Guitarist also reveals status of band's upcoming 'Songs of Experience' LP and discusses rare songs fans might get to hear live
Since their formation in 1976, U2 have aggressively avoided any move that even hints at nostalgia. But this year they're going to finally look back by taking their 1987 masterpiece The Joshua Tree on tour in stadiums across America and Europe in honor of the album's 30th anniversary. It's a chance for the band to re-connect with fans after the rather disappointing reception to their 2014 LP Songs of Innocence, and it gives them a chance to hit the road while continuing to put the finishing touches on their upcoming album Songs of Experience. A couple of weeks before the shows were formally announced, U2 guitarist the Edge phoned up Rolling Stone to talk about the tour, reviving rare songs onstage, their next album, Donald Trump and much more.
Can you give me some background on how this tour came together?
Well, when we came off the last tour, the Innocence and Experience indoor tour, we headed straight into finishing the second album of that set, Songs of Experience, which we were pretty much complete with after a couple of weeks of the final touches leading up to the end of the year. And then the election [happened] and suddenly the world changed. We just went, "Hold on a second – we've got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what's going on in the world." That's because it was written mostly, I mean, 80 percent of it was started before 2016, but most of it was written in the early part of 2016, and now, as I think you'd agree, the world is a different place.
You're talking about Trump and Brexit?
The Trump election. It's like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction. So, anyway, we then were looking at the anniversary of The Joshua Tree, and another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle, if you want. That record was written in the mid-Eighties, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. Thatcher was in the throes of trying to put down the miners' strike; there was all kinds of shenanigans going on in Central America. It feels like we're right back there in a way. I don't think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, "Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four years ago." And so it was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realization that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.
So we said look, "Look, let's do both. We can really celebrate this album, which is really born again in this context, and we can also really get a chance to think about these songs and make sure they're really what we want to put out." So the two sort of coincided and we decided we were gonna do some shows. And we've never given ourselves the opportunity to celebrate our past because we've always as a band looked forward, but I think we felt that this was a special moment, and this was a very special record. So we're happy to take this moment to regroup and think about an album that's so many years old, but still seems relevant.
Are you going to play the album in sequence at the shows?
I believe we will, and I say "believe we will" because that is certainly the working assumption right now. The show might not necessarily start with Track One, Side One, "Where the Streets Have No Name," because we feel like maybe we need to build up to that moment, so we're still in the middle of figuring out exactly how the running order will go, so yes. We will be playing the album in sequence.
The fans are going to be thrilled. There's many songs you haven't played in decades. Then there's "Red Hill Mining Town," which you've never played.
That's true. I had a couple of days at the end of a studio session where I was listening to that song and working on guitar parts for it, which I hadn't thought about for so many years. That tune in itself is just right slap-bang in some ways what's going on with the U.K. It's not quite as intense, but there's industrial action breaking out all over the U.K. for the first time in generations. It's not exactly a repeat of the Winter of Discontent, but it's wild those issues are coming back. It does seem like politics is polarized in so many parts of the developing world to an extent that I find worrying. I'm sure most people do. Those days were difficult, dark times, and personally we really would hate to see it go back there.
Why do you think that's the only song on the album you never bothered to play live? Is it difficult to play or difficult for Bono to sing?
I think it was probably one of those songs that due to tempo and arrangement never found a place within the live set. It's funny, sometimes great songs ... Think of a live show as an ecosystem. You've got niches to fill. There are uptempo, fast, dramatic songs and those are crucial. Then there are sort of more medium-tempo songs and no matter how great they are, sometimes you just can't find a place for them. So I don't think it was anything more complicated than that. But listening back to it I was like, "Wow, this is, I'm really …"
You may not know this, but within a few days of finishing the album, "Red Hill Mining Town" was our leading contender for the first single. We went ahead and made a video for it with Neil Jordan and we were very pretty confident about it. Then as the weeks went by and we sort of got back our objectivity, views started to change and it became "With or Without You," and I think we were correct.
Then there's "Exit" and "Trip Through Your Wires," which you haven't done since the 1980s. And there's "In God's Country," which has only been done acoustically a handful of times. It'll be great hearing those again.
Yeah. They're all so diverse. That's the thing about The Joshua Tree. It's a very broad, CinemaScope kind of record. At the time we were thinking about it in cinematic terms. I mean, so much of the photographs that goes with the album, the scope was cinematic. We were thinking about songs from that standpoint. And also the literary inspirations and references. In fact, the original working title of "Exit" was "Executioner's Song" because we were using a lot of literature as our jumping off point for the songs in terms of just taking our work in a slightly different direction.
We definitely were falling into the arms of America in the sense that, as a band, punk rock was so much about establishing a unique form of music not inspired or influenced by American music. If you listen to our early records, you can hear the influence of a lot of German contemporary music at the time. A lot of U.K. bands were listening to the same music. The Joshua Tree was the first album where we consciously went, "OK, we spent like four albums thinking about Europe, Ireland, but let's take a look at the roots of this form that we are inevitably a part of." And those were all American.
So we looked at American [music]. We looked at the blues. We looked at the New Journalism. I remember that myself and Bono were reading Flannery O'Connor, the Southern writers. It was a conscious effort to look across the Atlantic and to start to explore America. I mean, for someone from Ireland, it is a vast source of ideas and aspirations and inspirations and generations, America being the Promised Land. We're looking at it in that regard, but also at what America really was. I read about the Soledad Brothers. I read about the Black Panthers. We were exploring America from all kinds of angles. And this time was a Reagan moment where, in some ways, the vision of what America would be seemed under threat. The America of Thomas Jefferson, the America of John F. Kennedy, these were visionaries talking about the ideals of what America can be. We were grappling with those big ideas and now here we are again. It's crazy.
Since their formation in 1976, U2 have aggressively avoided any move that even hints at nostalgia. But this year they're going to finally look back by taking their 1987 masterpiece The Joshua Tree on tour in stadiums across America and Europe in honor of the album's 30th anniversary. It's a chance for the band to re-connect with fans after the rather disappointing reception to their 2014 LP Songs of Innocence, and it gives them a chance to hit the road while continuing to put the finishing touches on their upcoming album Songs of Experience. A couple of weeks before the shows were formally announced, U2 guitarist the Edge phoned up Rolling Stone to talk about the tour, reviving rare songs onstage, their next album, Donald Trump and much more.
Can you give me some background on how this tour came together?
Well, when we came off the last tour, the Innocence and Experience indoor tour, we headed straight into finishing the second album of that set, Songs of Experience, which we were pretty much complete with after a couple of weeks of the final touches leading up to the end of the year. And then the election [happened] and suddenly the world changed. We just went, "Hold on a second – we've got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what's going on in the world." That's because it was written mostly, I mean, 80 percent of it was started before 2016, but most of it was written in the early part of 2016, and now, as I think you'd agree, the world is a different place.
You're talking about Trump and Brexit?
The Trump election. It's like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction. So, anyway, we then were looking at the anniversary of The Joshua Tree, and another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle, if you want. That record was written in the mid-Eighties, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. Thatcher was in the throes of trying to put down the miners' strike; there was all kinds of shenanigans going on in Central America. It feels like we're right back there in a way. I don't think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, "Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four years ago." And so it was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realization that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.
So we said look, "Look, let's do both. We can really celebrate this album, which is really born again in this context, and we can also really get a chance to think about these songs and make sure they're really what we want to put out." So the two sort of coincided and we decided we were gonna do some shows. And we've never given ourselves the opportunity to celebrate our past because we've always as a band looked forward, but I think we felt that this was a special moment, and this was a very special record. So we're happy to take this moment to regroup and think about an album that's so many years old, but still seems relevant.
Are you going to play the album in sequence at the shows?
I believe we will, and I say "believe we will" because that is certainly the working assumption right now. The show might not necessarily start with Track One, Side One, "Where the Streets Have No Name," because we feel like maybe we need to build up to that moment, so we're still in the middle of figuring out exactly how the running order will go, so yes. We will be playing the album in sequence.
The fans are going to be thrilled. There's many songs you haven't played in decades. Then there's "Red Hill Mining Town," which you've never played.
That's true. I had a couple of days at the end of a studio session where I was listening to that song and working on guitar parts for it, which I hadn't thought about for so many years. That tune in itself is just right slap-bang in some ways what's going on with the U.K. It's not quite as intense, but there's industrial action breaking out all over the U.K. for the first time in generations. It's not exactly a repeat of the Winter of Discontent, but it's wild those issues are coming back. It does seem like politics is polarized in so many parts of the developing world to an extent that I find worrying. I'm sure most people do. Those days were difficult, dark times, and personally we really would hate to see it go back there.
Why do you think that's the only song on the album you never bothered to play live? Is it difficult to play or difficult for Bono to sing?
I think it was probably one of those songs that due to tempo and arrangement never found a place within the live set. It's funny, sometimes great songs ... Think of a live show as an ecosystem. You've got niches to fill. There are uptempo, fast, dramatic songs and those are crucial. Then there are sort of more medium-tempo songs and no matter how great they are, sometimes you just can't find a place for them. So I don't think it was anything more complicated than that. But listening back to it I was like, "Wow, this is, I'm really …"
You may not know this, but within a few days of finishing the album, "Red Hill Mining Town" was our leading contender for the first single. We went ahead and made a video for it with Neil Jordan and we were very pretty confident about it. Then as the weeks went by and we sort of got back our objectivity, views started to change and it became "With or Without You," and I think we were correct.
Then there's "Exit" and "Trip Through Your Wires," which you haven't done since the 1980s. And there's "In God's Country," which has only been done acoustically a handful of times. It'll be great hearing those again.
Yeah. They're all so diverse. That's the thing about The Joshua Tree. It's a very broad, CinemaScope kind of record. At the time we were thinking about it in cinematic terms. I mean, so much of the photographs that goes with the album, the scope was cinematic. We were thinking about songs from that standpoint. And also the literary inspirations and references. In fact, the original working title of "Exit" was "Executioner's Song" because we were using a lot of literature as our jumping off point for the songs in terms of just taking our work in a slightly different direction.
We definitely were falling into the arms of America in the sense that, as a band, punk rock was so much about establishing a unique form of music not inspired or influenced by American music. If you listen to our early records, you can hear the influence of a lot of German contemporary music at the time. A lot of U.K. bands were listening to the same music. The Joshua Tree was the first album where we consciously went, "OK, we spent like four albums thinking about Europe, Ireland, but let's take a look at the roots of this form that we are inevitably a part of." And those were all American.
So we looked at American [music]. We looked at the blues. We looked at the New Journalism. I remember that myself and Bono were reading Flannery O'Connor, the Southern writers. It was a conscious effort to look across the Atlantic and to start to explore America. I mean, for someone from Ireland, it is a vast source of ideas and aspirations and inspirations and generations, America being the Promised Land. We're looking at it in that regard, but also at what America really was. I read about the Soledad Brothers. I read about the Black Panthers. We were exploring America from all kinds of angles. And this time was a Reagan moment where, in some ways, the vision of what America would be seemed under threat. The America of Thomas Jefferson, the America of John F. Kennedy, these were visionaries talking about the ideals of what America can be. We were grappling with those big ideas and now here we are again. It's crazy.
