in the world—differently ambitious, equally dubious pursuits. Yet for the moment, let’s put aside Bono's blathering public persona—his extra-musical forays into politics, policy, and wraparound-specs addiction—and just talk about the music and its impact on the culture. in the era of 99 cent downloads, U2 continues to conceive of albums as long-form journeys, with individual songs—like chapters in a novel, scenes in a film, or members of a band—contributing to a greater whole. They’ve always thrived on both consistency and change, applying a surprisingly strict formula to their albums while challenging one another to evolve, adapt, and reinvent their sound. And rather than choose between art and commerce, they’ve almost naively struck a course between the two. Especially today, with music acts either serving the marketplace or accepting their niche, U2 has no peer. I listened to every album, B-side, and soundtrack song, watched every music video, movie, live clip, and costume change. If you’re a fan, let’s compare notes. It you’re not, I’ll tell you what you’ve missed.

You can read the complete essay here.

www.slate.com

Lanois looks back on U2's 'Baby'

Daniel Lanois (L) on U2's "Achtung Baby" recording sessions: "There was a certain kind of aggression in the air." (Reuters file photo)

There's an adage: If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made.

To their credit, the young U2 never went that route. Their emotions were genuine, their motives pure. And in the '80s, their earnest anthems made them the most vital, relevant band in rock.

But by 1990, even U2 were tired of U2. The grim B&W photos, the giant white flags, the rhetoric; it reached its zenith with 1987's Grammy-winning Joshua Tree. After that, they could only go down. And they did, pushed and pursued by charges of megalomania for the Americana-obsessed Rattle and Hum, which critically crashed and burned. Finally, during a New Year's Eve gig in Dublin, Bono announced it was "the end of something" for U2, and that they were off "to dream it all up again."

What they dreamed up was Achtung Baby, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It was their seventh album. Some say it's their best. It was certainly pivotal. It was here they reinvented their sound. They reinvented their band. And with the help of The Fly and MacPhisto, they finally figured out how to fake it. But they weren't faking sincerity, they were faking insincerity. "I'm learning to lie," claims a mischievous Bono in a vintage documentary in the new Achtung Baby box set reissue. Truer words were never spoken.

U2's sonic and stylistic rebirth began in an unlikely setting: Post-unification East Berlin. They holed up in Hansa, birthplace of albums like Bowie's Heroes and Iggy's Lust for Life. They rounded up the usual suspects -- producers Brian Eno, Flood and Hamilton's Daniel Lanois. They began chopping down The Joshua Tree.

"It was very stark," recalls Lanois. "It was cold and the food was bad. We had no windows in the studio; it was an orchestral room with a control room down the hall. We were communicating by camera ... But that's Bono; he tries to place everybody in an unfamiliar environment so they don't fall into the same old habits. And I think his instinct was right."

By all accounts -- except Lanois, who recalls "a lot of cuddling" -- early sessions were tense and unproductive, as the band tinkered with synths and beatboxes, exploring dance and funk grooves. "We were starting to go a little more -- for the lack of another term -- industrial with our sounds," Lanois says. "There was a certain kind of aggression in the air."

The break came when guitarist Edge stumbled on the chords for One.

Much of the song was penned on the spot. Others followed: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Until the End of the World, Mysterious Ways and more. Lyrically, the tone was deeper and darker, more personal than political. Musically, says Lanois, it balanced past and future, humanity and technology.

"I like the fact that we were able to mix flesh and machine successfully. I listened to it from beginning to end a couple of months back, and as I hear the record now, the rhythm section is pretty much rock 'n' roll. The sounds of the rhythm section are not the futuristic sounds. The toppings are the futuristic sounds. So it's very rooted in tradition, and looking toward the future."

Is it time for U2 to call it a day?

Neil McCormick gives us his view on the last "talks" about the possibility of U2 coming to an end.

The Edge and Bono have also contributed to the plot and dialogue (Photo: Getty)

There has been a lot of internet chatter about whether U2 are breaking up, following comments from Bono in Rolling Stone. He has been talking a lot recently about U2 having been “on the edge of irrelevancy for 20 years” and suggested “We’d be very pleased to end on No Line on the Horizon”. Despite a failure to deliver a hit single and a general perception that it wasn’t a classic, the album has recently reached the five million sales mark, and U2 have just completed the biggest, most technologically ambitious and highest grossing tour in rock history. Q magazine just presented U2 with an award for Greatest Act of the Last 25 years. Might it represent an opportune moment for U2 to bow out?
There is no set process for a band to break up. Usually it happens more or less accidentally and spontaneously, through internal conflict. Often it is accompanied by a decline in popularity and increasing creative divisions. But when you have been together as long as U2 (36 years and counting), and successful throughout your career, a kind of inertia can set in, where the band continues to exist just because, well, it continues to exist.
REM have been widely applauded for their recent decision to disband because of a sense that their best  days were behind them. The Rolling Stones continue despite of it, taking the critical flak to deliver music and entertainment for their massive fan base. You can’t say one is right, and one is wrong – it is each according to his own. But REM are close to U2, and belong to the post punk generation for whom an allegiance to rock bands came with high ideals and a sense of purpose. Talking about REM’s break up on Newsnight this week, Mike Mills explained that “It was an opportunity for us to walk away on our own terms. There are no external forces, no problems, we can walk away as friends and feel like we’ve accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish.”
U2 have certainly accomplished a lot, probably more than they ever dreamt… although they did dream big. I’ve got Bono on tape when Boy came out, in 1980, enthusiastically telling me that one day they would make a record as great as Sergeant Pepper. They’ve been the biggest rock band in the world for much of their career, they have constantly reinvented and reinvigorated themselves musically, done ground breaking and record breaking tours, and been at the centre of political and charitable campaigns that have helped shape the world we live in. I think this is part of the problem, actually, the very cause of the existential crisis the band find themselves in. Bono likes to be at the centre of things, part of the musical, political and cultural conversation. “Lots of people have U2 albums, why they would want another one is a reasonable question,” he admitted recently. “I don’t know if it is possible for us to make something that is current that is meaningful, not just to our audience but to the times we live in. But that’s kind of the job for me.”
U2 have recorded a lot of music over the past couple of years, with a lot of different producers, including new songs with Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton, the cut and paste wizard behind Gnarls Barkley), clubby pop tracks with Red One and meditative, quasi-ambient material with their established team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. I would like to hear those records. But there seems to be little sense in the band camp that this is music the world needs right now, something singular and original and powerful enough to stand up with their very best, as big and bold as the sprawling emotion of Unforgettable Fire, the rough hewn rock of The Joshua Tree, the industrial strength invention of Achtung Baby or killer tunes of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. And so they just keep chipping away, in search of that elusive creative breakthrough. But can a band of super rich middle-aged men ever achieve the creative heights of their youth, when making music really seemed like a matter of life or death?
Bono’s conviction that they have to create something world beating every time effectively creates a rod for their own backs. What bands have ever done their greatest and most resonant work in the middle age of their career?  When U2 made their early classics, they worked day and night in pursuit of an ideal, sacrificing personal time and private lives, giving everything to the cause of the music. Inevitably that is not the case any more. They arrange meetings and recording sessions to fit with their increasingly complex personal schedules.  Their fans may still like to believe that U2 live in Ireland and meet in the local pub or prayer meeting (hence the ludicrously inaccurate tax avoidance charge that keep being made against them). In fact, Bono lives mainly in New York now, The Edge in LA, Adam in London and only Larry remains a more or less full time resident of Dublin. They have all (apart from Adam) got wives and children who need time and attention. They have the kind of extreme wealth that ensures fabulous comfort. And Bono, their driving force, finds his time and energy much diluted by his sprawling range of extra-curricular interests and commitments, particularly political and charitable activities that inspire much antagonism in people who think a rock star should be in the business of making rock music. As Bono recognises, “We’re the most loved and the most hated band on Earth” and a lot of the reasons people don’t like them are actually about him – which he says he understands “because I have to live with me too.”
I was supposed interview Bono last week about the 20th anniversary re-release of Achtung Baby but he called it off because he felt he had done enough promotional work, and needed to take a break. He says he is becoming embarrassed by the amount of focus there is on him, as opposed to the rest of the band. It is a running joke that he sympathises with people who are sick of the sound of his voice, because he is too. And he’s plainly worn out. Or as he put it in an apologetic message: “Flat on my back from exhaustion.”
U2’s two year world tour may have finished in the summer but sometimes I think Bono just doesn’t know how to stop. He has continued his ceaseless globetrotting in connection with all his philanthropic, humanitarian and business commitments. He sang at Steve Jobs memorial in California on October 17, met Nicholas Sarkozky in Paris on the 19th as part of a lobbying group for the Global anti-poverty coalition One ahead of the G20, and was in London a few days later with the rest of U2 to pick up their award from Q magazine. It is hardly surprising that he told Rolling Stone his only future plans were to have some time off: “I want to take my young boys and my wife and just disappear with my iPod Nano and some books and an acoustic guitar.” Then on Monday, this week, he was in Dublin, as part of a delegation trying to convince foreign technology companies to invest in Ireland. He is the rock star who can’t say no.
Which is why, personally, I don’t think U2 are likely to do an REM and retire gracefully. If they ever do go, it will be in a blaze of glory or an act of outrageous folly, broken by their singer’s mad ambition. Right now, it is probably fair to say U2 need a break and the world needs a break from them. But U2 fans have heard these hints of disillusion and dissolution before – notably in 1989, after the excesses of Rattle And Hum, when Bono declared they had to “go away and dream it all up again.” They came back with Achtung Baby in 1991, probably their finest moment.
From my experience, what they tend to do is manufacture a sense of crisis to drive them. Edge refers to it as jeopardy, a constant buzzword in his discussions of their creative process. U2 need to feel that there are things at stake when they are writing and recording, deliberately using tension and risk to maintain focus. This, presumably, gets harder the more successful and comfortable individuals get. When Bono declares U2 to be on “the edge of irrelevance”, what he is really doing is raising the stakes for himself and his band, shoving them rudely out  of their comfort zone.
U2 are in temporary retreat while their leader recharges his batteries, but his own self-questioning is not actually an indication of disillusion, but an instigation to action. Fans worrying that Bono’s remarks suggest U2 are about to call it a day could not be more wrong. What he really wants to do, indeed what he feels he needs to do, is for U2 “to go away and create the album of their lives.”
I don’t know if it is possible for a band with their long history to reinvent themselves again. But, like millions of other fans, I want to hear them try.

www.telegraph.co.uk

AB: Rolling Stone Review

Achtung Baby (20th Anniversary Edition)

U2

by: Andy Greene

At the dawn of the 1990s, most of the biggest bands in the world – Def Leppard, INXS, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Poison – marched blindly into the new decade, releasing a watereddown retread of their last album. Not U2. Abandoning the stadium-size sincerity of LPs like The Joshua Tree, they went to Berlin, drew on krautrock and club music and created what Bono called "probably the heaviest record we've ever made" – a barrage of irony, distortion and still-huge hooks.
This deluxe box set features both Achtung Baby and its spacedisco follow-up, 1993's Zooropa, along with B sides, remixes, previously unreleased outtakes and aKindergarten disc, basically an early version of Achtung Baby. The best of the unheard tracks may be "Down All the Days," an early version of "Numb" with Bono on vocals instead of the Edge. Others are more interesting than thrilling, like "Oh Berlin," a soaring ode to the birthplace of Achtung Baby, and "Heaven and Hell," a moody synth number with some unexpected doo-wop flavor. A few tracks on Kindergarten sound nearly identical to the final versions; others went through major restructuring: In its early form, "One" sounds like a campfire singalong. The bonus material is not essential listening, but since U2 rarely pull back the curtain on their creative process, it's fascinating to hear this rough draft of history.

www.rollingstone.com

Behind the scenes on U2's Q magazine cover shoot

Behind the scenes with U2 on the cover shoot for the latest issue of Q, Q305 which is out now.  Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr shot it  in Montreal earlier this year for the issue which not only sees the band discussing their Achtung Baby reissue and their future, but which comes with a special version of the iconic album that features the likes of Patti Smith, Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Jack White and more covering tracks from the record. 



More details,here. 

Adam Talks on BBC 6

Huey Morgan ( frontman of Fun Lovin' Criminals) covers Lauren (of the Lauren Laverne show)  and is joined by Adam Clayton of U2. The band release the 20th Anniversary edtion of their seminal album Achtung Baby next week, and their bassist joins Huey to tell all about how the most important album of their lives came together.
There is the first airing of an unreleased song called "Blow your House Down" which is now part of the new album.


The audio will only  be available for seven days on the BBC6 website.


www.bbc.co.uk

More Achtung Baby Covers

Glasvegas playing "Acrobat".




Nine Inch Nails playing "Zoo Station"









And one of the most awaited ones, at least by me, Gavin Friday singing "The Fly"







youtube user:  ToneNoir

Bono´s "Bongolese"

'Ah this is Bongolese... this is how they write their songs.'

Making the new documentary to mark the 20th anniversary of Achtung Baby, Director Davis Guggenheim discovered how the band write their songs.

www.u2.com/you tube user, U2hellas

If we don't come up with a good reason to make a new album..."

...we should just f*** off' ended Bono in an interview for  Irish Times. (Brian Boyd) 

Bono ,Adam Clayton, Edge and Larry Mullen in Morocco at the time of Achtung Baby. Photographs: Fred Dufour/AFP/ Getty Images and Anton Corbijn

'Achtung Baby’ was the making of U2. As the album is rereleased after 20 years, alongside a film about the band, Bono and Edge recall the turmoil that surrounded the recording and talk about their future

IT’S WHEN THREE glasses are raised to toast “12-step programmes” that you realise perhaps one too many cocktails has been taken. It’s a bar in Toronto and the caipirinhas were Bono’s idea, with Edge not slow to get his round in. “If we don’t come up with a very good reason to make a new album, we should just f*** off,” says Bono. “Why does anyone need a new U2 album?”

For the first time in their 35-year career the notoriously “faster, stronger, higher” band have put the brakes on and taken a long look in the rear-view mirror. A new film about the band, From the Sky Down , documents how their huge success in the 1980s provoked a bout of self-loathing and almost broke up the band as they struggled to stay true to their vision of a band forged in the white heat of Dublin’s punk/new wave movement.

To mark the 20th-anniversary rerelease of their key Achtung Baby album, U2 had a rush of blood to the head. They decided to open their archives and cede editorial control to the Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim to make a film ostensibly about the troubled gestation period of Achtung Baby . The result was something very different.

“Watching From the Sky Down the first time made for painful viewing. I hated it,” says Bono. “U2 never look back. It’s never been what this band is about. Edge will tell you that when we put together our best-of collections he forced me – actually had to physically force me – to listen to them before they went out. I’ve never been interested in what we have done. I’m interested only in what we’re about to do. But I think there comes a time when it actually becomes dysfunctional not to look into the past, and for the Achtung Baby album we made an exception.

“The film is not about us per se. It’s about how bands function – or, in this case, don’t function. But when I saw it first I just saw these four people talking intensely about their music, and, really, does the world need that at this time? Davis didn’t tell us he was going into our past to put a context on what really happened to the band after the success of The Joshua Tree and how bad things were in Berlin when we started to make Achtung Baby . He didn’t tell us because we wouldn’t have agreed. Now that I’ve seen it a few times I realise it is actually about the creative process. Let’s face it, the era of rock music is going to end soon, and if you are interested in rock music and rock bands you’ll be interested in their internal dynamics: what makes a rock band tick, the tribal aspect, the idea of the clan. The irony for me now is that we made Achtung Baby to set fire to our earnestness and now here’s this very earnest film about the making of the album.

“We held back nothing from Davis. We opened up our archives to him and he really had carte blanche. The first time I saw it I was going, ‘Oh no, no, no,’ and I went to him and made a few suggestions as to the changes I wanted. There was no battle of wills. He just didn’t even get into a discussion with me. He didn’t change anything. But I was looking at it, going, ‘Why is this film talking about Cedarwood Road [where he grew up], the Baggot Inn and my grandmother? I thought we were making a film about the Achtung Baby album. What is going on here?’ ”

What is going on in the film is a look at how a band who shared musical DNA with Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire ended up sitting at music’s high table alongside Elton John and Dire Straits – but without the AOR table manners. A generation before Nirvana dragged alt-rock into the musical and media mainstream, this punk-theatric band ended up on the cover of Time magazine, in April 1987, as “Rock’s Hottest Ticket” and selling out arenas around the world.

Disgusted with the idea of being rock idols and disillusioned by their stadium-rock billing, they were at breaking point. “We were carrying Catholic guilt around – the sin of success,” says Bono. “We had emerged from playing with The [Virgin] Prunes and hanging around the Project Arts Centre getting mime lessons from Mannix Flynn. And the context here is that the musical scene we came from had this very Maoist music press. There were certain canon laws: thou shalt not go platinum; thou shalt not play in a stadium or an arena; thou shalt not go to America; thou shalt not be careerist. If you even thought about those things you had committed a sin.”

DESPERATE NOT TO turn into a cigarette-lighter-in-the-air stadium-rock band, U2 boarded the last flight to East Berlin just before Germany reunified, in 1990. It was one of the harshest Berlin winters, their recording studio, Hansa, was a former SS ballroom, their hotel was rubbish and they had no songs. “On a scale of one to 10 we were at a nine for breaking up,” says Bono.

For Edge, U2 were over the moment they walked into Hansa – or, at least, Rattle and Hum U2 were over. “It would have been insanity for us to have stayed in Rattle and Hum mode; that was a wonderful, great little aside, but it was never who we really were,” says the guitarist. “Who we really are is all about the future and innovation. We were getting a bit purist and a bit ‘disciplist’ about roots music, but we needed to become disciples of what is coming next. I arrived in Berlin with drum machines and loops, telling everyone what was happening in Manchester,” he says, referring to the Hacienda nightclub and to The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, among other bands. “I was also big into industrial music, but the producer of the album, Danny Lanois, was going, ‘Okay, this all sounds interesting, but show us where it’s going musically.’ And I couldn’t.”

Things deteriorated rapidly. As Bono has it, while outside they were tearing down the Berlin Wall, U2 were building their own wall inside Hansa. On one side were the so-called traditionalists: Adam, Larry and Lanois; on the other, Bono and Edge were throwing club- culture and dance-rhythm shapes. Bono had always felt aggrieved that whenever a club DJ would play a U2 song, it would empty the dance floor. He wanted to make U2’s music sexy.

“To Danny Lanois, from his perspective, we were kindred spirits to his love of roots music,” says Edge. “He loved the organic feel to our music, the material that was on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree . But no one knew how to make the bits of new material we had into U2 songs. The first two weeks were a nightmare. Everything we tried would just nosedive. It got to the stage where we lost trust in each other . . . and there was a clear dilemma.

“There were options: one was to see whether U2 could absorb new material and make it their own, or whether U2 as a band were inflexible and couldn’t stretch. The other option was to throw out all the material, start again and . . . extend the line-up or bring in other musicians.”

With the band having to take some very hard decisions about continuing to flail around in the studio or just cancelling everything, a deus ex machina arrived in the shape of the discarded second bridge from a song called Sick Puppy (later renamed Mysterious Ways ). That bridge was shaped into the intro for a new song,One . “As soon as One came into that room it stabilised everything,” says Bono. “Everyone just sort of surrendered after we had that. By surrendering, we got over the hump.”

With a song to anchor the album, they returned to Dublin for Christmas and finished off the album in a rented house in Dalkey, in south Co Dublin.

Released in 1991, and hailed as a triumphant reinvention, Achtung Baby sold more than 20 million copies. It remains their most important album, and the resulting tour, Zoo TV, changed how live rock music would be presented and experienced.

It’s dark outside in Toronto now, and an interview that began in sunshine has gone way over time. There’s just one more thing. It may well be an act of lese-majesty, but here goes: one possible interpretation of the film, Bono, is that, without Edge, you’d still be in the Baggot Inn. “Sure,” he says, nodding.

“That’s a lovely thing to say,” says Edge. “But I don’t think that’s true. It’s symbiotic. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without Bono, and I think that’s reciprocal. He makes me great. I help him to be great.”

Before they descend into you’re-my-best-friend territory, we slip away. Bono is saying, “Being in U2 is like being in the priesthood. There’s only one way out. And that’s in a coffin.”

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Achtung Baby is rereleased next Friday in five formats, including a remastered CD and a six-CD, four-DVD edition that includes the film From the Sky Down