U2
U2 have had the same four members since Dublin in 1976: Bono singing, the Edge on guitar, Adam Clayton on bass, Larry Mullen Jr. on drums. That is close to unheard of at their scale, and it explains a great deal about the band, including the parts people find hard to like. They started out in post-punk and were never especially good at it. What they had instead was the Edge's guitar sound, built out of effects and space rather than distortion, and a singer aiming for the rafters at a moment when the fashion was to mumble.
The songs got bigger and so did the ambition attached to them. Bono's lyrics run on spiritual imagery and on politics taken personally, which has produced both the best and the worst of the catalogue depending on how much sincerity a listener can absorb. The live show became a separate art form: they have staged some of the most elaborate tours ever mounted, and the records are often written with those rooms already in mind.
The catalogue splits cleanly in half. Boy through The Joshua Tree is a band getting steadily larger and more earnest. Achtung Baby onward is the same band taking itself apart on purpose, adding irony, electronics and disguise, before reassembling in the 2000s as an arena rock institution. They have a Grammy shelf, and, more unusually at that stature, they never broke up long enough to need a reunion.
Books (1)
Music (19)
- Achtung Baby (1991)
- The Joshua Tree (1987)
- The Unforgettable Fire (1984)
- War (1983)
- All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000)
- Zooropa (1993)
- How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004)
- Rattle and Hum (1988)
- No Line on the Horizon (2009)
- Boy (1980)
- October (1981)
- Songs of Innocence (2014)
- Pop (1997)
- Songs of Experience (2017)
- The Best of 1980–1990 (1998)
- Under a Blood Red Sky (1983)
- The Best of 1990–2000 (2002)
- Songs of Surrender (2023)
- Rattle and Hum (1997)
Where to start with U2
The Joshua Tree first. It is their most complete record and the one where the guitar sound, the widescreen production and Bono's sincerity all point in the same direction. If you are ever going to like this band, you will know by the third track.
Then jump forward rather than backward. Achtung Baby is the better album and the braver one, a wholesale reinvention recorded by a band that could easily have coasted, and Zooropa pushes that further into strangeness. The Unforgettable Fire is the atmospheric record that made The Joshua Tree possible, and War is the young, blunt, political one.
For the later run, All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the comeback and the most consistently likeable thing they have made since 1991, while Pop is the interesting failure worth arguing about. U2 by U2 is the band's own book, and the obvious next stop if the music takes.
The eighties
The decade that built them, from a post-punk debut to the biggest album in the world. War is the urgent one, The Unforgettable Fire is where Brian Eno arrives, and The Joshua Tree is where it all lands.
The reinvention
Achtung Baby is the better record and the braver one, made in Berlin as the band deliberately dismantled its own earnest image. Zooropa and Pop pushed further and the audience eventually stopped following.
The later albums
The comeback and everything after. All That You Can't Leave Behind was a deliberate return to being a rock band, and Songs of Innocence is the one that appeared on everyone's phone without asking.
U2 on CrossBinge
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