Not long ago, The Edge played Noel Gallagher songs from How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb, a new collection of outtakes from U2‘s 2004 LP How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. “His comment was, ‘I want my money back,’” says The Edge. “‘I paid good money back in those days for what I was told were the best songs, and it turns out you were holding out on us.’”
U2 fans will get the chance to see if they agree with Gallagher on Nov. 29 when How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb arrives for Record Store Day. Some of the songs on what the band is calling a “shadow album” (“Picture of You,” “Luckiest Man in the World,” “I Don’t Wanna See You Smile,” “Are You Gonna Wait Forever”) have been heard before in either their finished form or an earlier incarnation, while others (“Evidence of Life,” “Treason,” “Country Mile,” “Happiness,” “Theme From Batman”) sat unheard in the vault for the past 20 years.
Taken as a whole, they offer a fascinating glimpse into U2’s creative process between 2003 and 2004 as they attempted to follow up their 2000 comeback album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and maintain their relevance in a post-Napster era where few rock bands of the prior century were still landing hits on the charts. It was a difficult process that caused the band to shift producers midway through, from Chris Thomas to Steve Lillywhite, and disregard many tracks they labored over for months.
We hopped on a Zoom with The Edge to talk about the laborious Atomic Bomb sessions, raiding the vault for How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb, the status of their next record, Larry Mullen Jr.’s health, and what archival projects might be in store for the future.
Hey Edge. Where am I catching you?
I’m in Dublin. I just came in from a recording session. We’re doing some demos and recording some tunes that we’ve been working on. It was just Bono and myself, but it was a lot of fun.
Going back to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, I remember Bono telling the press then that his goal was to make a guitar record, and he’d been listening to the Who, the Clash, and the Buzzcocks for inspiration. Was that your goal going into it too?
Very much so. I think we felt that this was a moment to explore our early inspiration. The first flash of U2’s creative life came about when we were playing in the room together, and exploring very simple song forms driven by guitar, bass, and drums. The limitations that that creates are an interesting challenge because you have to do it with just those instruments, and dynamics become a hugely important part of the creative process. And so we really went into that album very consciously thinking in those terms.
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How did you get into that headspace?
One of the things that we utilized was a tradition that we developed with Daniel Lanois, which we call the Power Hour. No matter what we were doing, once a week or twice a week, we would all go into a room and just improvise together. We often came out of that with two or three different track ideas.
When you’re you’re doing that, you have to respond in real time to what the other members of the band are doing, and they have to respond to what you are doing. You can get some very surprising results. And I think it is very evident from this collection that this is a slightly unhinged U2 in a great way. It’s utilizing, I think, the right kind of chaos where a radical element will be the thing that we’ll all jump on to work with, whatever it might be. It might be a drum part from Larry or a bass part from Adam [Clayton], or it might be something I’m doing, but suddenly there’s an intrigue around a piece of music.
You started with producer Chris Thomas. He made one of the great guitar records of all-time with Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. But after several months with him, you changed directions with Steve Lillywhite. What caused your frustrations during the Chris Thomas sessions and led to the change?
I think we did make some great progress with Chris. But when it came to listening back to the rough mixes that we had, we realized that where we were trying to push the chaos further, Chris’s instinct to try and rein it in was winning out. And some of the tracks just sounded too polite for us. So without really making a firm decision, we said, “Well, let’s just try some sessions with Steve and see if it takes us in a different direction.”
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We did this very much with an open mind about who the personnel would be going forward. But quite quickly, we fell into a more, I suppose, organic kind of process, which I think we’ve developed over years with Steve. He’s very practical, he’s very supportive, and he’s very upbeat. And I guess he also knew very well what we were both capable of and what our weaknesses were and was able to kind of coax the best out of us without being, I suppose, hemmed in by the limitations of the band. During out post-punk phase, that was the whole thing. We wanted to keep it simple, and we wanted to keep it direct.
Steve goes back to the very beginning with you guys. He knows all four of you well.
Exactly. And we did have some great ideas and great song beginnings. A great example of how that switch helped is “Vertigo,” where there was a version of that song called “Native Son,” which was finished. It was a really credible, good song, a solid, beautiful rock & roll tune. But Steve was like, “I think you guys could probably do a better backing track,” which we did on a day when Bono wasn’t around. Adam and Larry and myself went in and we just cut three takes in the room altogether, and one of those we chose.
When Bono started to sing over it, he was like, “Oh man, I think there’s something more here than this ‘Native Son’ song.” So we kept pushing and he came up with some new melodic ideas and we kind of took it out of the world of the earnest reportage style of lyric into something much more playful. It gave the song a completely different angle, and it became a much better song in the end, more complex. So that, as I say, is the right kind of chaos that was missing.
Did you feel pressure at this point to follow up All That You Can’t Leave Behind? You had such a big hit with “Beautiful Day,” and the spotlight was suddenly really bright again.
Yes and no. We did not want to do another version of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, so we made a decision to try and do something much harder hitting and more guitar driven in response to the success of “Beautiful Day.”
Each U2 album is a kind of reaction to the one that’s come before. So I guess we felt some sort of pressure to follow it up with something, but what we didn’t want to do is try and repeat ourselves. We’ve never been able to do that in the past, and something about how we do our best work is always about a sense of discovery, and putting ourselves in a new place musically. So that was a big part of our decision going into this record.
Let’s talk about some of the songs on this new release. “Picture of You” is clearly one you labored over since we’ve heard versions of it before called both “Fast Cars” and “Xanax and Wine.”
Well, this is not unusual for U2 with that kind of cell division that can occur with us. There was a demo going into Achtung Baby that ended up creating “The Fly” and “Zoo Station” called “Lady With the Spinning Head.” And in the case of this guitar-driven riff, out came “Xanax and Wine,” “Fast Cars,” and “Picture of You.”
It sounds like Bono cut new vocals for some of the songs.
Not all of them, but yeah. When we were finishing off the songs, we were trying to stay true to the spirit and the work that had been done 20 years ago. And then only in one or two cases did we feel like we really needed to step in and put a lot of our work in. And “Picture of You” is pretty close to the original with some harmony singing. “All Because of You 2” is the same. “Wait Forever” is exactly the same. We didn’t touch that at all. But “Treason” needed some new vocals because there was whole sections that were missing that didn’t have a lyric. And then “Luckiest Man in the World”… part of that was maintained from its earlier guise as “Mercy.”
Tell me about “Evidence of Life.” I’d never heard any part of that one before.
It was created in that period just before Steve came on board. I went into the studio with just some ideas. I had a few days, and just put that track down. I think it’s me playing drums. It’s the same drum little bit used throughout the song, so I’m reckoning it couldn’t be a proper drummer because they would’ve played the whole song, but I got eight bars here and there that I liked, so we just chopped it up.
You’re moving forward all the time. Things get left to one side, and you just never end up getting back to them. Sometimes when it came time to think about B sides, we would have to look back and go, “Well, what about this?” And I do remember thinking about what’s become “Country Mile” and what has become “Happiness.” I thought at the time, “Oh no, no, no, these are too good to be B sides. We’ll get back to these at some point.”
“Treason” was produced by Dave Stewart. How did that come together?
They were doing some recording leading up to the Nelson Mandela concert that we all did in South Africa, and all we had was a groove and some choral singing and some guitar. So at the time we worked on it a little bit, but again, it didn’t have finished lyrics. We left it to one side back then. But I really love that tune. It’s quite unique. It’s quite different for us.
When I heard “Country Mile” for the first time, my reaction was, “Why the hell didn’t that make the record?”
I love that tune. There’s a version with a slightly different opening, which is the radio edit. I like that one even better. I think at the time we made it, it had a different main lyric. The “Country Mile” lyric idea was one that we got to when we were reworking the songs. So I think we felt at the time that the lyric content was already covered on the album. But I’m like, “Yeah, what were we doing?”
It’s the same with “Happiness.” That’s such a great, funky groove.
That was another one that we just didn’t have time to finish. In the rush to get an album done at the end, there’s always that kind of compromise you have to make. You go, “Well, is it this or this?” I can’t remember what the choice was, but at the time, I think it was again that we hadn’t finished lyrics. These were still all kind of songs in development, but I remember at the time, thinking that, “We’re going to put that out at some point. That’s a great one.”
“Are You Gonna Wait Forever” goes back to the All You You Can’t Leave Behind sessions with Eno and Lanois.
Yeah. There’s always this thing with U2 albums where the door closes on one, but when you start going for the next record, there’ll be a continuation. The very first version of “City of Blinding Lights” was on the Pop album, and we just couldn’t quite crack it. And Chris Thomas was very helpful in helping us get that one on board.
I’d never heard of “Theme From The Batman.” What Batman project was that written for?
|I was asked to do the theme song for a cartoon series of Batman. We just said, “Let’s throw it in” because it had never been released. Maybe it’s on YouTube somewhere, but it never appeared on a U2 record.
You’re the only musician on the song, and you produced it. It’s more like an Edge solo track.
It pretty much is. But it felt like it was part of that moment, part of that time. And I guess that’s what’s fun about this collection is that little insights into where our heads were at.
“All Because of You 2” is clearly an earlier version of the song.
That was one of the first versions. We did do some work on the vocal and the lyric, but I think there’s a slightly new backing vocal arrangements. But for me, it sort of encapsulates what we were trying to do. I think we were aware that there was a great energy to it, but I suppose we were second-guessing the melodic content. And so we went back to the drawing board, and the version that came out on the album was quite a bit more melodic. But I think it lost something as well, whereas this is just complete. It is what it is. I think there’s a purity to it that’s very compelling.
What’s happening now? Are you guys deep into the next album?
We’re working on so many different things. During the whole Covid lockdown, I just went crazy into creating tracks and song ideas. So we’re starting to go through some of those, and we’ve got an awful lot of material to wade through to see what it is. And I guess we’re at that great honeymoon period of a lot of experimentation, and looking at all kinds of possible themes musically. I think the guitar will be a big part of the next record, but I don’t think it’s going to be a heavy rock album. I think it’s going to be a very different kind of use of the guitar, not a straight-up rock thing.
We’ve never done that. It’s just not who we are. We’ve always tried to avoid using the instrument in a way that’s too mainstream and kind of normal. We’ve always tried to find ways to use the guitar that has never been heard before, and it seems that that’s an important part of what gets us excited.
It’s almost like we’ve got to find our way into the counterculture, and it’s bringing that to the masses rather than ever trying to find what’s happening, what’s fashionable, what’s going on. So the same is happening with us right now, and the songs will tell us the direction of the album. Music starts to come into focus.
How is Larry doing? Is he able to play drums in the studio?
Yeah, we’ve done a session with Larry. We’re going to do another one in a couple of weeks, and we’re having a great time. So yeah, obviously we don’t want to be over-doing it, but yes, it’s going great and he’s in great form. It’s lovely to spend time with him in the studio in a creative environment.
Do you know at this point who is going to produce the record?
We’re working away with Jacknife [Lee], and I’m really enjoying working with him. And we have other sessions booked for potential different projects, which will probably all end up being folded into the U2 project, but we are working with other people and enjoying that. We’re really at that phase of just experimenting, letting the music tell us what to do. It’s just a lot of fun right now.
Are you thinking about the next tour yet? Might it be stadiums? Arenas?
We can’t really think much about the tour. There’s been some conversations about what we might do. But for us, again, as I was saying earlier on, it’s like how one album seems to respond to what has happened before. So I think we’ll respond in some way to what we’ve just done, which is the Sphere, with something quite different. But what that is, we’re not really sure just yet.
We’re looking forward to getting out and seeing our fans and going to where they are. I think that would be an important thing rather than them traveling to us. That helps on some levels cutting out some sort of the carbon emissions of touring, but I think we can find a way to cut back on carbon and still manage to get on the road and see our fans where they are.
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To wrap up, a lot fans would love to hear a huge Pop box set, possibly for the 30th anniversary in 2027, and Songs of Ascent, the unheard No Line on the Horizon sister album. Might either of those things see the light of day?
I would say both are quite likely, but we haven’t really put any energy into them yet. But yes, definitely. As I was saying, I have 100 song beginnings that we’re wading through. There’s so many song ideas from each U2 album that has been released, and I’m sure we will get around to doing something with Pop. I remember that very fondly. There was a lot of cool experimentation going on at that time. So yeah, I’m sure it’ll happen.
This has been the longest gap ever between albums of new material. A lot of fans are really excited to hear what’s next.
Me too. I can’t wait to get something out, and hopefully get on the road.
