WITH AND WITHOUT U2

The Phoenix Bar in Cork on a hot sweaty Thursday night, and Robbie Robertson's "Testimony" pounds out of the speakers, all beef and brass and gospel funk, and suddenly you remember, that's Larry Mullen on the drums, Adam Clayton on bass, The Edge chopping stevecropperly on guitar, and Bono's voice gospelwailing, all of them weaving in and out of the rhythms and the brass lines as though to the manner born. The whole bar chugs to the mightypulse. This wheel's on fire. Turned full circle...

Cut back to the summer of 1981, U2 having just returned from one of their early tours of the States. Yours truly was upstairs in Bewleys, nursing a black coffee and reassembling some fragments of the previous night when Bono entered the room, on his way to meet some new American friends who'd made the pilgrimage.

We wound up talking for an hour, about America, about American music and about the contrast between the young bands of the era who had largely come to music anew, learning their instruments on the run, as they attempted to assemble an idiom that reflected their own experience, and their older counterparts whose music encompassed a range of traditions, but had lost the freshness and fire that was so evident in a band like U2. We also talked of God and the vocal affirmation most manifest in gospel music.

Typically, Bono wanted it all, to be himself in U2, learning as he and they went, but also to understand the roots, to absorb them into his own canon. He hadn't listened to much roots material at the time, so I promised to put a tape together of some of music's finer moments.

In the way of these things it was some time before the tape was ready, and I delivered it during the recording of "War". I’m going in there in an hour to record a very heavy song, and I don't know what I'm going to do on it vet," said Bono as we settled down to listen to the tape. The song in question was " Sunday Bloody Sunday".

The stuff on the tape was culled from a whole bunch of sources, and included tracks like "Trouble In My Way", a stunning gospel performance by the Swan Silvertones, "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson ("Slide Guitar! Wait till the Edge hears this!"), "Jesus On The Mainline" from Ry Cooder's live "Showtime" album, stuff by Muddy Waters, Louis Jordan, bits of country, soul and folk...

Later that day "Sunday Bloody Sunday" was recorded and the "War" album was well and truly on its way. The big wheel kept on turning. The band hit the road again on the "War" tour that eventually wound up at Red Rock, the video of which - by capturing their power for mass consumption in passionate closeup - elevated them to the front rank of live acts. Even then, the desire to broaden their musical canvas was in evidence, in the rather odd inclusion of' a chunk of the Steven Sondheim MOR classic "Send In The Clowns" during "Electric Co", a musical quirk which is captured live on "Under A Blood Red Sky".

It was to be a chastening initial foray into the world of cover versions - with the release of the video, and the six-track live album in the, United States, the band were sued for royalties by Sondheim's publishing company, who eventually won the case.

A costly experience, it would not, however, deter the band I from pursuing the policy of digging deeper into the music's past.

After "Under A Blood Red Sky", U2 began a rethink. For their next album, "The Unforgettable Fire", they brought in Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to handle production and engineering duties. It is assumed of the former that he represented a Europeward move, given the normal association between the name Eno and European styled avant-garde music. Not so simple. Eno is a musicologist by disposition, with a wide ranging interest in all areas of ethnic is as contemporary music.

"You really ought to meet Eno", was Bono's introductory remark when we met at Slane during the Bob Dylan concert there, "he’s got the most amazing gospel collection." In fact the association with Eno and Lanois was part of a wider change of bearings which U2 going through and which involved at least the temporary abandonment of formal recording studio facilities for "The Unforgettable Fire" the band had taken over large sections of Slane Castle into which a mobile studio was wheeled, thus beginning their shift to the "live" approach to recording which has subsequently become a trademark.

The band's temporary residence at Slane meant that the venue was like a second home to the singer at the time of Dylan's visit and he became invoked in the thick of the action a couple of times during the day. Initially he went backstage to interview Dylan for Hot Press: both had been intrigued by the idea when it was mooted first. In the event, the cub reporter actually confronted two of the cagiest and most practised media gameplayers in music, Dylan being accompanied by an unexpected associate in Van Morrison.

That pair do not like to give much away, and the published results give a fair impression of the sometimes awkward and often humorous encounter that ensued, with Bono winging it, filling the gaps with freewheeling associations, and in the end almost out-talking the interviewees.

But Dylan seems to have been engaged. On his way back to the stage for an encore he passed Bono, who later recalled the occasion: "He asked me if I knew 'Blowin' In The Wind' and I said, 'Sure. Everybody knows it.' But on stage, when he threw a verse at me to sing, I realised that, while I know the song, I don't know the words... "

So he made them up. To unsympathetic ears it might have been a travesty but to the rest of us that verse lasted forever, with all the spinetingling sense of possible doom that accompanies a highwire act, as Bono wrestled with the song's meaning and let his feelings flow in a torrent of words and emotion. It was an occasion when he seemed exposed and vulnerable - but one on which his ability to give something extra, even in the most difficult of circumstances, was also established beyond dispute.

In some ways that unplanned live collaboration saw Bono cross the great divide in musical terms. If punk, and the inheritance of its do-it-yourself philosophy to which U2 had been privy, involved a rejection of established rock heroes and the legacy of the sixties and seventies, then Bono was re-writing these rules in stepping on stage at Slane and trading vocal licks with Dylan - a man who was old enough to be his father. With the one gesture he was also staking a claim to credibility with a new audience, those for whom tribal allegiances were a matter of indifference but whose fundamental musical commitment was to great songs, and great rock'n'roll, from writers and performers of any age and any generation.

Almost certainly none of this would have been considered by Bono or anyone else in the U2 camp at the time. Indeed there seems to be little doubt but that the experience will have confirmed for the singer just how much he still had to learn about the great tradition of singing and writing and musicianship of which he wanted to be part. But the important point was that U2 did now want to be part of that great tradition.

That proposition would be confirmed with the much-anticipated release in October of 1984 of the band's follow-up to "Under A Blood Red Sky", the magnificently atmospheric Eno-Lanois produced magnum opus, "The Unforgettable Fire". For the most part a carefully crafted labour of love, it was also the album which saw Bono emerge as a songwriter of real subtlety and substance. And in "Pride" and "MLK" it contained the first U2 songs which could aspire to classic status, ones which might outlive the band and their time, to become part of The Big Picture, and be covered by other singers and bands for years to come.

Nurtured into life over a lengthy gestation period, "The Unforgettable Fire" marked the point at which U2 as a unit opened out to broader landscapes in earnest - but part of that broadening included an involvement in spare-time activities, with other musicians and in other contexts, as the members of the band separately explored the new parameters they had begun to shape for themselves.

In some ways U2 were reflecting the growing involvement of rock musicians in general in wider social issues. Indeed the band were in the vanguard of this upsurge of commitment, "Pride(In The Name Of Love)" and "MLK" in particular signalling a willingness to challenge and confront audiences with statements of an overt political nature. But these aspirations to changing hearts and moving minds were given a more practical dimension entirely by fellow Irishman Bob Geldof who galvanised the goodwill of the pop industry for the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in December 1984, in which Bono participated as one of the featured vocalists, and the proceeds of which went to famine relief in Ethiopia.

The following summer saw the concept extended with the "Live Aid" concerts run simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic and transmitted by satellite to a global audience of hundreds of millions.

U2 were among the bands who grabbed the moment, turning in a show- stealing performance which many see as having irresistibly accelerated their transition to megaband status. Typically, however, they did not let their involvement with Ethiopia rest there. Bono and his wife Ali travelled to the famine and war stricken country in 1986 to do a stint as Famine Relief Workers, a voyage which resulted in an exhibition of photographs and a book, published in co-operation with the Irish Famine Relief Agency, Concern, to whom all Proceeds were donated.

Another excursion into extra-curricular political pop came with the "Sun City" album, brainchild of former E-Street Band mainstay Little Steven (aka Miami Steve), late in 1985. Bono's contribution here was self-penned, a simple driving blues, "Silver And Gold"; with Keith Richards in support playing slide guitar, its pared-back country blues feel powerfully underscores the song's anger and emotion.

"Silver And Gold" was a marked departure from all that U2 had released previously, although subsequent versions have, with the other members of the band on board, linked it more explicitly with the mainstream of their ouvre. But at the time, there it was, Bono and his song, almost alone... and still most effective.

It was another statement of growing maturity, with U2 defining their place individually and collectively, at the forefront of global rock. In Bono's case it was further confirmation that he had, in Robbie Robertson's phrase, caught the lever. Music had become a way of life.

Few other musicians of U2's era would have been seen in the company of the likes of Keith Richards; indeed in the band's own early days, 112, in common with most other post-punk performers, might themselves have been seen as antagonistic to all that those older generation musicians stood for.

Bruce Springsteen, like the streetwise Little Steven, acted as bridge between the generations. The Jersey Devil was among their strongest supporters from their early days. He and Bono found common ground in talking of songs and U2 repaid the compliment with a ragged, but utterly engaging version of Bruce's "My Hometown" at their 1985 homecoming in Croke Park, Dublin.

The narrow worldview of rock music as the exclusive possession of the young was now officially consigned to the dustbin of the 70's...

It was around the same time that Bono recorded his contribution to Clannad's "Macalla" album, released in 1985. The track was "In A Lifetime", which during 1989 enjoyed a second lease of life in the UK and Irish singles charts. At the time Ciaran O'Braonain of Clannad expressed amazement at Bono's brilliantly empathetic reading of the song: it wasn't so much the quality of the vocal performance itself, which is exceptional by any standards, as the sureness of the U2 singer's instincts, which enabled him to put it down almost instantly.

"He was in the next studio, and we asked if he'd like to try a vocal, and he said sure," Ciaran recalled, "and he just walked in, listened through it, got the hang of it, and did it, just like that."

The song's renewed success affords us an opportunity to recognise afresh the still-young Bono's vocal assurance, his combination of passion and technique on what is, in fact, a comparatively complex song.

Meanwhile The Edge was also branching out again, this time for the soundtrack to the film "Captive", released in 1986. Three years earlier he'd collaborated with Jah Wobble and Holger Czukay on the mini-album "Snake Charmer", but "Captive" was a much more substantial undertaking on his part.

The album of the movie is most widely remembered for the presence of a young Sinead O'Connor on the song "Heroine" an underrated performance in hindsight - which was released as a single in the months before "The Lion And The Cobra". The track also featured Larry Mullen on drums. The rest of "Captive" is by and large, a highly-effective piece of soundtrack sound sculpting; outside the context of the film it works best as mood music, confirming The Edge's fascination with the evocative power of orchestration.

Placing it in the context of U2's work, it is an exploration in the European mode, of textures and patterns. And yet, there is a clear link to the band's development, from "The Unforgettable Fire" onwards. If "Silver And Gold" can be seen as an advance on the western front, then "Captive" is an exploration to the cast. And, as the axis of U2's sound moved ever westward, it may also have been important in convincing The Edge that there were other avenues via which he could ultimately - where time and tide might allow - explore this aspect of his muse.

Bono and The Edge were joined in the extra-curricular activities by Larry Mullen Jnr., who not only played on the "Captive" soundtrack, but also contributed handsomely to Paul Brady's album "Back To The Centre", on the track "Airwaves".

The sound that U2 had begun to explore in "The Unforgettable Fire" was altogether more spacious than the U2 of old, and both Larry and Adam found themselves with a great deal more room to manoeuvre. This freedom also carries responsibilities: in this case they had to be able to control the space and time of the performance, and integrate their contribution into the overall sound.

That ability was effectively brought to bear on "Airwaves" in a performance that emphasises Larry's maturity, not just as a drummer and marshal of time, but also as (that most difficult of roles) - an accompanist. The cut may not have had Steve Gadd quaking in his boots but it was a mighty long way from the Artane Boys Band and the Drifting Cowboys - a country band Larry toured briefly with in the 70's - nonetheless...

There were other landmarks along the way. One occurred when the new looser U2 surfaced on RTE's TV Ga Ga early in 1986, Bono resplendent in a buckskin jacket, boots and a beard, his newly long hair tied up for the first time in an outlaw-style bandanna.

The ramshackle image aptly reflected the character of the music unveiled on a night that was destined to challenge every assumption about the nature of the beast U2. Renowned for the tightness, precision and organisation of their sound, here they opted for a sprawling raucous noise, with Bono blowing an ornery harmonica in a Dylanesque folk rocky version of the then unreleased "I Trip Through Your Wires". A rockabilly-based original with the working title of "Womanfish" was also on the agenda before the band launched into Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" by way of finale, with the audience gradually taking over the singing and playing.

That gig was undertaken on the explicit agreement with RTE that it was to be a once-off performance, never to he re-screened. Inevitably, however, bootleg video tapes of the occasion - complete with an interview with Bono and Larry - have since surfaced, capturing a performance for posterity, the full significance of which could hardly have been lost on those involved. Following the huge Stadium Rock success of The Unforgettable Fire Tour, TV Ga Ga saw U2 reincarnate as garage band, rough and raw and untutored. But this time round, rather than aiming to soar into the stratosphere, the collective had their feet planted firmly on terra firma. They were putting down roots, relearning their trade, only this time as journeymen musicians of the kind that are in the music game for good.

The same spirit informed the band's appearance at the "Self-Aid gig at the RDS in Dublin in May of 1986. The set opened with a storming "C'Mon Everybody" and featured "Pride", a balladic "Sunday Bloody Sunday", "Bad" in its most tortured performance ever, as well as a violent and menacing version of "Maggie's Farm", which is to be found on "Self-Aid", the album of the concert, which was released by MCA. Ragged, angry, spontaneous, anarchic - "Maggie's Farm" is all these things and more, with its mocking references to "Old MacDonald's Farm" and its furious surges and declamations on Chernobyl and Sellafield, underscored by the rumbling rhythm section and The Edge's searing slide guitar.

It is a performance of power, intensity and passion that's well worth hunting down in its recorded form.

U2 have seldom been so naked.

"THE UNFORGETTABLE Fire", according to the credits was " produced/ engineered by Eno/Lanois." Its successor marked a subtle shift: it was "produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno."

The implied elevation of Lanois in the overall scheme of things was significant. Lanois leans towards a more rough and ready style, and was instrumental in the band's rejection of the clinical studio environment from "The Unforgettable Fire", through "The Joshua Tree", and on to "Rattle And Hum". He was also co-producer of the solo album by his fellow Canadian, former Band guitarist Robbie Robertson, in which U2 became involved...

Robertson arrived in Dublin at the end of August 1986, in the middle of Hurricane Charlie. "There were cars floating down the streets, " he recalled in a Hot Press interview with Declan Lynch, "...it was really frightening. Thank God these guys (U2) were up for some spontaneous combustion!"

Robertson admitted that he wasn't prepared for the exercise because he had been too busy writing the score for the film "The Color Of Money". "I had one little clue, inspired by a song I heard by Mahalia Jackson when I was a kid, called 'Didn't It Rain, Children'. I put it on a tape with Daniel Lanois - just a tom-tom and a guitar playing this groove, and it had something.

"I also had a tape of a thing that Gil Evans wrote for 'The Color Of Money'. So I put that down on tape, and thought there was something about it I liked, it's got this kind of bizarre, trance-like throb.

"Then I had a few scraps of paper with stuff written on them, and when I got there, their enthusiasm was just so fantastic. They were so great at rising to the occasion. Saying 'let's jump all over it' and 'let's hit it every way until we get it'."

The two tracks recorded with Robertson worked well in the context of the album, yet maintained the integrity of U2's sound, a tribute to Lanois' production mastery. Of the two tracks, "Testimony" is the more successful, working the brass riff originally composed for "The Color Of Money" into a dense, powerful, blockbuster of a soul stomper.

The other side yields up "Sweet Fire Of Love" where, it's fair to say, the former Band leader meets U2, and youth too, half way. While this is not as interesting a track, it features Bono more prominently in an effective vocal part which shifts smoothly between harmony and counterpoint.

Robbie Robertson's eponymous album was not finally released until the latter half of 1987. The same year saw the release of U2's fifth studio album, "The Joshua Tree", which signalled an emphatic shift towards an exploration of the enigma of America.

Before they hit the road, however, they repaid a debt to their own roots - this time through an American-style folk ballad. When RTE's The Late Late Show presented a 25th anniversary tribute to folk scene veterans, The Dubliners, U2 played an impassioned version of "Springhill Mining Disaster", learned from the singing of one of Bono's spiritual forebears, the late Luke Kelly, a founder member - insofar as such an animal existed! - of The Dubliners, who had died not so long previously of a brain haemorrhage.

Kelly was a great and garrulous artist, never short of an opinion and never wanting for a song or poem. He was full of curiosity and hungry for new challenges, like appearing in theatre and playing with rock bands. He was politically committed too, and notably generous, both with money, being a patron of the arts, and with praise, for those whose efforts were made with sincerity and what that era unblushingly called soul.

The video of that Late Late Show is available on general release, and repeated viewings reveal an authority and assurance to U2's performance, and an empathy with the genre that make marked contrast with Bono's youthful exuberance, onstage with Bob Dylan at Slane a few short years before.

Against a stark, sparse backdrop, Bono recounts the song's story of greed and exploitation with passion and commitment. Unburdened of the trappings of rock'n'roll, the voice can come into its own, a wonderfully powerful instrument delivering a simple folk song with devastating power.

Quite clearly, U2 were beginning to take command of the roots they'd been digging through...

In some ways, all of these extra-curricular activities found their logical culmination in "Rattle And Hum", the album on which U2 officially explored the musical continent of America. Throughout the tour which became the album and the film, they'd endeavoured to connect with the great tradition, not just by seeing and listening, but also by doing.

Unwinding after gigs in bars and hotels they were prone to adopting the guise of The Dalton Brothers, a kick-ass country combo. But it wasn't all played strictly for high jinks. Reflecting their increasing fascination with the sources of the music's primal power, they journeyed to Memphis to record in Sun Studios with Cowboy jack Clement and Dave Ferguson, in the room where all the great hillbilly cats turned the rootstocks of blues and bluegrass and country into the heat of rock'n'roll. Not just for tourist nostalgia either: now they would know how those guys got that sound. And in a similar vein they recorded "God Part II" with Jimmy lovine, who had himself worked with John Lennon on his solo album.

They also played a host of cover versions drawn from different sources and eras: "Stand By Me", "C'mon Everybody", the furious upstanding version of The Beatles' "Helter Skelter" which features on the album and a decidedly ropey unrehearsed once-off of Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower". Add in the joyous version of the old Love Affair hit "Everlasting Love" and the classic "Unchained Melody" (both recorded in Dublin's STS Studios and found on the flip side of "All I Want Is You") and you begin to get a full picture of the magpie instincts which have begun to prevail in U2, where any and every aspect of popular music's rich heritage is seen as a potential source of inspiration.

For "Rattle And Hum" also found U2 exploring forms: there is the homage to Billie Holiday on "Angel Of Harlem"; an Irish transportation ballad - The Edge's plaintive "Van Diemen's Land"; and, most triumphantly, an exhilarating gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

Part of the excitement of these explorations was finding it happening right beside you: "Rattle And Hum" records Bono's palpable joy at the impact of the New Voices Of Freedom on this latter track, but he also refers to "hearing the horns breathe", to that urgent and immediate and utterly live approach to recording which the band have come around to.

And then there are the collaborations: with Bob Dylan on the lonesome campfire ballad "Love Rescue Me" , and with the king of the blues, BB King, on the rich, swaggering "When Love Comes To Town". On the basis of performances like these, by "Rattle And Hum" U2 have attained that plateau where they can reach out and successfully embrace other forms of music and ideas - often without guile or artifice or apparent sense of purpose, but always with intense curiosity and commitment.

If "TESTIM0NY" saw U2 riding the crest of a pounding, raunchy soul rhythm, another collaboration reveals a different kind of authority. Perhaps the pinnacle of U2's recent explorations is the beautiful love song "She's A Mystery To Me", written by Bono and The Edge for the late Roy Orbison, and produced for Orbison's "Mystery Girl" album by Bono.

It ties in with Bono's work with T-Bone Burnett - they co-wrote "Having A Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Her" for the long fellow's album, "Beyond The Trapdoor", and "Purple Heart" for his last LP "Talking Animals", on which Bono also gets a vocal credit - in that an aspect of the U2 singer's ambition in relation to songwriting has been to escape from the specifics of band composition. He wants to write songs that transcend time and place - classic songs. He talks of writing for Nina Simone and Willie Nelson. He says he'd love to write a song for Frank Sinatra. The Orbison opus whets the appetite for what's to come...

Uncluttered, literate, intense and, yes, classic, "She's A Mystery To Me" is a wonderful thing - a perfect torch song for the greatest torch singer that rock'n'roll has ever produced. Its classic lines offer the ultimate statement regarding the efficacy of U2's extra curricular explorations and collaborations. From here on, anything is possible...

And still the big wheel keeps on turnin'. Summer 1989 found Adam joining country chanteuse Maria McKee onstage in Dublin. Bono meanwhile was to be found alongside Bob Dylan again, this time at the RDS (performing "Maggie's Farm" which the U2 singer transmuted to "Charlie's Farm", in deference to the uneasy political times in Ireland in Summer 1989), and onstage at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, reciting poetry by W.B. Yeats against his own atmospheric musical backing.

But the traffic hasn't all been one way. Joan Baez' latest album featured a folksy version of "MLK". Colm C.T. Wilkinson has recently been performing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in his stage show. On a lighter note, there was the recent single "A Bit Of... " by London rappers Kiss AML which sampled the bass and keyboards riff from "New Year's Day" with decidedly infectious results. And then there's The Joshua Trio, currently making a career out of covering and parodying U2...

It's ironic. The group that were once, by their own admission, the "world's worst covers band", now inspire a thousand cover versions by garage combos across the globe -while the fab four themselves, collectively and individually, continue to expand the limits of their own musical ambitions by collaborating and conspiring with the greats of rock'n'roll past and present and by covering whatever - or whoever - takes their fancy.

Against that compelling backdrop, it's worth pausing to reflect that the second decade of U2 is only just dawning.

WITH OR WITHOUT U2

August 1989