INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector DECEMBER 2024 - by Rob Fitzpatrick

RECONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN

Their eleventh studio album, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, found U2 28 years into their career, sliding into their forties and coming off the back of an LP that sold twelve million copies. Fast-forward twenty years and their new release, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, is its shadow record: unissued tracks from circa 2004 that highlight a band building a new pathway, seeking the soul of U2. In these exclusive encounters, Bono offers his thoughts - or "unreliable recollections" - on the album and Adam Clayton explores not just this period but the band's past, present and future But first, The Edge leads Rob Fitzpatrick through the shifting world out of which Atomic exploded...

The Edge - he's been David Howell Evans to an ever-shrinking number of people since the "surrealist street gang" called Lypton Village (members: Bono, Gavin Friday and Guggi from The Virgin Prunes) renamed him some fifty years ago - is at home in Dublin when Record Collector calls.

Truth be told, he looks remarkably like The Edge: black beanie, a well-padded pair of over-ear headphones and a dusting of facial hair. The room he's in is softly lit against the gathering gloom of an autumn evening. There's a low glass table behind him, the suggestion of a piano to his left, a sofa to his right and what looks like a colossal, high-end speaker cabinet by the window, though it could just as well be a piece of figurative art. Or both.

As it happens, we're talking about Echo & The Bunnymen. In January 1983, U2 (due to mime to New Year's Day) and the Liverpudlians (preparing to mime The Cutter) found themselves on the same episode of Top Of The Pops. U2 were in their dressing room, waiting for their time to go up, when they got a knock.

"It was Ian McCulloch," Edge says. "He looks at me and says, 'Why don't we fuck them up,' you know? 'Let's fucking have a bit of fun. Why don't we have Will play with you and you can play with us?'"

As those were the days of backing tracks, it wasn't undoable and the Dublin band did think it would be fun, "But then we went, yeah," Edge grimaces, "except they'll never fucking have us back!"

Forty-one years later, Edge says there's still a part of him that thinks they should have done it. "We loved - and still do love - the Bunnymen, but we thought if we did that, it would be the end of everything."

Of course, we now know it was barely the beginning of everything. "Bands like the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Wire were a real throwdown challenge for us," he says. "It was like, 'Holy shit, this is serious.'" Edge mentions his love for The Skids, which reminds RC that Sounds writer Betty Page called U2 "the Irish Skids" in a glowing review of their debut album in October 1980 (though she also thought that Bono "owes more to Billy Idol than Richard Jobson.") "That whole Celtic thing," Edge enthuses, smiling now. "Simple Minds and The Waterboys? All those bands were inspiring for us."

More recently this room has felt some of those inspirations again as Edge has been revisiting and collating the tracks that make up How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, a companion piece to U2's 2004 album, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. Made up of rare and unreleased tracks, some of Re-Assemble's unearthed pieces, like the Hunky Dory-goes-garage rock sass of Picture Of You, the psychedelic shimmer of Evidence Of Life and the tight-but-loose strut of Are We Gonna Wait Forever? have distinct echoes of the energy and vitality of U2's '80s compatriots.

But none of these tracks made it onto the final album, a fact perhaps explained by something Edge said around the time of Dismantle's original release: "There's no such thing as an easy album - at times it seemed like we were getting nowhere."

Should you need proof of this statement, the album - the band's eleventh - has six producers listed, from Pistols, Beatles, Roxy Music and Pink Floyd man Chris Thomas to Carl Glanville, who'd ascended from his basecamp roots as assistant engineer at PWL working on Mandy Smith and Kylie Minogue records to the rarified mountain tops where Michael Jackson and Billy Joel (and U2) dwell. Back in early 2003, the band, focused on making a full-on guitar record that would, they trusted, cement their Biggest Band In The World status, began work with Chris at the boards. "The intention was a rock'n'roll feeling," Edge said at the time, but that didn't mean it would be easy.

"I'd come with some ideas," he says now, under the warm glow of a desk lamp. "I had one which I'd worked up over some of Larry [Mullen Jr]'s drum loops. When you go in to start an album, you need one or two of the columns of this new building to start with, and that was one of those."

They had another song, City Of Blinding Lights, which they'd started on during the making of the Pop album with Flood, but they hadn't finished. They liked that one a lot. But there was a problem.

"We had a lot of these very basic ideas to play with," Edge says. "And with Chris, we struggled because our songs were really out of focus. We hadn't figured them out fully and I think he was used to having more to work with. He's a producer - he wants to hear songs!"

Was he surprised by the fact that you had a couple of tracks, but the rest of them were, basically, sketches? Edge pauses for a second. "I think every band is idiosyncratic," he says, "and we are certainly as idiosyncratic as they come. We have clear strengths and weaknesses as musicians. Chris brought us an immense amount; we learned an awful lot from him. But when it came to the visceral band in the room thing, we over-emphasised our songwriterly methodology and didn't trust enough the raw energy of what a band can do."

On listening again to the work the band did during those early sessions and hearing them afresh, Edge wonders aloud, "How did we miss the qualities that these had as songs? I wouldn't say we were panicking, but we were trying desperately to get something we could show Chris, and say, 'Look, this is pretty close! Let's work on it!'"

When you were working with Chris, RC asks, was it Sex Pistols Chris, Beatles Chris or Pink Floyd Chris you wanted?

"All the above," Edge smiles. "But it was for sure that visceral band sound, that Steve Jones on Never Mind The Bollocks guitar tone we wanted. That energy is gold. But The Beatles, of course, as well - they invented the whole playbook."

But, of course, it wouldn't be that simple. Is it ever? After nine months in the studio, with a full album recorded, the band met up in Dublin to assess the situation. Bono and Edge wanted to put it out. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen didn't, the latter telling writer Neil McCormick a few years later the songs, "had no magic".

"Some of it was really great," Edge says now. "But we recognised that we hadn't got to where we felt we wanted to get to, so we decided to start Act 2 of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb."

So, the band parted ways with Chris Thomas and reached out to Steve Lillywhite, the man who'd produced their first three albums and returned to work on 1991's Achtung Baby. Determined to not repeat the previous year's disappointing results, Edge says a "huge amount of effort went in" before Lillywhite even arrived to make sure the band got their act together.

On demoing Evidence Of Life, Edge had persuaded himself - wrongly, he thinks now - that it was way too close to one of 2003's most monstrous hits. "I thought, 'Oh, shit, man, it's just like [White Stripes'] 7 Nation Army!' Now, looking back, I can see it's nothing like that. But it felt so at the time, so I abandoned it. With the benefit of objectivity and hindsight, actually we were onto something and it's strange to see how relevant these songs are to what's happening today."

The guitarist has been listening to a couple of Irish punk bands recently. "Particularly [Galway's] Shark School and [Limerick's] 50 Foot Woman," he says. "That raw band-in-a-room sound is coming back at a grassroots level and that's lovely to see." Edge laughs when he recalls he and Bono playing Re-Assemble for Noel Gallagher earlier this year. "Noel's reaction was, 'I want my money back! I bought the Dismantle CD believing you'd put all the best songs on it!'"

• • •

In early 2004, U2 reconvened and started again. At first, they even contemplated writing entirely new material, but it was a combination of some new songs and also one of Steve Lillywhite's first suggestions, which turned out to be the album's turning point.

The band listened again to the raw and energetic demos, one of which was Edge's tune that he'd built over Larry's drums. By the time they had recorded it "properly" it became a much more melodious, but much less immediate, song called Native Son. With Bono away for a few days, Lillywhite suggested they recut it from the ground up. The following day, Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr and Edge recorded three backing tracks. Bono came in the next day, took a listen and started singing what he'd already created for the song, but very quickly realised this new piece needed something "more surprising, more energised". With the singer improvising off the track's explosiveness, the song became Vertigo and, with it, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb began to take shape, the one song becoming emblematic of what the album was to be.

"That immediate, post-punk feel," Edge suggests. "That sound we were hearing in bands like The White Stripes, The Hives, The Vines and The Strokes."

Asked how conscious he is when writing and creating a new set of songs that there are certain musical avenues you're going to have to go down to fulfil not only your needs and your wants, but also what a massive crowd's going to want to hear, Edge takes a beat before replying.

"That's true," he says. "You can't kid yourself, you know? There's those songs that are resonant and have vitality and climbing onstage without songs that have that quality is much more of a scary prospect than if you do have them, so that aspect of 'casting' songs is there for sure. Those surprises, those unexpected twists, are still really important to us as a band, because that's when we get really excited. Unfortunately, we don't have a genre we can rely on - there's no such thing as the U2 genre."

If there was, RC asks, what might it be? "Well," he laughs. "I can tell you this. Recently I've been experimenting with AI composition, and I promise you there is no way to get AI to make a U2 track. It doesn't exist!"

If it ever did exist, Steve Lillywhite would be able to bring it out of them and soon new songs would grow out of old, while fresh ideas would turn into fully fleshed-out pieces. Miracle Drug - produced by Lillywhite, Carl Glanville, and Garret "Jacknife" Lee - started out as a song that Bono was writing about the work being done with antiretroviral drugs in Africa and the lack of funding and support for a pandemic that was ravaging the continent. Then the lyrics took a turn and, as Edge says, "We personalised it."

Irish poet and author Christopher Nolan had been a schoolmate of Edge and Bono. Born with cerebral palsy, he later wrote, "an incredible book" called The Dam-Burst Of Dreams. "He couldn't actually communicate," Edge says. "But his mother believed that she saw the spark of intelligence and understanding in his eyes. So, she mounted a campaign to try and help her son find a way to communicate, and eventually they came up with some drugs that steadied his shaking to the extent that they could place a unicorn pointer on his head so that he could type."

It turned out that Nolan was not only awake and aware, but he'd been writing poetry and prose in his head for years. "There was this dam-burst of dreams," Edge says. "An outpouring of all these years of ideas and thoughts and these were the inspirations that we folded into Miracle Drug. I've always felt, maybe the music didn't quite do the lyric justice. But in that moment, you just have to go with what you've got."

Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own arrived feeling so familiar that Edge thought maybe they'd already written it. One of the first songs the band would play to Lillywhite, he immediately identified the problem - the lack of a first part of a verse - meaning the band could quickly nail the piece. "Sometimes," Edge says, "songwriting is so confounding. You're too close and you cannot see what's needed - that's why a great producer like Steve is of huge value."

Another great producer can be heard at the very start of Love And Peace, Or Else, his one track on Dismantle. "Yeah, that's Brian [Eno]," Edge smiles. "He created this beautiful, crazy, sort of threatening, low-end synth part and Adam and Larry jumped straight on with this swing beat, which is totally out of the '70s." Describing the piece as, "glitter rock meets Mickie Most", Edge admits those two influences are not part of U2's sonic world. But again, that was why they latched onto them. This was, he thinks, not what people would be expecting at all.

"We never used his oblique strategies as such," he says of Eno's unique methodology. "But Brian's understanding of how to get you out of professionalism and into playful creativity is amazing."

Elsewhere on the album, One Step Closer drew its title from a conversation about his father's impending death that Bono had with Noel Gallagher. Edge describes it as a "classic, two-chord, Velvet Underground-inspired track", while Yahweh - a surviving Chris Thomas production - always felt like "a bit of a cornerstone", Edge says. "We knew we had a rock'n'roll album to make, but we also knew we needed some extra dimensions to it all, and Yahweh created this prayerful end."

When it came time to sequence the record, Edge says it was "particularly tricky" because, while they had set out to make a "straightahead, guitar energy record", the album they ended up with was hugely diverse. When you're writing, RC wonders, do you ever come up with things that are just too U2 for U2?

"Oh yeah, sometimes," Edge laughs. "The worst thing you can do in, say, a lyric is to take a long time to tell people something that they already know. You need to be surprising yourself and surprising your listeners and it's not always evident how to do that. We all have our approaches and go-to sounds - the band are super-sensitive to that. There are many, many times in the studio I've been playing something, and Bono and Adam and Larry will be wincing slightly and I'll go, Oh, right! We're back in classic Edge mode, so I'll divert into something different. You don't want to make people think, well, I've got this album already, no?"

• • •

On October 26, 2004 another Steve - Jobs this time - hosted the annual Apple Keynote conference. Onstage Jobs, Bono and Edge would, together, launch the U2 iPod with a live performance of songs from a finished - but not yet released - album called How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. That day it was announced the 20gb - 5,000 song - U2 version of the mp3 player would sell at $349 and feature the band's engraved signatures and a coupon for a digital "box set" of catalogue and rare tracks.

Bono, the back story goes, had personally sent Jobs a copy of the album, later declaring he was the first person outside of the band to hear it. Jobs later met Bono, Edge, U2's then-manager Paul McGuinness and Jimmy Iovine, then chairman of Universal Music Group's Interscope division, at the latter's home in Los Angeles.

"I remember meeting in Jimmy's house with Steve and a couple of his employees," Edge says. "They were showcasing iTunes - this is before iTunes and the iPod really went live - and it was obvious that this was going to be huge. In hindsight, the record labels probably still regret that they didn't try and negotiate some kind of royalty from the hardware. I mean, without the music the iPod would have no value."

Edge says he and Bono were "completely enthralled" by the creativity and ambition of Jobs and his team, and felt like "kindred spirits" in terms of his desire to disrupt the norms. "The little bit of punk rock that we kept is that instinct not to ever feel like you relaxed," Edge says now. "We sensed that in Steve, and while we weren't super-close friends, we met and hung out quite a bit after that."

A deal was later done in Jobs' own kitchen, whereby U2 would appear in the iPod ad and Apple would "vigorously" promote the album across billboards and on the iTunes homepage. The band would receive no fee for appearing in the ad but would receive a royalty from each piece sold. Bono, in a very Bono moment, later described the iPod as "the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar".

How did you come to work with Jobs and Apple in the first place?

"We'd finished the album, and we were like, 'OK, what are we gonna do now and how are we going to get this track out?'" Edge says. "So we called up Steve and said, 'We really like what you're doing with that iPod thing, and we'd like we'd like you to consider using our track.'"

So, you were thinking of being in an advert? "Yes. We said, 'We don't want money or anything, we're not asking anything from you,' then we said, 'But we want to be in the ad.' He didn't really want to do that, but we said, 'We think we could be in your ad, it could be a cool collaboration!' And as you say, we didn't earn a penny, we saw it as an incredible rocket to attach to Vertigo."

Edge believes Jobs was quick to recognise that file-sharing meant artists needed a new way to be paid. "During that era, artists were paid a lot more than they are now," he observes, "because the streaming services are a completely different model. Music is much more of a commodity than it's ever been and streamed music is almost like a loss-leader now for touring, which is where you can actually start to make a living."

Dismantle was finally released on November 22, 2004. Edge and Mullen Jr were forty-three. Bono and Adam were forty-four. This was the band's first new album in four years. All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) had sold 10.8 million, but the album before, 1997's Pop, had been a "flop" (relatively speaking; this is U2 after all) selling a little under 8 million.

In late October 2004 U2 were filmed for Top Of The Pops performing Vertigo live outside TV Centre in Shepherd's Bush. NME gave the album 9/10; indeed, this writer recalls writing a wildly enthusiastic review of the single for the same paper. "Early reports say this is the band's best since 1987's The Joshua Tree", announced an otherwise dry trade magazine, somewhat breathlessly. The Guardian admitted the album "may be unadventurous and melodramatic, but it is packed with disarming moments." Q, perhaps unsurprisingly bearing in mind the magazine was designed to appeal to U2 fans, loved it. Pitchfork were a bit less convinced, insisting it was "a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler".

However, by Christmas Day that year the album had spent three weeks at the top of Billboard's Internet Albums Sales Chart, above Shania Twain, Eminem and Rod Stewart. McGuinness told the press it was key to bring in "young recruits", so twenty-five-thousand stickers were distributed to US High Schools. Apple had come good and featured Vertigo in their iPod ad and spent some $20 million promoting the song around the world. Iovine's Interscope label shipped 2.2 million copies on release date in the US alone.

The band's then-marketing boss, Paul Kremen, sensing his time had come, declared the whole shebang to be akin to "The Beatles on the tarmac and it's 1965". In 2024, Edge laughs out loud when informed of this. One hundred and fifteen dates across the world were booked, starting March 1, 2005 in Florida. The previous tour grossed $104 milliom from a hundred and six shows. Billboard, never a publication to knowingly under-sell a prime advertiser's big fourth-quarter release, applauded the record's "radio anthems" while stating that U2 are "the only rock'n'roll band that appeals to virtually every demo[graphic]".

There were three editions of the CD: Standard jewel case, a Deluxe CD/DVD and a limited edition, super-edition CD/DVD. No one talked much about the vinyl version at the time, though there was one with a matte cover and printed inner sleeve with a sixteen-page 12"x12" leaflet with pictures and lyrics. As you might have guessed, twenty years later you can pick up a VG+ Deluxe box set for a couple of quid. A first press vinyl, though, will cost you around £30. In the end, the album sold eight-hundred-and-forty thousand copies in its first week, won nine Grammys and would go on to sell around nine million copies worldwide. It would be another five years before the band released a new album.

• • •

Twenty years on from the release of Dismantle, what's remarkable is how much the world it was released into has changed. Steve Jobs is, sadly, gone. The iPod is gone. The iTunes store is, basically, gone. Top Of The Pops and TV Centre are both history. Q magazine and NME are no longer with us in anything like the same sense. So many of the parts of the music culture that Dismantle touched simply don't exist anymore, perhaps thanks, in part, to the widespread digitalisation of music that it helped to birth.

Yet U2 remain. What has kept Edge's band alive while so much else has perished?

"That's a good question," he says. "I think the fact that there's a chemistry between us when we play is our superpower. We learned our craft as a band in front of the public with all the embarrassing failures that happened along the way."

Another remarkable thing about U2 is how, since the death of ZZ Top's Dusty Hill in 2021, they're the only major band in the world working at their level where all the original members are still in the band. When RC probes Edge on this he approaches the question with the sense he's wondered that himself yet has come to a firm conclusion.

"We're a band of friends," he says. "We grew up together, we know each other very well, and actually enjoy each other's company. That's maybe one of the unique things about our band."

Over the decades, Edge reveals, it's been quite common for the band to be at some big industry bash and, at the end of the night, be at the back hanging out together because they actually like each other.

"In a collaborative relationship like ours," he says, "you have to compare being part of a collective with not being in the collective at all. I don't necessarily need to worry about everything being completely equal or fair, I just have to make sure I know that I'm better off here and not just in terms of remuneration and respect. We're much better individually within the collective than we would be if we were outside of it."

It's fully dark outside Edge's wide windows now and it feels like we've covered so much, but still barely scratched the surface. Twenty years on from this record, RC enquires, is there a point in the future where you can imagine dismantling this atomic band? Can you still be U2 at eighty or eighty-five years old?

Edge barely takes a breath before he leans in. "I would say, why not? As long as we're still enjoying it and feeling inspired, as long as we're surprising ourselves and the fans with work that has vitality and experimentation and creativity. I've still got the same drive and ambition and focus to continue. Will we still want to be playing I Will Follow and running around the stage doing Vertigo at eighty-five? Maybe."

How To Reassamble An Atomic Bomb is released by UMG on November 29.

A NOTE FROM BONO

Dear Record Collector,
Loud music may have dimmed me brain but here's some unreliable recollections...

HOW TO DISMANTLE AN ATOMIC BOMB

Apart from what was going on in the world at the time, with rumours of weapons of mass destruction supposedly being hidden in Iraq, the unspoken thread in the lyrics of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was the fact that my father had recently died [during the Elevation tour], something I didn't know at the time would have reverberations right up to the present day. It was the "atomic bomb" that at least I was trying to dismantle. A sort of psychological ground zero for me... All of us have them...

So on the original album, you have the presence of these father figures throughout. There's Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own... there's my da, Bob Hewson. There's Yahweh... the Father in heaven. And there's the songs about being a father yourself... Original Of The Species, which was happening to Edge, Larry and myself.

It's not very rock'n'roll subject matter but it offered us opera played by guitar, bass and drums and it began a level of introspection that ended up affecting the whole band's inquiry as to what made us who we are... I think of City Of Blinding Lights as the first song of innocence... With the exception of No Line On The Horizon, that period continued for twenty years - Songs Of Innocence, Songs Of Experience, they're all retrospective. It has stopped, you'll be pleased to hear... You'll never have to listen to me raging and whinging about my mother or my father ever again...

You'll never have to listen to me raging and whinging about my mother or my father ever again... Though I have this opera coming out, haha!

Coming off the Elevation Tour, what did we have as still ringing in our ears, a roar actually, and the memory, the close memory, of how a song lands on an audience, the utility of the song... Is it a song where people get airborne? Is it a nodding-dog song? Is this a light up your lighter moment? (If you still own one). These are archetypes really. When you're on tour, you are very aware of such archetypes. The further away from playing live, the greater the temptation to write songs that live better in your head than onstage... You can disappear into yourself and end up with high concepts with low impact... Like a joke you have prepared for a mate's wedding and it's just not as funny as it was written down...

VERTIGO

Vertigo ended up out of a song that we recorded with Chris Thomas called Native Son. In that case, we were right not to trust our first instincts... Chris is great with guitar sounds, as well as singers and bands, he got it as far as he could, but it wasn't the combustible, unstable chemistry we needed for our show. So later, when we re-wrote and re-recorded the song, Steve just wanted us to play it live... with no overdubs. The lyric is - you're on a night out with the singer. It's the most present tense song I've written about the pure joy of just being out and about... The losing and finding yourself that can happen in a noisy club. You're on a roll with the singer as he dives into deep conversation with a perfect stranger who might turn out to be an angel, or not... When a waitress comes over with a pewter bucket and a bottle full of bubbles wearing a cross that you will end up holding onto for dear life... It's not at all profound, you're in the room, you're in the moment, that's the lyric... But... you are also in the room with the band. The room as the band are recording Vertigo...

And that's the thing when you have little or no overdubs. You start to sense the shape of the room... The sense of place, the mood of the band is built into the recording... Steve Lillywhite deserves credit for forcing our hand on that one. If you're in a corner, he's usually the right man to call.

HOW TO RE-ASSEMBLE AN ATOMIC BOMB

Edge is the archaeologist of the band, he's the Mother Teresa of Lost Songs. We had kind of forgotten the genesis of Atomic Bomb, and Mother Theresa himself found it with these songs... We're all so grateful, because these songs have a spontaneity that some of the best recordings on How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb have, it's fresh paint without any added layers or the second or third guessing... Which can happen, and we do tend to second or third guess ourselves.

It's a band, everyone has a view. If we had to put the song or album out the following day, decisions would be clearer... but sometimes we move on too quickly and some real beauties can be left behind. That period was such a fertile time for us because we had just come off the Elevation tour, we were match fit, we were in tune with each other musically. We didn't even have to speak, it was shorthand. These are your mates, your bandmates... We have each other's backs. Sometimes we went in to record with no words, not even a title or a chord sequence. Sometimes I'd have some chords (in those days I was allowed to play guitar, Flood always encouraged the anarchic stuff). Sometimes it was Adam, but mostly likely it was Edge who pulled some musical magic out of his back pocket - a chord sequence, a guitar figure, a keyboard loop - that the band would be hearing for the first time. That sense of discovery is palpable on those songs.

We were playing Luckiest Man in the World back to Noel Gallagher over the summer and he goes, "Hey, first of all, I want me money back. You said these [HTDAAB] were the eleven best songs you had in you. That's not true. Give me my money back." I think for that album they are the eleven best songs... but it turns out there was another album hiding in the shadows... A shadow album where you can hear our original intentions... Atomic Bomb 2... Who knew... Edge knew.

LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD

At the time the tune was called Mercy and we never finished it. As we were laying it down, we all knew there was something 'other' about it... But we were not sure of its lyrical destination until the line, "You were the luckiest man in the world, but you didn't want to be." That was the key that unlocked it for me... It's a violent piece of work... You don't know who exactly the singer is hitting out at, it might even be himself. I like to think it has the joy of a U2 song played live, which saves it and makes sense of it. It brings me back to The Who, who were a huge inspiration to us. . . After the set up - "I'm ripping the stitches / You've been bandaging up / I've been digging the ditches / For the relics of your love"... It launches into the chorus with a Who-like uplift that is so Pete Townsend, he should sue! "Love hears when I lie / Love puts the blue back in my eye / The sand inside the pearl / You were the luckiest man in the world". With the harmonies, the sun comes out from behind the clouds.

Luckiest Man In The World is the maddest melodic journey you are going to hear from a post-punk band out of the north side of Dublin because I'm stepping through different characters and parts of my life and hitting those notes, then not repeating them. The most upsetting for me, as we played it back, was, "I feel nothing / I feel so much / I-I-I feel nothing" while this man is like a child bawling his eyes out. But that's the contradiction rock'n'roll loves to live in... That's The Who again, "No one knows what it's like, To be the bad man, to be the sad man, Behind blue eyes". It's that rage. That rage that translates to the tears of things, and then the praise, the explosion of joy after you've been through something. And rock'n'roll does that really, really well.

• • •

Edge has likened Re-Assemble to a throwdown, in terms of where U2 might go next... Fresh paint... you have to be fit to play first touch football... I want to hear the sound of our band in a room... to feel a performance get away from us and be better for that... I experienced it last month with Larry, Adam and Edge and I want more.

I want to match Edge's melodic flights with a more earthbound lyricism that might be required to negotiate these modern times. Presently I'm listening to epic Irish ballads, I'm paying extra attention to the storytelling that's at the heart of great folk music... The details of character and geography as well as the usual emotional landscapes... But no crying in our beer here. Rock'n'roll - whatever that is these days - deserves its day in the sun.

These new old songs are also a clue in their 'live-ness', their 'present-tense'-ness... How To Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb, in its directness, is certainly an inspiration for us now as well as then. It won't inform all our music but right now we're all about the moment. And if you want to live in the moment you have to be ready for it... fit for it. There's no hiding, it's very demanding... I would say Edge, Adam, Larry and I are in violent agreement on this, and we rarely agree on anything.

"WE WERE THE NO FUTURE GENERATION"

Wisdom! Knowledge! Road-Tested Ideas! Adam Clayton on the past, present and future of U2. He will follow: Rob Fitzpatrick

Adam Clayton, U2's bass-player for forty-eight years, is at home, wearing a very smart looking robe - it would be a gross disservice to call it a dressing gown - and drinking an espresso from a fine china cup when RC calls. But then, it is 8am. Adam has a busy day ahead of him so we have a strict thirty-five minutes, so strict, in fact, that five minutes before the call must end, he slips off to put eggs in a pan.

Tell us about The Sphere shows, what they were like to play, and what it was like to inhabit that space.

Well, it was Bono who started to hear about this project called The Sphere happening in Las Vegas and in many ways, one's prejudices against that were rife. It was like, "Oh, really, you know, Las Vegas?" After a while, though, we looked into it properly and dived into the tech. The screen is effectively 16k and covers three acres - that's an unbelievable amount of LEDs bashed onto a wall! It started to look interesting, so we said, OK, we're gonna jump into this. When we got into the main space we really knew we were onto something, and whilst we initially experienced a lot of tech problems, when it was working properly it was like, "Oh, my God!" It does take people to a different place emotionally. We're all a little conditioned on how a show works. It's a big opening. You get twenty minutes of uptempo, and then it starts to slow down and gets a bit emotional and intimate, and then it'll sort of start ramping up again.

This is the bit where you clap!

Exactly. This is the bit where you sing along! So we threw out the rule book and it was somewhat like when you're performing in a theatre or a musical show where the scenery and the technology give you that emotional context for what you're doing. Also, we'd been playing shows and touring the world since 2018 and now we're going to be in the same place every night. We didn't have to sound check. We didn't have to travel. We didn't have to pack. We didn't have to do anything but turn up at the appropriate time and start our preparation for the show each night.

When you see clips of it online it looks amazing, but the band are like ants.

Yeah!

It shifts the focus, so people are watching what's going on around you as much as they're watching you.

Definitely. The first month of shows, the audience were coming in absolutely cold, not knowing what to expect, not knowing where to look, not knowing how to react, but quite quickly the audience broke down into two different ways. The tickets that we sold for the floor were people who wanted that band experience. The people that were up in the seating knew that they were gonna be getting a relationship with what was happening on the screen. And really, as someone who didn't experience either of those things, both experiences are valid.

Now, according to the internet - which, of course, is never wrong - today is U2's forty-eighth birthday.

You know, I think they might be right.

You were born, collectively, on September 25, 1976.

Ha! I think we're very aware we are approaching fifty.

What do you remember of the very earliest days of the band?

I remember two things. I remember that sense of how, together as a band of brothers, we were going to take on the outside world. That was arrogance and stupidity, but it was also an essential ingredient for U2. We were coming from a place of total invention, and punk had inspired us. It had allowed us to believe in this concept that you could take guitar, bass, drums, play them very fast, give it a strong melody, and you suddenly had a validity where you could go anywhere. This was against the backdrop of absolute social decline, but also of the youth going, this prog rock, this heavy metal, this west Coast Californian folk doesn't represent us and our problems. We were the generation of No Future, and if you have no future then you have to go into the garden shed and start tinkering around and create some sort of a vehicle to take you into the future.

Such glorious naivety.

Total naivety! We were sixteen or seventeen years old and I think, differently to the UK, we faced west conceptually. We always thought the place where we're going to thrive and flourish is America. We weren't thinking, "Oh, we'll just get to England" where Blacks, dogs, Irish, and children weren't welcome. We knew if we went to America there was enough infrastructure that we could make friends there.

Who was inspiring you in America at that time?

The pre-punk generation, The Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls, those kinds of urban New York bands. We were second-generation Dylan fans, too. We would have had some kind of a nod towards the West Coast scene without really understanding it. It's only much later in life that you realise what's going on there. And weirdly enough, because we're Irish, we would have had a good understanding of folk. Johnny Cash would have cast a shadow in our direction, as would Willie Nelson; Kris Kristofferson, too. We didn't really understand black music, because again, it wasn't part of our culture. When Television's Marquee Moon came out, we all one hundred per cent identified with it. This was our music, and out of that you got Richard Hell, Patti Smith and later, Blondie and Talking Heads. They all made a lot of sense to us, whereas Sham 69 didn't. That was a different thing, culturally. I hear they're still going?

Isn't everyone? Your debut album came out in 1980 and there were some incredible debuts that year: Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Teardrop Explodes, The Associates, Young Marble Giants, Dexys, Echo & The Bunnymen and more. What do you remember about being in a young band with those people as your competition?

We very much felt like the juniors in school. We instinctively knew that we were somewhat out of step with where these groups were coming from, where they were writing from. Our strengths and weaknesses came from our experiences, but were very inarticulate at expressing it. We looked at what Joy Division were doing, and they had these very simple, hooky beats and it wasn't regular rock'n'roll, by any means. We said, "OK, we'll take a bit of that." We felt we were coming from a position of musical inferiority - we had very, very limited chops, but we made the most of them. We actually saved up collectively for a Memory Man echo box and that became a cornerstone of our band.

You presented yourselves differently too.

Well, we were slow to the party, visually. We weren't thinking about image, and in some ways that counted against us but actually it made us much more approachable in the United States, where that street culture of the UK didn't really translate to a country that was still wearing cowboy boots, Levi jeans, and plaid shirts, you know?

Where are U2 currently? How far ahead is your diary booked?

Our diary is always completely overbooked. Whether or not we turn up for the dates in the diary is another thing. We realise that we're at a critical phase in our career. Very often at this point in a band's life, they see that the end is in sight. We're not getting any closer to the culture. We're not getting any more relevant, so our songwriting is less important. What you really acquire after being a band for a long time is an audience, and that audience represents a field, as in agriculture. You can go to that audience maybe every three years, or whatever, and you can present yourselves differently to them. But then you have to leave them alone. You have to leave a little bit of space.

Around the release of Dismantle you said it's harder and harder to get people's attention - that was twenty years ago. It's exponentially harder to get people's attention now. Does that have an affect on what you do?

Well, I suffer from it as much as anything else. The convenience of Spotify as a consumer is being able to go anywhere musically. But, somehow, you don't have the same musical connection, curiosity, or loyalty that you have when you're holding a piece of vinyl or a CD - music touches you deeper when it's tactile. Nowadays, Nick Cave puts out a record, and I'll listen through it once, and I'll judge it, evaluate it, and having done that, simply going back and listening to it for enjoyment becomes harder and harder. If that's my relationship with music on Spotify, it's probably the same for a lot of other people.

So how do you consume music?

It tends to be online. I mean, I really held out for a long time because I liked the artefact, but I've got to the point where that's become too cumbersome now. In the old days, listening to a record was a real ritual. It was a formal occasion. Nowadays, I don't consume music in that all-encompassing sort of way, suspending my disbelief, making myself open up to being a little bit raw, so the music touches me. And the Spotify model means that a lot of interesting, edgier music is not even available.

Who has your ear right now?

I find myself moving back into Irish folk, simply because that's the music that has always been a part of my life and I never really paid it much attention. The great thing right now in Ireland is that music is being re-evaluated and there are new practitioners coming through and making it relevant and lively. Lankum have made amazing inroads, but I also go back to people like Christy Moore and Dónal Lunny. If you're interested in some archaeology, the early albums of The Bothy Band were tribal records that shook the room.

Tell us something you learnt from Brian Eno.

Well, whenever we brought Eno in on a record, as lazy musicians, we would say, "Oh, you know we can change that in the edit. We can programme that differently" and Eno would always say, uncharacteristically for someone who lives in the world of science, "Let's not do that, it's so time-consuming. Let's just take the band into the room. They'll play it in five minutes, and you'll have the results that you want." In some ways, that is a great mantra.

Forty-eight years on, are you as excited about the future of U2 as you were on this day in 1976?

I'm totally excited, and why I'm excited is, back then there were an awful lot of self-important teenagers joining bands and telling people how they were feeling. Now, forty-eight years later, I think it's interesting to look at how our generation, and indeed, generations ahead or behind us, have adapted to the world that they've experienced. The whole punk ethic was: be young, make your own opportunities and defy anything that is elderly, or trying to put restrictions on you. Well, having lived that way for forty-eight years, I now think that we have some wisdom and some knowledge, and some well roadtested ideas. I think we now can holistically see that we're in a world of total chaos which, actually, we might have been back in 1976.

Thank you, Adam. I feel like your egg might be overcooked now, and I'm worried I've spoilt your breakfast.

No problem, but I've got to be out the door in fifteen minutes!

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