'Swept Off Our Feet...'

'Swept Off Our Feet...'

'Summer I was fearless

Now I speak into an answer phone

Like every falling leaf on the breeze

Winter wouldn’t leave it alone...'

Powerful performance of Every Breaking Wave for the 2014 MTV EMA in Glasgow last night. 

 'Bono took to the stage with the band’s guitarist, The Edge, who played piano during the performance shortly after the show’s host, Nicki Minaj, accepted the award for Best Hip-Hop.

 'The band silenced the SSE Hydro with Bono showing off his incredible vocal ability dressed in a black leather jacket, jeans and wearing his signature sunglasses.'

Universal Italy has called "Every Breaking Wave" U2's next single. The label announced that Sunday on its Facebook page.

www.u2.com//http://www.mtv.co.uk/

U2 are heading for the Glasgow MTV EMAs

Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen were announced as performers via MTV EMAs official Twitter account today.

The group released their 13th studio album Songs of Innocence via iTunes back in September.

The release made the album available to over 500 million iTunes customers for free.

This will be the fourth time U2 have been part of the MTV EMA, having performed in Rotterdam in 1997, Stockholm in 2000 and from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in 2009.

On Sunday hip hop superstar Nicki Minaj the award show and also perform on the night joining a cast of other confirmed performers including Enrique Iglesias, Calvin Harris, Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, Charli XCX, Kiesza and Royal Blood.

Rock legend Ozzy Osbourne will also be honoured with the Global Icon Award.

Councillor Gordon Matheson, Leader of Glasgow City Council and Chair of Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, said: “Today’s exciting announcement that U2 – one of the biggest names in music – is to join the incredible list of acts already confirmed to perform at the MTV EMA this weekend will come as welcome news to music fans across the city. In a little over 48 hours’ time, this year’s EMA will showcase Glasgow to more than half a billion households through MTV’s global network of channels, reinforcing our enviable reputation as a world-class music destination.”

Edge on Homelessness and What He Is Listening Now

The Edge, producer of Friday night's MTV special on youth homelessness, "The Break," says he, too, sometimes finds himself at a loss about how to help people on the street.

"There's that awful thing where you realize there's nothing you can do, right at that moment, so you kind of pretend they're not there," he told TheWrap. "And I think for somebody who's homeless, particularly someone who's panhandling, that's the most emotionally difficult thing, is to become like a non-person. Like you literally do not exist to someone walking by.

"And I understand both sides," he added. "The person passing by just doesn't know what to do. So they end up blanking the homeless person. And it's a terrible thing to see happen. I've been guilty of it myself from time to time."

The musician and activist, who says he usually does give money to the homeless people he encounters, has spent three decades working on social causes like African famine relief as a member of his band. U2, the biggest touring act of 2011, has campaigned for causes and organizations from Make Poverty History to Amnesty International.

With "The Break," the Edge and host Anne Mahlum, an advocate for the homeless, profile three young people on the street and try to help them rebuild their lives. They include a woman who was involved in abusive relationships, a gifted drummer who suffered a downward spiral, and a woman who left home because her parents objected to her lesbianism. The Edge also wrote a song for the show, "There's No Home Like Place."

The Edge said U2 is "slowly starting to think about work," but the band is in no rush to get back to the studio, despite a wealth of material. Instead, it's listening to a lot of music. After we talked about the special, he told us what he's playing lately.

What interested you about this project?

It was something that just inspired me early on. I was questioning myself about some of my own ways of relating or not relating to homeless people, and it just started me on kind of a journey to answer some questions for myself. And in the process I started thinking about the way that the homeless are really completely marginalized, and in many cases disenfranchised.

They suffer through a lot of stereotypical views about how they got there. What I've learned is there is a myriad of reasons why someone might become homeless. No two stories are the same. I thought that it was time that there was a little bit more of an intelligent sense of inquiry into this problem. It's particularly serious at the moment with the economic downturn.

I thought if we could really make a difference in somebody's life with an intervention, it could be a reality TV kind of thing that would be very uplifting and inspiring, instead of making people view the show and feel better because they see a lot of bad behavior.

But also if somebody's in a position of being homeless, in could be hopefully an inspiring thing to see.
The question of how to help is a particularly interesting dilemma for you. As part of U2 and singularly, you're one of the most approached people in the world to help contribute to causes. And you're also in a unique position to help a lot of people. How do you choose what you're going to do?
I think it's down to feeling like you can move the needle, that you can make a difference. And of course we can't do everything, because then you'd be so diluted that there wouldn't be any kind of impact to your support or involvement. That's an important thing.


And the things that inspire you and the things that you feel moved to become involved with. As with Bono and his Africa work. He happened to be in Africa at a very pivotal time in his life and witnessed a lot of the problems with famine. And it's stayed with him. For me, there was something about the homelessness issue that was like this voice just saying, you've got to try to find some way of getting involved here.


There were a couple of stories as well that sort of inspired me. One Irish homeless man, in Dublin, quite famously rescued the driver of a bus that had plunged into the River Liffey. And he and a passer-by actually climbed down though this wrecked bus because the front of it was in the water but the back of it was accessible from the bridge. And they climbed down through the broken rear window and dragged the bus driver out and saved his life. But he ended up wandering into the night with his wet clothes to sleep rough.


And it just struck me as a kind of really tragic scenario – I wasn't the only one. It was a big story in Ireland.

Not that you've ever suffered through the kinds of struggles that homeless people do, but as a child or when you were trying to get U2 started, was there a time when you felt like you lived close to the margins?

I mean, friends of ours, during the early days, we would hang out in derelict buildings … and all that stuff, which was kind of almost a rite of passage, particularly if you were coming out in a punk band, the punk movement. But no, personally, I can't lay claim ever having had to deal with not having a home. Although there are people I know who've had phases of being homeless, I'm not putting myself forward as an expert in homelessness.

'There are over 1.5 million homeless youth living on the streets, in shelters and couch surfing, in America. Despite the stereotypes, many of them are not addicts, hardened criminals or mentally ill. They come from families who didn’t understand them, some are runaways who could no longer tolerate the abuse in their own homes and some have aged out of the foster care system with no place to go....'


In an MTV documentary, 'The Break', the personal vision of Edge, viewers meet Ava, Nancy and Rob, all without a home to call their own and in desperate need of a change. Like many homeless young people they face a struggle for food and shelter, the dangers of crime and illegal drug use. 


Every day, strangers turn a blind eye, telling themselves the problems are too big to fix. But homeless advocate Anne Mahlum knows different and the documentary reveals what's possible when people find the tools to build a new life.


'I wanted to find the right answer to the question, 'How do we respond to homelessness?' Edge told U2.com, in Dublin to talk about his vision for The Break. 'I wanted to get an intelligent audience to think differently about homeless people, to realise that so many of the cliches are untrue...'


More from Edge, and a clip of the show, in the video below. The Break airs in the US this Friday. Details.


http://www.u2.com/news/title/the-break


www.u2.com/MTV

U2 "Pop": A 21st Century Look

U2 are making their latest comeback. Following Bono's back surgery (which forced the cancellation of their North American tour), the group will hit the road in Europe for a series of dates and be back around the United States next summer. U2 have had a fascinating career, as even though they've been one of the biggest bands in the world for the better part of the past three decades, they have still regularly been cast as underdogs on the comeback trail. Their story arc is remarkable, and it hit an interesting point when they released Pop in 1997.


When you consider most albums, you have to consider the context along with the songs. But in the case of Pop, it's almost all about the context. The last time U2 had appeared, it was a part of the absolutely gigantic ZooTV tour, which at the time was one of the most ambitious stadium-sized rock shows ever produced. It was in support of the hugely successful Achtung Baby, a moody art rock album masquerading as pop music (it helped that "One," the one track on the album that doesn't really fit, was a huge international hit). The band followed Achtung with a pair of strange experiments: 1993's Zooropa, which was an album that leaned heavily on electronics and was written and recorded in between legs of ZooTV, and 1996's Original Soundtracks 1, a heavily ambient album produced by Brian Eno and credited to Passengers (it was so out there that the label didn't want them to release it under their own name).


That meant it had been nearly six years since a "proper" U2 album had been put on the market, so expectations were high. Those expectations were compounded by the fact that in the run-up toPop's release, people were suggesting that U2 had somehow managed to solve the conundrum that was facing rock music at the time. Back in 1996, a reasonable portion of the population believed that dance music was going to take over as the next great underground genre to blow up to stadium size. Everybody was extremely excited about the Prodigy, and the Chemical Brothers were being treated like big time rock stars and not just a pair of DJs. More and more bands were dipping into the electronic pool, augmenting their rock tunes with breakbeats, bits of trip-hop and whatever else floated over from the United Kingdom. It was seen as a conundrum that needed to be solved, as though somebody would eventually crack the code and deliver a song or an album that would successfully bring together the two disparate worlds to create a new genre.


Everybody was convinced that Pop was that album. Before anybody heard any music, people who thought about pop music for a living seemed to think that U2 had solved it, and when they dropped the single "Discotheque" a month before, it seemed like Pop was going to change everything. "Discotheque" grafted some super-distorted guitars, techno-funky bass and a sweaty breakbeat, and it still allowed for a killer chorus it sounded like the collision of modern dance music and rock and roll.


But when the album came out and fans listened to the other 11 songs on the album, there was much confusion. The first three songs on the album — "Discotheque," "Do You Feel Loved" and "Mofo" — made an effort to attach disparate dance genres (like techno, house and drum and bass) to U2's refined approach to stadium rock. The problem is that none of those songs particularly succeed as dance songs or as rock workouts. "Discotheque" runs out of steam, "Do You Feel Loved" isn't dynamic enough and "Mofo" devolves into a beat-happy mess.


And then U2 seem to abandon the premise entirely. Luckily, they do it for the sake of "If God Will Send His Angels" and "Staring at the Sun," neither of which contain very much in the way of electronics but both of which contain blissful melodies and hypnotic hooks. ("If God Will Send His Angels," in particular, seemed to be laying the groundwork for their throwback 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind.) "Gone" is also a spectacular anthem with a giant chorus — in fact, Bono has a great time on Pop, as there are places for him to experiment as well as to hit his usual high notes. (Conversely, the Edge has the roughest time on Pop, as his guitar tones are often subverted, distorted or lost entirely.)




Latter day U2 albums also contain a healthy amount of obsessions with American culture, and Popcontains two such tracks: "Miami" and "The Playboy Mansion." The former is an intense beat experiment that does a lot of swirling but doesn't go much of anywhere, and "The Playboy Mansion" is about the closest thing the band has ever come to making a novelty song. Still, it's charming in spots and has a jaunty little melody.


The album wraps up with the smoldering "If You Wear That Velvet Dress," the lurching "Please" and the sparse, powerful "Wake Up Dead Man." Really, those three songs act as a microcosm for U2's entire career, as it has the right combination of romanticism, Catholicism, passion and darkness. Unfortunately, none of those songs have the sort of sweetness that lurks under even the most militant U2 tunes, which makes for a rather uneven finish to what ends up being a bizarre, disjointed album.


So Pop didn't change the way we think about rock music, nor did it change the way we think about U2 (they ended up really coming back with All That You Can't Leave Behind a few years later). Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. seemed to be distracted by keyboards and irony, which may explain why Pop is by far the most schizophrenic release in U2's canon. It's an interesting entry in the band's history (and a fascinating look at the state of rock music in 1997), but not up there with the essential All That You Can't Leave Behind, Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree.


by Kyle Anderson ,MTV


source:www.mtv.com