I’m ready, I’m ready for the laughing gas. I’m ready, I’m ready for what’s next.
– U2’s Zoo Station
Rock music’s world conqueror can be excused if he’s a little down and distracted. Over white wine and linguine carbonara during the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Bono, with the guitarist Edge, was speaking about a film he’d had little to do with creatively – Davis Guggenheim’s U2 documentary From the Sky Down – and the reissue of an album (Achtung Baby) he and his band had made two decades ago. “Glum,” he says, well, glumly, when asked about U2’s mood early in the recording of that record in Berlin. “The whole period was really tough.”
And with that, the man always in black got up from his seat, still limping slightly as a result of his surgically repaired back, and walked off in search of something to jazz the conversation – a portable music player for an exclusive listen to some of the previously unheard tracks from the Achtung Baby 20th anniversary package. In the singer’s absence, Edge, much brighter-eyed, speaks about sounds – organic sounds, inaccuracies, chemistry and the right combination of technologies for making modern music. “With analog technology, depth is infinite,” he says, leaning forward, his knit cap all I can see. “If you retain the organic shapes, your brain will continue perceiving depth that might not even be there. But the minute your mind sees a grid, that’s the end of the interpretation.”
It’s interesting stuff, but I felt like I was in the middle of a Marshall McLuhan egghead fandango instead of rapping with two of the world’s biggest – and in Bono’s case, best – rock stars. “Perfection is deathly dull,” Edge continues, “so unexciting.”
Yep.
Ten minutes later, Bono is slow dancing with himself to Heaven and Hell, from the original Achtung Baby sessions. “It’s U2 like you’ve never heard us,” he shouts, turning heads of those among the band’s entourage in the private room at the swank Hazelton Hotel’s One restaurant in Toronto’s Yorkville. “It’s a smooch,” Bono grins, pleased with himself for arriving at just the right description for the doo-wop ballad. “Who would have thought?
In a hurry, the Dubliner in lilac-shaded glasses clicks onto another track before the first one even finishes. “I can’t believe you did that,” Edge says, rolling his eyes, dismayed at the song’s interruption. “I’m just giving him some flavour,” replies the singer, who then proceeds with a taste of the tribute CD of covers of Achtung Baby songs put out by the British music magazine Q. “We couldn’t make this a pop song, but they have,” he says, about the Killers’ giant version of Ultraviolet (Light My Way). “We need him on the radio,” Bono says about Brandon Flowers. “His voice!”
Bono is animated, singing harmony with the voices – sometimes his own – coming from the tiny speakers. “This is just better than our version,” he surmises, listening to Nine Inch Nails’ tense version of Zoo Station. More wine, more tracks and the interview is taking a decided upswing. The change of mood is dizzying – how in the world did we get here?
The film From the Sky Down is part of the Achtung Baby reissue package that includes early versions of the album tracks, rarities, remixes, b-sides and videos, not to mention a replica of Bono’s wrap-around sunglasses. A few days before the interview with Edge and the activist-singer, I spoke with film director Guggenheim (It Might Get Loud, An Inconvenient Truth) about how he got a forward-thinking band like U2 to participate in an archival project. “There’s now this movement to do these anniversary movies, inspired by the Bruce Springsteen movie The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town and the [Rolling Stones’] Exile on Main Street reissue,” he said. “But if the album is good, and the story is good, it’s a good reason to make a movie. And for them, it’s the most tumultuous curve on their trajectory.”
