AROUND the turn of the Millennium, U2 were ready for a reset.
Since forming at school, the four likely lads from Dublin’s Northside had scaled dizzying heights to become the world’s biggest band.
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But Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr wanted to recapture the free-wheeling, rabble-rousing spirit of their early days.
This process began with their tenth studio album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, released in 2000 and best remembered for euphoric lead single Beautiful Day.
For album No11, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, they were looking to take things a stage further — to strip their music back and to rock out.
“We were hitting our forties,” bassist Clayton says today, before adding with a knowing smile, “which is still a very vibrant, masculine moment!
“As a band at the peak of its powers, playing well together, our aim was to go into a room and command that room with just a few primary colours.”
To get in the mood, singer Bono listened to unvarnished, guitar-driven records by the bands who had inspired him in the first place — The Who, The Clash and Buzzcocks.
When it came to recording, U2 turned to producer Chris Thomas, the man who had added fuel to the fire of punk’s most iconic album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols.
On paper, Thomas seemed like the perfect choice but, as you probably know, this is a band that “moves in mysterious ways”.
It took Steve Lillywhite, producer of their first three albums, Boy, October and War, to apply necessary rocket boosters to send their studio efforts into orbit.
Speaking via Zoom from the Irish capital, the genial Clayton gives me some first-hand insights into the complicated creation of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.
If Lillywhite gets most of the production credits, Thomas is also recognised, as are other U2 associates Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Jacknife Lee.
The finished article contains what Clayton calls “four very strong songs — Vertigo, City Of Blinding Lights, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own and All Because Of You”.
Twenty years on, we also have a worthy companion album, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, ten discarded tracks from the sessions finally brought kicking and screaming into the light.
It includes Luckiest Man In The World, originally known as Mercy but given new lyrics and melody by Bono, and regarded by Clayton as “a great song”.
“I have a feeling that one will be in our live set,” he says. “It didn’t fit with what we were trying to do at the time, but I’m so glad it’s out there now.”
We also have the thrilling punk blast of Country Mile and three other previously unheard songs, Happiness, Evidence Of Life and Treason.
The newly remastered out-take Picture Of You (X+W) bears the telling lines: “I’m going nowhere, where I am, it is a lot of fun/There in the desert to dismantle an atomic bomb.”
Clayton returns to the story of the sessions: “Chris Thomas cut his teeth engineering The Beatles, made the legendary Never Mind The Bollocks and did some wonderful records with Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders.
‘Various reprobates would gather’
“By the time we got to know him, he’d also done a lot of good records with INXS, so he straddled different eras.”
U2 had been friends with mercurial INXS singer Michael Hutchence right up until the Aussie’s untimely death in 1997.
Bono and Hutchence were neighbours in the south of France, near Nice — that’s where Thomas came in.
Clayton says: “We had known Chris for a while. We would bump into him during summers in France when various reprobates would gather.”
During those balmy days under the Mediterranean sun, there were informal chats with Thomas “about the record we wanted to make”.
It was these that led U2 to “setting off on a course with him”.
But, and it’s a big BUT, things didn’t quite work out as planned, as Clayton explains.
“In U2, we have a rather strange methodology, which is: Just when you think a track is finished, we go off and rewrite it!
“Chris wasn’t used to this. Quite reasonably, he thought a record should take six weeks at most.
“When we were heading into the third month, he found it very difficult to concentrate.
“At that point, he said, ‘Look, I’m not sure I’m the right person. You Irish guys are a bit too crazy!’”
There’s something about those searing guitar riffs. They’re eternal.
Adam Clayton
The band turned to Steve Lillywhite, who Clayton recalls being “very helpful and very sensible”.
“He listened to what we had, particularly the track we were putting most energy into — the one which became Vertigo.”
First known as Native Son, the song served as a homage to Leonard Peltier, a Native American incarcerated for murder in 1975 and long the subject of miscarriage of justice campaigns.
“For us, it was a complex lyrical matter,” says Clayton. “It wasn’t really working and Steve called it.
“He said, ‘Do a better backing track and then we’ll play it to Bono’. He had been doing other work, but when he heard what we’d done he was very excited.
“Bono said, ‘Give me a mic’. And the bones of Vertigo happened right there.”
Suddenly, “everything clicked into place” and U2 had a storming, straight-ahead anthem to kick off their new album, exactly what they had been aiming for.
Clayton says: “We’ve always loved the idea making rock and roll 45s and Vertigo fits into that, as does Beautiful Day.
“They are the holy grail of tunes for us. They’re fun to play and audiences love them.
“There’s something about those searing guitar riffs. They’re eternal.”
If Vertigo is a three-minute adrenalin rush that Clayton describes as “invincible”, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On You Own is just as intense but in a very different way.
‘Difficult relations with our fathers’
Spanning nearly five minutes, the searing power ballad bears a towering Bono vocal and some of his most heartfelt lyrics.
Originally with the working title Tough after the song’s first word, it is about the singer’s troubled relationship with his father Bob Hewson, who died of cancer in 2001.
Clayton well remembers how the song resonated with the rest of the band.
“Bono’s father had been very, very sick,” he says. “Probably with the exception of Edge, we’re a band of men who had difficult relationships with our fathers.
“Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own contemplates the loss of a very big figure in a very big figure’s life. It is poignant and powerful.
“You don’t need to dig very deep before you realise what Bono was working with.
“I’ve always responded to the universality of a lyric. But, because I know Bono and because we’ve been together for so long, I’m very aware of where he pulls his references from.
“For me, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own was him being that small boy again, that 14-year-old looking at his father who was struggling with the loss of his wife.”
Clayton is referring to the death of Bono’s mother, Iris, which had a devastating effect on the singer’s whole family.
When Bono writes, he’s never looking for sympathy.
Adam Clayton
She is remembered in several U2 songs, including I Will Follow and Iris (Hold Me Close).
But Clayton adds: “When Bono writes, he’s never looking for sympathy. Rather like a method actor, he’s saying, ‘I need to examine this emotion and express it.’”
The bassist suggests that no matter who you are, rock stars in their ivory towers included, life can be tough.
He says: “The thing that’s dropping into my vision nowadays is realising that nobody escapes heartache, disappointment, vulnerability. We’re all built the same.”
This brings us to another key song from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, City Of Blinding Lights, which, says Clayton, had a difficult birth.
“It was originally conceived on piano but we had to shift everything into guitar mode. It was hard to make it work.”
Then he adds with due modesty: “Once we had, dare I say it, the bass part, which drives it, everything slotted into place.”
City Of Blinding Lights, a U2 live staple, achieved wider recognition when it was used by Barack Obama during his presidential campaigns.
Clayton questions whether a song being used in a political context “is a good badge of honour” but adds: “It must have connectivity — and that means something.”
‘To succeed, you needed no plan B’
Bono’s lyrics reflect on lost innocence but, suggests his bandmate: “It is written to the audience and also to a city. The city of blinding lights is probably New York.”
We move on to a wider discussion about the influences swirling around How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.
Of its post-punk vibe, Clayton says: “As teenagers in 1976/77, there was a lot of anger in the air. That was our go-to position, where we came from, our music.”
Clayton acknowledges that in the years leading up to How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, “We made our music more complicated — to take us away from the mainstream maybe.
“A lot of Edge’s more lyrical guitar parts were coming from a place of otherness.
“On this record, we were interested in pushing him to turn off the echo machine and play the power chord.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to get him to do that,” he adds, before adding with a smirk, “because he doesn’t have that sort of anger in him!”
Clayton sees the two albums, Dismantle and Re-Assemble, as something of a last hurrah for old-school recording techniques.
“Compared with 20 years ago, music today is made in an entirely different way.
It’s a different sound, not that of four men forging a future for themselves.
Adam Clayton
“Back then, records were based on people in a room, playing instruments together.
“Now that’s become uneconomical. Artists are in their bedrooms or home studios, creating music alone, and that is being streamed.
“It’s a different sound, not that of four men forging a future for themselves.”
Clayton says that when U2 started out in the late Seventies, “the best way for a band to succeed was desperation. To have no plan B.
“You had no choice but to keep going forward because your life depended on it.
“By the time you got a record deal and a bit of money, the next thing you had to do was play a whole load of tiny, s***ty little bars and clubs.”
Before the ever-insightful Clayton and I go our separate ways, I ask him for an update on drummer Larry Mullen Jr. who missed U2’s groundbreaking shows at the state-of-the-art Sphere in Las Vegas because of “drumming-related” injuries.
“He’s back on his stool,” replies Clayton. “Look, we are a little bit like athletes, but have a longer shelf life.
“Larry’s body had taken a battering over the years and his primary issue was pain.
“He’s finally feeling much better and is very enthusiastic about playing again.”
And what of the future of U2? “I feel, I hope not mistakenly, that we still have a lot to give,” answers Clayton.
“No matter where our lives have led us, the constant is mucking about in a studio, creating music together.
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“That is the greatest reward.”
U2
How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (20th anniversary editions with How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb)
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