Matt McGee ([email protected])
Sun, 11 Oct 1998 22:20:06 -0800
Thanks to T for sending this one to the @U2 web site. Pretty interesting
comments this guy makes, I agree with some of it and disagree with some of
it ... but hopefully it's worth some good conversation here on the list.
I disagree with the comment that U2 is a creature of the 80s more than the
90s - perhaps in terms of sales, sure, but not in terms of creativity,
songwriting, and musical excellence.
Matt
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Sunday Times
September 20, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: Tills to rattle and hum again for U2
BYLINE: Michael Ross
The band has reworked Sweetest Thing, an 11-year-old B-side, as a new hit -
and reneged on their post-punk ideals by putting out a compilation album.
MICHAEL ROSS reports.
In recent weeks in their Dublin quayside studio U2 tidied up some business
left unfinished for more than a decade since the recording of The Joshua
Tree, their biggest-selling album. With producer Steve Lillywhite, who on
U2's first three albums fashioned the wide-screen sound appropriated by
countless others in the 1980s, they reworked Sweetest Thing, a song
released unfinished as a B-side in 1987. Having run out of time on it at
the end of the Joshua Tree sessions, U2 always intended having another shot
at it, reckoning that it had hit potential.
The single, due for release on October 19, promises to be one of their
bigger hits of this decade, something of an irony for a band who began the
1990s by trying to demolish the edifice of earnestness they had spent the
1980s building. Similarly, U2 The Best Of 1980-1990, which will follow on
November 2, will buck the commercial decline U2 have experienced since
Achtung Baby, their 1991 album. That offering sold 11.5m copies, Zooropa,
its successor sold 7m and Pop, U2's most recent album, sold 6m copies,
despite the promotional back-up of the PopMart tour. The compilation, the
band's first, will be a reminder that U2 are much more a creature of the
1980s than of the 1990s.
Paul McGuinness, the group's manager, describes the "best of" album and the
B-sides compilation that will accompany it simply as a piece of
housekeeping. "We've never allowed compilations of U2's work before,
preferring to allow the albums to be seen as separate pieces of work," he
says. "It was inevitable that we would do it sooner or later and this was a
good gap. After this many years it's fair to let people obtain the tracks
on one album."
The compilation, however, will be more than just a piece of housekeeping,
more even than a much-needed boost to Polygram's Christmas campaign. It
will be an acknowledgment of sorts from a group that refused to sanction
collections because they wanted to be seen as a working band, not a museum
piece.
When they went on the road with the grand folly of PopMart, U2 repeatedly
made the point that it was not a greatest-hits tour, thereby distinguishing
themselves from the only other acts that tour at their level, the Rolling
Stones and Pink Floyd, who would be lynched if they did not deliver a hits
package at their shows. Now, in a deal worth a reported Pounds 30m, U2 are
finally joining the nostalgia market. After the 1980s compilation and at
least one new album, a 1990s "best of" compilation will follow.
They could, of course, have done this and a lot more besides a long time
ago for even greater and easier profit. Apart from the mid-priced live
compilation Under a Blood Red Sky, which primed the pump for their
commercial breakthrough, The Unforgettable Fire, U2 have not released a
live album, nor have they scoured the vaults for unreleased material. They
would have a very fine album if they simply drew together their
collaborations with others and tracks recorded for tribute albums, such as
Jesus Christ for Woody Guthrie or Hallelujah for Leonard Cohen.
Remaining faithful to their post-punk asceticism in this regard if in
little else, they have thus become one of the most bootlegged bands ever.
They do not rule out a box set of archived material but they have no plans
for one.
The forthcoming compilation will reinforce their status as the archetypal
1980s band, full of passion and bluster and self-aggrandisement. Indeed, it
will present a somewhat distorted portrait of a band that marched onwards
into caricature as the decade progressed.
Their briskly majestic first single, 11 O'Clock Tick Tock, is a surprising
omission, though it is available on the recently released compilation of
producer Martin Hannett's work. The intelligent qualification of that debut
characterised some of U2's best work during the 1980s, even during their
most aggressively colonising phases, but that is a side to U2 scarcely
represented on the compilation.
The larger problem the album highlights is the band's position in history,
something they have always kept at least one eye on. U2 came along after
punk and 10 years before acid house, the two revolutions in popular music
since the 1960s. These democratising revolutions, though led respectively
by the Sex Pistols and the Happy Mondays, were about technology and the
means of production rather than about individual bands. Coming between
them, with their powerful symbiosis of the messianic and the evangelistic,
U2 in the 1980s belonged more to the counter-revolution.
They will be remembered for The Edge's pioneering work with echo and
harmonics, they will be remembered too for the brave and bold way in which
they began the 1990s afresh, but they will be remembered perhaps most of
all, and not altogether fairly, for their big-haired reactionary bluster in
the 1980s, the decade that irony forgot.
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_________________________________
Matt McGee / [email protected]
@U2 Web Page Curator
http://www.atu2.com
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