Atomic Bomb - 25 Years in the Building

Bono, sometimes Saviour Of The World and all times singer and mouth piece for U2 has been describing their new record How To Dismantle The Atomic Bomb as being their “debut album.” It is in fact their eleventh album and the first since they all turned forty. Bono thinks that everything has been building for now and this is their best and most personal.

Let us look at the prelude and ask why U2 are not by now resting in their well earned laurels, enjoying the south of France, releasing tepid albums and touring the world to churn out the old hits. The Rolling Stones still do stadium tours but when was the last album that was good never mind ground breaking or feverishly anticipated.

There are three things that have focused and fuelled the intensity of U2’s intent. To the art itself they have added politics and faith. Maybe more important; money has not had very much to do with it. U2 was coined in a unique place. In the earliest days of the band they were at the same time heavily involved in Shalom fellowship a house Church born out of a charismatic revival that hit the 96% Roman Catholic Republic Of Ireland around 1977. Punk was hitting too and U2 straddled the two. Church worship and pub gigs intermingled and in maybe the only English speaking place in the western world without any kind of evangelical Christian ghetto it didn’t even occur to them that this was in any way incongruous. That rare bird, “authentic Christianity” sits uncomfortably with complacency, comfort and wealth. U2 have been authentic.

Twenty years ago Bob Geldof’s invite to Bono and Adam to join the Band Aid charity single took the spiritual heart of U2 and broke it. Band Aid celebrates its twentieth anniversary right now with Live Aid available on DVD for the first time and a remake of the Do They Know Its Christmas Time ready for release. On both Bono got the God line, “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” It is an obnoxious line and left Bono uncomfortable but it is the sharpest most provocative statement in the entire song.

Band Aid sent Bono and his wife Ali to Ethiopia to see it for themselves. They have never recovered. The genuine deep seated longing to change the world literally has been a vital ingredient as to what U2 do in song and on stage; their extravagant Zooropa and Popmart in the 90’s were almost like theatre plays with everything saying something and not an access word or image in sight. Music is often times not the end so much a means to a bigger more eternal picture.

Founding DATA to deal with third world debt, fair trade and HIV/AIDS wins no philanthropic Grammies. Rock stars with a conscience has NME recently calling Bono a “tosser.” It is a bizarre critique that helping people can be condemned. I guess rock would rather see him messily divorced with drugged up children than a positive contribution.

These two extra curricular obsessions of U2 have kept them urgent, vitalised and relevant. They arrived out of the post new wave energy. They held up the guitar amidst the tragedies of eighties synths. Their debut album Boy’s rawness of late adolescent introspection gave way to October’s post punk exuberant worship to War’s looking beyond to world events. Unforgettable Fire was more haunting, more atmospheric and the first worldwide hit Pride (In The Name Of Love). After Live Aid they produced the album of the decade in Joshua Tree and launched Stadium Rock. They were the biggest rock band on the planet.

After a blip, with the critics if not the fans, on Rattle and Hum they went to Berlin in 1991 and came back reinvented. Irony was dressed in shades, horns and leather and an industrial sound woke the world. Pop at the end of the nineties went a little far in experimentation and the seeming need to stay contemporary. Ironically it was a dip in fortunes that they recovered from by ditching the need to compete and going back to their rock basics for All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The Elevation tour of 2001 took them back to the top of the tree.

And so we wait for How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. In Ireland the tradition is that the album goes on sale at midnight on the day of release. I’ve made the pilgrimage in Belfast, Dublin and Cork even finding that the band themselves turned up in Belfast for the Joshua Tree release. Last time there were not many of us. I’m expecting to stand in line a bit longer in the first hour of November 22nd. After all it is the band’s “debut album” and not surprisingly the rumours are that it is filled with political comment and closes in prayer.” Just like Church. Who’s kidding; I wish!

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