"What people are doing when they're forming a band, is they're forming what an anthropologist would call a clan." "It's a group of people who may not be genetically related, but share interests of some kind and have pledged loyalty to each other." "I think men in particular, have a kind of instinct for banding together, and being in a group together." "Most of the identity of that group is formed by its separateness from everybody else." "There is a moment when it is dysfunctional not to look at the past." "20 years into it - the randomness of an anniversary, we're actually going to look at it." "We're gonna open the box." "Making Achtung Baby was the reason we're still here now." "That was the pivot point where we were either going forward, or, is this our moment to implode?" "I thought to myself, "This is it, we've come to the end of the road " ""band breaks up over artistic differences."" "Classic cliche." "We're gonna have to listen to The Fly, I think, and..." "So, if we can play it back...?" "We can't afford to make a mistake on the second song." "We had this thing where we really believed in music as a sacrament." "It's over there." "You almost have to take your shoes off in its company." "So we have quite a low opinion of the musician, and a very high opinion of music." "We're only reverent to the thing if it happens." "That thing, whatever you call it, you know, the song that enters the room, and you go, "That's why we're all here."" " It's not gonna work." " lt doesn't really work, does it?" "You can stop that, if you would." "Do we know where that's from?" "Was that actually played to human beings who were gathered together for the purpose of music?" "Was that a guitar mix?" "It sounds like..." "Yeah, it's a special mix accentuating the guitar." "OK, it's certainly very 'special'." "Joe, do you have a version that you mixed?" "There's an environment out of which music... grows." "There's a kind of faith that's necessary to move from one note to the other." "That wasn't the environment we were in." "We felt as we walked into this place, well, it's so full of greatness that greatness will visit with us." "So, we're there, and greatness is nowhere to be seen." "Greatness has left the building, it seems, years ago." "This is good." "Try it more, em from you, Edge, just more totally abstract, like sonic abstraction." "At this moment, we're a long way, a long way from the madness of Zoo TV, we're a long way from taking that television station around the world." "Picture, picture." "At this moment I couldn't imagine what we were gonna become." "Edge, it's brilliant." "Great." "And then, when I'm singing, slap it with the back of your hand." "We're much closer now." "The '80s, I think they suffered a lot from my own intensity." "So, our rehearsals were, a lot of the time, me shouting at people." "Well, shouting over the fucking racket they were making!" "And then shouting to achieve some kind of direction, and I don't know how they put up with that." "Edge, Edge when the singing starts, try to create a dynamic by almost getting really quiet - make it a dynamic." "Very hard to do." "OK, hold on." "It's because you're in full flight - if I stop, it'll just sound bad." " No, it'll be great if you stop." " OK." "So, a big, wild feedback thing." "OK, keep going." "Bono is the same now as he was back then." "I mean, he's just one big idea." "The moment I met him, he had the ball and he was running with it, and this was his opportunity." "Look at where this could go with a guy like that." "You know, having that guy out front, having that guy as your singer - anything is possible." "You wanna do this, we can do this, here's the plan - it was hard not to be taken by it, intoxicated by it, and just going, "Wow, this is something."" "After we'd left school, there was this period where Edge went to a technical college," "Larry got a job," "Bono almost got into college, and I wasn't doing anything." "OK, here goes." "OK, the band could just fall apart." "Slowly, everyone kind of came back together again, and said, we've tried this going to college thing and this going to work thing, and we don't really wanna do that, we wanna be in the band." "Adam was the oldest, wisest and with his posh plummy British accent." "Edge was fairly reflective, even then, and kinda studious," "Larry was a real life-force." "He laughed a lot, but then he'd have moments of panic, where he'd go, "What am I doing hanging out with you guys?"" "I was a bit of a brat, but I'd had enough trauma at home," "I was too raw to be a total pain in the arse but I had a lot of front." "In fact, that's all I had." "I managed to break through the self-consciousness." "I got almost violent, hitting notes I couldn't sing." "I always knew that I had these melodies in my head." "I knew them when I was eight, when I was ten, but I had no ability to express them." "One of my earliest memories was in my granny's house - they had a piano." "I couldn't see the keyboard but I could make a sound." "When I hit one of those notes, my instinct was to find another note that felt good with it." "And I even then discovered the power of reverb." "I remember sticking my foot on the pedal of the piano, and how this tiny living room would become a cathedral." "When I found my voice, it was like I'd been walking with a limp." "It was the first time I walked up straight." "Rock and roll, joining this band, was emancipation." "It was liberation." "And I just knew this feeling was the greatest feeling I could have." "The clan sees itself as distinct from everybody else around, and sees itself as bound by some ties of loyalty." "Sounded great." "Yeah?" "Yeah, fantastic." "Maybe a bit more passion this time, Bono." " Yeah, it was a bit restrained actually." " Yeah." "Maybe you could try standing for this one." "The only direction I might offer you is that the first chorus might be a little more restrained than the others." "But, um..." "I wouldn't like to inhibit what you're doing." "All the British rock and roll people, even the punk rock people," "Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, they're all Art School." "John Lennon" " Art School." "Eric Clapton" " Art School." "Jimmy Page" " Art School." "They're all Art School." "Brian Eno was our Art School." "It is like painting." "You're putting sounds together." "You're adding things, taking them off the next day." "Suddenly the act of making music is spread over months, rather than a single performance." "Play your bit." "I think they always know that it's difficult, and if it isn't difficult, they don't trust it." "Yeah, that's right." "Every record they've ever made has gone right down to the very last second." "That's the thing." "I would just like to know that we have got a good take, even if there are one or two things to repair." "And then we can go on with some sense of, less sense of desperation, into doing some other takes." "What do you think, Bono, do you wanna try a few lines on this?" "Erm, I'll do some scat singing if that's any help to you." "When Bono goes off and does a vocal, and you think you've heard a whole set of lyrics, you think, "Wow, I was really touched by that lyric"." "Then you listen later and say, "Wait a minute, he's fudging half the words."" "Bono's singing, and he's just channelling." "He's trying to get to the vocabulary of the melody in sound." "Anything there?" "We get the music and then the melody, and then we try to let the words express the feeling that's in the song, cos there's a feeling in every piece of music." "It's an odd way to live your life, as a composer, building your house from the sky down." "Sometimes I think I'm cleverer than what I've just... than the expression that's just come out." "It's not a place for a vain man to be - you know, intellectually vain." "I find myself listening on little tape machines to me singing gobbledegook - it's like a child, it's like I'm speaking Japanese or Italian or something." "Bonolese is like a language" "It's just a made-up language." "I hear then a word, I hear then a thought, and I have to scribble it down." "We always had a mic ready when Bono came into the room." "He'd hear something and say, "Oh", and he'd start singing, and if you didn't catch it, it was gone." "He didn't repeat things." "Or, if he did, he didn't repeat them with that same oddness that the first moment would have." "What's the chorus chords again?" "So, A to..." "A..." "D..." "We'd spent the '80s throwing stones at other people." "Now we've started throwing the stones at ourself." "Wow!" "ls this what you would do?" "Yeah." " Pretty much." " What's different?" "The only difference is we didn't, we have songs now - back then we didn't really have songs." "Well, the mid '80s we started to tour in America." "It wasn't a thing of having been prepared, groomed, made ready for it, it was like suddenly, boom, you were there." "Being 22 or 23 and you have a bit of success, it's gonna be tricky for anybody." "If you come from Dublin, and not only do you come from Dublin, you're still in Dublin, it's gonna make you a little self-conscious." "I met them in '82." "I was working for a magazine in England called the New Musical Express." "They asked me to go to New Orleans to shoot U2." "I'd never heard of U2." "There was certainly a house photographic style, we used to jokingly refer to it." "Since most of the photographs during that time were taken by Anton, there was a certain amount of collusion." "That was the way the band wished to present themselves." "The work was always serious and for me that was the same." "My photography, if you look at my books, is never about the lighter moments." "We hated photo shoots." "Make sure you get some sun on your faces." "If you all come a bit forward..." "We started to be those kind of earnest po-faced men." "I went out one night with Bono and I said," ""There's a tree here which I really love, it's called the Joshua Tree" ""lt would be a brilliant idea to have that on the front" ""and the band would be on the back, like a continuation."" "He's Dutch and he can't say 'Joshua'." "He would say 'Yoshua'." "So we really go off on getting him to say Yoshua Tree Park." "The Joshua Tree sleeve is my favourite sleeve." "Their faces were sculptured in stone." "We always felt that the photographs should look like the material." "Anton was not photographing us, he was photographing our songs, and the environment of the songs." "So, those pictures of us as stoic Irishmen, pilgrims, in the desert " "people would say when they meet you, you're not the same person." "This is a very dangerous place to be, when your public image is so different from your private reality." "And the winner is The Joshua Tree, U2." "We'd arrived." "Suddenly, this was our defining moment." "I'd like to thank Jack Healey and Amnesty International for all their work," "Desmond Tutu for his courage... lt was a very mad time." "We were guys in our mid 20s having this amazing experience" "Nothing could've prepared you for that ...John the Baptist, George Best, Gregory Peck, Batman and Robin, sumo wrestlers throughout the world, and of course, Ronald Reagan." "They wanna put us on the cover of Time Magazine." "Um, it's a comedy." "It's a comedy about the tour." "It was a great idea." "It was a really good idea." "Make a small film about the band." "And everyone went, "Yippee, this is a great idea."" "The next thing it's like, "We're going to invest" ""all the money we made from The Joshua Tree into this thing," ""Paramount are going to take it" ""and it's going to go to cinemas all over the place."" "I encouraged the idea of a movie." "Remember that in the course of the tour, we went from being an arena band to being a stadium band, and had to learn how to do that kind of on the run." "This was in the days before video reinforcement." "It was hell." "It was literally just us in a stadium." "We were so out of our depth and not quite proficient enough to be consistent." "It was a rollercoaster ride." "There was a white knuckle aspect to just holding on." "We didn't have enough material to do a stadium show." "Bono felt particularly vulnerable - he's out there, sticking his ass out the window, and he expects the band are gonna be there." "Every night we would come off the stage, we would debrief ourselves, and we would have this over-riding feeling of doom and gloom, that we just weren't good enough." "You couldn't just rely on making it up on the night." "Shit happens." "The drum kit would move forward." "The sound I'd have on stage wouldn't work." "I can't live with this." "Edge would break a guitar string and it would happen every night for a week." "For him, he became just wild - pent up rage, anger, I mean, the whole gamut of emotions, so, and you really didn't know what you were going to get - it was very intense." "It was particularly difficult for Bono, because he had to really work as a physical performer to sell those songs." "Having to steel ourselves almost to deal with the position we found ourselves in, and we'd become overly earnest, overly intense, overly protective." "In the course of that tour, they became fascinated, if you like, by America" "That's my wife." "The reason for making Rattle And Hum was actually to prove something to ourselves and to our audience." "It was an experiment in drawing from the American roots music canon." "I want to learn the blues from you today." "Have I come to the right place?" "The idea behind Rattle And Hum was, wouldn't it be interesting if we went on this journey to discover American music, because we had no background in it." "Let people see us as fans." "Just because something was new for us, doesn't mean it's new for the listener." "People knew all about BB King, they knew all about the blues, they knew all about country music." "It looked to people like we were going," ""Let's introduce you to your music."" "That's such a shame, really." "We had unbelievable amounts of laughs, except when you put the camera on." "Then we just were like..." "Woosh!" "It was gone." "He went through miles and miles and miles of takes, and there's no joy in it." "What's the deal with the camera, Phil?" "Do we just pretend it's not there, or get on with it?" "No, you can do what you want." "Yeah, this is just like whatever we..." "it's for fun." "So, you know, man, if you want to talk..." "It's fun for him, guys." "I know, I know." "The good thing is, it's your camera." "As post production started, they involved themselves in the cut, and got to choose which way they really wanted to be seen." "The film is entirely shot in America, showing U2 in America, why is that?" "Why is that?" "We let people see the sort of naivete." "And what came out the other end was a slew of reviews saying these people are fucking megalomaniacs." "Backstage footage shows the band being deliberately inarticulate in interviews and pretending that's cute." "But it's not cute to giggle and pretend you have nothing to say." "Everyone was kind of a little shell-shocked." "You start to believe..." "what people are saying about you." "You start to think, maybe this is the end." "I was sitting with Ali, she said, "You've gotten so serious." ""You've gotten so serious." ""The boy I fell in love with was so full of mischief," ""so full of madness." ""You were a much more experimental character " ""what's happened to you?"" "A group is a sort of collective ego in a sense." "And that ego is very easily offended." "We found out that he had left the group when we got copies of the letter from the record companies." "Of course, popularity is a great ruiner of friendships in a way." "That makes me feel like sad, you know?" "That's like somebody taking you out to dinner and you think you had a great time and at the end of the night they go," ""Hey, you know what?" "I had a really lousy time." ""And you know what?" "You're lousy too!" "But thanks for dinner."" "It's to do with personalities, you know what I mean?" "I didn't split." "I didn't do a walk, Noel did, so ask him." "Apparently I was a nightmare to work with." "I had to have my own dressing rooms and stuff." "I don't think so, mate!" "Well, I'm going home!" "This..." "I was explaining to people the other night, but I might've got it a bit wrong." "This is the end of something for U2 - that's why we're playing these concerts." "We were physically exhausted, and creatively felt we'd run out of steam." "It's no big deal, it's just we have to go away and just dream it all up again." "Stop it!" "Hang on, wait until I put me hat on." "Anyway, we are going... going very shortly to The Point Depot in Dublin, where U2 are playing." "This didn't become us, this kind of band we had become." "We looked like a big overblown rock band running amok." "The Irish sons returning home triumphant." "Irish people go, "Who?"" "First of all they look like some American band." "And not just American, but like some American show band." "You left here as an interesting post punk phenomenon you go to America, fine, we'll run with you on The Joshua Tree, but now you've actually become this, you've come back," "and by the way, you're not very good at it." "When we were kids, 1 6/1 7 years old, going to see The Clash in Dublin," "this was the enemy." "Have we become the enemy?" "We hadn't committed any great crimes against humanity or art - all we'd done was been a little self-conscious and overblown." "I'd like to thank Edge and Adam and Larry for letting me be in their band." "They started out, as do most bands, by saying we don't want to be that, and we don't want to be that and we don't want to be that, and then they carried on by saying we don't want to be what we were either." "As an artist, your biggest enemy is your own history, actually." "Couldn't make corrective adjustments to put it right - the limb had to come off, you know." "Let's get a big fucking chainsaw and cut down the Joshua Tree." "Great, good, thank God for that." "So, now, let's go and figure it out." "However, that was the end of the conversation." "Bono made that statement, that was it." "Next time we met, I think, was not long before we turned up in Berlin." "We were running away from Lovetown and Rattle And Hum as fast as we could." "I was listening to bands like KMFCM," "Einsturzende Neubauten, the Young Gods." "Machine age music is really what it is." "It's about the use of repetition, and taking the humanity out of things, to a degree, so that the humanity that you put in there means more." "Something about that new decade, the '90s, something about the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new Europe emerging, that's what we were focussing on." "There was a lot of experimental avant garde kind of music, that was coming out of Berlin and coming out of Germany." "Berlin was all about texture." "Manchester was about rhythm - rhythm that could only be created using computers and machines." "I mean, the kids in Manchester don't know about that - they just instinctively know that that stuff is uncool, this is a cool direction." "It was at that moment when rock and roll and club culture had sort of come together " "records being made for dancing." "You could really trace it back to German theory," "Stockhausen and these ideas about what modern composition should be about." "German music had a huge impact on us, from Kraftwerk." "When I was 1 6, one of the first records I bought for Ali was Man Machine, for her 1 5th birthday." "This is soul music from Europe." "This is the invention of electronic music." "And they had a big influence on Joy Division, which had a big influence on us." "It was just an education in rhythm going on that you couldn't ignore." "How were we gonna absorb that, and allow it to just make us better?" "After the New Year's Eve gig, there wasn't a lot of communication." "Bono and Edge took themselves off, and decided to try and find a new way of writing and developing ideas." "There was a little bit of abandonment, and a lot of that abandonment, for me, I spent in not good places." "I took some drum lessons and listened to music I hadn't listened to before." "Cream, and Ginger Baker and stuff like that." "You have to reject one expression of the band... first, before you get to the next expression, and in between you have nothing." "You have to risk it all." "The height of technology was the DAT player." "So I rang Bono and said, "I've got this idea." "See what you think."" "He came in and he heard it and said, "I think it's good." "Let's try it."" "So we recorded a few takes." "Yeah, all right." "C'mon now and give me that chocolate mousse." " Ready." " So high..." "Bass guitar." "All right, Reggie." "Give me that chocolate mousse." "Thank you." "A rhyme." "Oh, it's the bass part from Mysterious Ways." "It's like trying on a new leather jacket." "You're just like..." ""Yeah, this can work, like." "OK." ""Make a few adjustments." "Yeah, it's sort of..." ""ls it me?" "Yeah, it's kinda me."" "You can hear like Bono's trying to find himself in this." "If you had that kind of genius that you could just sit on the groove, it's actually a great groove." "It's just..." "There's just no song there." "This is not Larry." "This is the drum machine, so it's got no personality." "It's just..." "It's not all right, in fact." "In Dublin, I had a little studio in the house." "The two of us worked together, just going through possible melodic ideas." "It just didn't... go anywhere." "The idea of going away to a remote location, and recording away from home, was kind of already in the air, and I think Hansa must have been the number one candidate." "It was, I think, the feeling of being somewhere where there was a culture collision going on." "There was a tension." "Just a natural tension there." "If drama is conflicts, you're going to end up in these kinds of places." "Hansa?" "Yeah, it's a great rock and roll room - a lot of good records were made there." "We'd heard about it from Brian Eno." "He'd been here with David Bowie, obviously." "The engineer that we got very close to and was also a co-producer, Flood, had worked in Berlin before." "From about '84/'83 there were a variety of different artists." "Bono said, "We want to go to Hansa."" ""We want to soak up that atmosphere." lt was like, "OK, brilliant."" "You took Iggy Pop to Berlin to make his records." "I think it's a very good therapeutic city for an artist to go to, to come back to, not the punk street level, but a real street level, where you have to do things for yourself," "where nobody will take any notice of you." "I was totally anonymous in Berlin." "Suddenly you're creating a kind of crucible - it's like a focussed capsule, where it's just the group of you." "Eno was always a bit frustrated by the domesticity of the rock band, if you like." "It makes sense to break away for a little while and let the thing go kind of out of control." "We just felt we wanted to get away to a place where we were much more focussed on making the record." "We didn't have to, you know, deal with all the other paraphernalia that surrounds us in Dublin." "Plumbers to talk to and interior decorators." "Interior decorators are the death of recording, actually." "The idea was to do something that had its roots partly in club culture... something very rhythmic." "So, we started out by using a drum machine in Dublin, programming this very intricate polyrhythmic beat with a lot of swing - a place that U2 would never go to normally." "We were trying to find our way into dance, a kind of groove music, that wasn't cliched." "We were very much reacting to that shift away from Americana." "Behind the workings of all of those songs, was this awareness of the rhythmic sophistication had to kind of come up." "So we were the last flight in to the old divided Berlin." "It was British Airways' last one in the sky." "Therefore, the pilot could just circle Berlin." "And he had a very plummy accent..." ""We are just going down over the Brandenburg Gate." ""As you know, we have the skies to ourselves tonight," ""and we're just going to take a little tour over here." ""This is the wall." And we're like..." "And there was a little bit of 'bombs away' about it, no doubt about it." "More than a million Germans are out on the streets of Berlin tonight celebrating the birth of a united Germany in what is once again its official capital." "We went looking for the celebrations, because we're Irish and we like to go out." "And we ended up at a huge mass rally." "But people didn't really look like they were having a very good time." "It was like grim." "Very grim." "until we discovered that we weren't at the celebration for the wall coming down, we were at a protest meeting to put the wall back up." "I can't recall this exact spot, but I can recall it was behind the houses that I'm looking at now." "The wall was here, somewhere." "The wall was here, I think." "And you had Hansa Studios, then a lot of waste land because nobody built near the wall." "It was just, you know, visually... lt was really interesting." "It's hard to beat a good wall as a background for photographs, so I was always a very happy person here." "We ended up in this hotel called the Palace Hotel, which was a festival of brown, meaning everything in the fucking hotel was brown." "Brown carpet, brown..." "I mean, East Berlin was brown - brown knobs on the stereo, brown, brown!" "I was looking at a beautiful cathedral that was nice, from the brown room, in the brown hotel." "Every morning, we'd drive into the studio, and there'd be a new burnt-out Trabbi on the side of the road." "This car had just made it from some obscure part of East Germany, and he just had to leave it on the side of the road." "These were cars that people were driving from the east side." "They were made from papier-mache, they had two stroke engines in them." "Potsdamer Platz, the centre of the old Berlin, has got a wall built right through the middle of it." "There's a load of gypsies living there." "Crusty people, beautiful souls, I'm sure." "In the great hippie tradition of that city, they'd been given rights to live there." "When the wall was knocked down, they owned the most prime real estate in Germany." "Then there was Hansa Studios." "We're coming here believing in improvisation." "We started out doing the same thing that we'd always done, which was look for the magic moments when we played together." "So it allows the four of us to be in the song writing process." "Even before we went there, there was a sense of something not quite right and then when we got there, we were on completely different pages." "We would go into the room and we would just bash it out, hour after hour." "Listen back and not like anything that we were doing." "This is unexpected." "We've got these great ideas, sounded great in Dublin, and now, we've hit Berlin and, what's wrong here?" "His marriage is breaking up." "It has broken up." "We're a really tight community." "This is not like somebody's girlfriend's left, we've grown up with these people - this is our family, our community." "This was really hard for us, and very difficult for my wife." "It was like the first cracks on the beautiful porcelain jug, with those beautiful flowers in it, that was our music and our community starting to go." "Leaving Dublin for Berlin was actually in a weird way was a distraction, a way to escape." "I was disappearing into the music for a different reason, you know." "It was a refuge in a way." "That approach didn't completely work, you know." "I wasn't really in a good positive head space." "I was..." "I was running away, I suppose." "I remember being in the studio playing a guitar solo over Love ls Blindness." "I've put everything into it." "All the feeling, all the hurt, all the angst - everything went into that solo." "I put down the guitar, went into the control room listened back, and it was really bad." "And Danny looked at me, of course he had no idea what had gone into that ...and he said, "Nah." "That's not it, is it, Edge?"" "And I went, "Danny, you're right, it's not it."" "Ever since we were kids, Edge tunes up at high volume, and he doesn't know that he's doing it." "And based on the day he's having, and his emotional life, he tunes up more or less." "So, when he's going through bad times, dang, dadang, dadang!" "So, it's like being hit by an iron bar on the back of your head, just going through rehearsals." "And Larry's sitting there, he can't even move anywhere - he's like, "Edge, would you shut the fuck up!" "We're trying to talk here."" "And Edge just goes like this, gadang, gadang, gadang!" "We were kind of going down a lot of blind alleys, and there was a lot of friction, there was a lot of tension - nobody was particularly happy." "And there begins a sort of internal argument about where we're not going." "There was a lot of grumbling as to why we were there in the first place, and nothing was coming out of it." "Within the band, myself and Bono were probably the ones pushing hardest to try new things." "Adam was with us, Larry was probably the most resistant, and questioning why we were taking the direction we were taking." "It was just not really understanding what Bono and Edge had in mind, where they were coming from." "I'd no idea that they were exploring, and particularly Edge, was exploring a particular kind of rhythmic and dancing, I had no idea." "There was no us against them, really." "I think... it was probably... for a moment, each man for himself, which is betrayal of the concept of a band." "People just start to walk a bit differently." "Conversation is a little different." "The way they carry their cup of tea is different - there's just a sense of tension, of a doubt, of..." "Everyone sort of retreats somewhat into their own little corner." "It was a long, cold existence." "It's fraught with danger, because you can fail at any moment, but that's the whole beauty of it." "If you're prepared to remove the safety net, and if you're prepared to really expose yourselves, because your pursuit is after the magic moments - those moments of, "Wow, I would never have imagined."" "What I did was I just started to concentrate on ways to solve the musical problems, which is... my main sort of personality trait is a solver of problems." "We would have a rough kind of chord structure, a rough melody, and we would basically try and get a drum take." "I was using a lot of loops and drum machine elements." "So we were trying to mesh Larry's live playing with these programmed elements." "I'd never played to a drum machine that was going to be so present." "This was a very new experience, and I didn't really know what to do." "I didn't know how to give myself to it." "I came in with my offering of the morning, of," ""How about these ideas for the chorus?"" "I don't know which version we were working on." "It's starting to come into focus." "A new bridge." "OK, this is the bit that I was saying - that never made the song." "Well, this is, this is that." "But there was another new bridge." "That's a bit mad." "The verse seemed to offer some kind of eternal, joyful, upful melody." "Mm, interesting. ls that the first, the first time that melody..." "The first time, those chords in that melody were tried out." "Didn't that shift into..." "One." "I played these on acoustic guitar." "Everyone's like trying to decide whether they were any good, and then Danny said," ""Edge, why don't you play those two ideas sequentially?" ""Just play one after another and see what happens."" "So, I did, and everyone was like," ""Ooh, that sounds really good, let's try that." ""Let's try that in the big room."" "When you're at that moment of inception there's a sense of momentum, that takes you into a different place." "You're not in the environment, you're not in those four walls." "So, we all went into the big room and showed Adam the chords, and we just started playing them." "Bono got on the microphone." "Suddenly something very powerful is happening in the room." "Something happened, something comes into the room, and you know it - everyone knew it, Danny... lt was one of those hairs on the back of your neck moments." "Bridge." "Piano, Edge." "To the C. Stay on the C." "F to G." "If you can get the piano in Edge, that helped me the last time." "And I'd like to hear Edge, Joe." "He's calling out the chords and moving the chords, to figure out where the fertile ground is melodically for him." "It's such a pivotal moment." "We'd been going through this hard time and nothing seemed to be going right suddenly, we were presented with this gift that just kind of arrived." "It steadied everyone's nerves hugely in the studio." "We're playing these changes, but we're really listening to what Bono's doing on the microphone." "Every time he finds a new place to go melodically, we try and go with him dynamically." "We, as a band, always seem to come alive, when we're all aware of the fact there's something new happening in the room." "Whatever it is, some little spark, some angle that's new, and then everyone's suddenly there." "It can happen very, very quickly, or... tragically, very slowly, but in the case of One, things happened extremely quickly." "I don't want them to take off the echo if there's a chance they'll lose it." "It wasn't that we'd found a sonic identity for that, that sort of came later." "I think it was we found a spiritual identity - that was the important thing, that was what we actually needed." "There's a sort of blood pact, which is that we have to be truthful with each other." "So, it wasn't working, we'd run out of gas and maybe just saying that was you know, that maybe we've outgrown each other." "It wasn't Adam's fault, it wasn't Larry's fault, it wasn't Danny's fault - they weren't convinced, because we weren't convincing them." "The material wasn't done, it wasn't right." "Where's the songs?" ""Cut the crap, show us your willy," as the cartoon said." "Ever seen that with the peacock?" "Peacock's showing the big fantail, so, he goes, "Just cut the crap and show us your willy."" "Next time we do the chorus" "I want you not to end on a G but end on a C." "Did you hear that, Adam?" "The way through writer's block is always by being truthful - to write a song about division," "a bitter-sweet song about... disunity." "I think what was going on at that time, took us a long time to come to terms with, and I almost can't remember what we were actually trying to come to terms with, but I know we carried each other" "to the point where we could stand on our own feet." "At Christmas, everybody just went, "Fine, that's enough, go back to Ireland."" "I think there was about two months where there was a sort of sense of regrouping, like, "Right, so that's what we've left behind." ""OK, well, we have got one or two things" ""that are leading the way."" "Berlin was a baptism of fire." "It was something that we had to go through, to realise that really what we were looking for and what we were trying to get to, was not something you could find physically outside of ourselves in some other city." "There was no magic to it - we had to actually just put the work in, and figure out the ideas, and hone those ideas down." "I mean, it's never gonna be a democracy, but if it's a benevolent dictatorship, that allows everybody to feel that they at least get a chance to say yay or nay." "Then you get something like One - everybody's going," ""Wow, that's amazing!" "Classic song, genius."" "Brian, "I really don't like that." ""We're gonna have to sort that, that's just boring me to tears."" "The idea is to try to set a scene, so that the band doesn't walk into a blank canvas." "There were suddenly all these little glimpses " ""Oh, I can do that" and "I can try that."" "The thing behind the foreground - push that more and the voice more." "So, bells back?" "Bells and Dan's like real attacky guitar." "Everybody started to see jumping off points." "What about the low one?" "I really like that." "There's a kind of quicksilver sound about it, it's like shimmering." "I like it, a real silver of silver..." "at the top, but it needs maybe some..." "grit." "And maybe that would come from..." "from you, Edge." "You dirty dog!" "As wiry a sound as you can make it, Edge." "Grit, wire...." "The drum sound, the original drum sound, it came in so low and then it went... it came in and then went up, so I missed that." " It's not a point of drama anymore." " I felt I really missed it." "The thing about Larry is he's as much of a visual part of the band as Bono and Edge." "His style of drumming is unlike anybody else's." "He's completely self-taught and he's basically wrong, but, thereby incredibly individual." "Yeah, basically, what I was just gonna do was, because Edge seemed so keen on the previous part," "I was basically just gonna try and emulate that and then change for the choruses." "Sure, I'll do that." "No problem." "Sure." "Man, he comes up with the drum signatures." "Now hardly any drummers do this." "You hear the drum beat and you know that's that song." "Sorry, Larry, I'm stopping you cos I don't think that's going anywhere." "It's softening the song up." "What I liked about the previous part was that it was brutal, and made it sound vigorous and strange." "It might be because there's another snare involved in it." "Everybody knows the value of the band." "The idea that there'll be somebody to challenge you, and you can challenge other people, the idea they can do that as adults and not necessarily have to agree with people." " It's a nice sound, isn't it?" " Yes, I know." "They're very, very loyal to each other." "And they're really, really kind to each other." "It's no good to have somebody not well in the unit or not happy." "The others don't say, "Hard luck, mate, we're carrying on."" "The others say, "OK, we've gotta get that person happy again."" ""We've got to draw them back into the circle."" "If we're being accused of megalomania let's do some judo." "Let's use the force of what's attacking us to defend ourselves." "So, then we got a voice, this character, The Fly to go with the glasses, and we distorted the voice, so I could go it's no secret that the stars are falling from the sky..." "So, getting down there, into that sort of guttural place, into the gutter then I had a whole new vocabulary open up." "You're going to go there, and I just decided I was gonna go there, but I couldn't do it without some armour on." "If I was gonna expose my heart," "I needed the right kind of armour to protect the rest of me." "Well, I'm learning to lie." " Tell us about Bono." " I'm learning to be insincere." "The shades, rock and roll, man." "To quote Iggy Pop, "When things get too straight, I can't bear it," ""and I feel like I'm stuck on a pin."" "Let's give them a rock star, let's have some fun with this." "I took Lou Reed's glasses, and Jim Morrison's pants," "Elvis's jacket, and a little bit of his hair - it was like an Identi-kit rock star, you know, an assemble one yourself?" "And actually, it was incredibly freeing." "We started to embrace our world and the silliness of it - the contradictory nature of it." "We stopped trying to be those earnest po-faced men." "The mask reveals the man alright." "It was a move into brighter light." "I think we got a bit fed up with those serious black and white gloomy photographs." "It's Anton really not working in an area that he was comfortable in." "I think we did brighten up a bit." "That song informs so much about what ended up becoming our exploration live of media and the truth which was Zoo TV." "Or maybe the encore's exactly the place for it." "Just, you know, like fish tanks, something that might start over there and end up over there, but it's not what you think it is." "So, you really like that?" "And Ned reckons he can get fins on it and all sorts." "It's something funny, basically, isn't it?" "Yeah." "During Zoo TV, I remember Edge saying..." ""This fantastic thing, this is our reward for ten years of restraint."" "It's just such a wide expanse to do something that... makes people laugh, as opposed to just be impressed." "Loud, boom, boom!" "Boom!" "All different versions of us." "I saw... them." "I saw into them." "I saw what Edge is now, I saw it then." "I saw who they could be." "It was always there." "And I saw Larry, and I thought, "This guy's a superstar."" "It's a very unromantic love, it's a very hard-bitten, tough, fuck off love." "You have to reject one expression of the band... first, before you get to the next expression, and in between, you have nothing." "You have to risk it... all."