After bringing them up on a couple of others (clean tone thread, hard to cover thread)
@RocknRollDave suggested it's time for a standalone thread for some highlights and rarities. I've gone up and down on the last 3 or 4 albums but man when they're good they're so damn good.
I found these two while discussing various bits - WOWY from the early ZooTV era with a lovely melodic solo in the outro, and Ultraviolet form the same show which has a fantastic little guitar line added in the last verse. I'll never not love Edge's playing
And my favourite version of All I Want is You from the BBC concert a few years back. Just lovely
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https://youtu.be/rta9CHp7bEE
can watch that for days
War might be my favourite album…I don’t necessarily look forward to hearing SBS…but NYD never gets old!
Also nice that ‘Drowning Man’ got some Rick Beato love recently
Edge’s guitar playing was a real inspiration to me when learning as well.
They have produced some good music in my opinion!
I like this - forget Jimmy Page and Slash, this is what a Les Paul should sounds like, beefy yet chimmey.
It's also a great example of how rhythmically accurate he is as well .... I've tried very hard over the years to do this number but it's very difficult to do right
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Those guitar sounds he crafted in the studio with Lanois and Eno are just ... amazing.
That's not guitar playing - it's art.
my faves? Apols for the lack of deep cuts but for me I love the guitar solo after the piano break in New Years Day
... and of course that chiming guitar line in Pride... shivers down the spine. The whole band are on point. Wonderful stuff.
After "All that you can't...", they just aren't the same to me; either on record or live shows. Yes, they still have the odd great song here and there but they're trying to be good instead of being true.
My "deep cut" is probably the live version of Lemon from Zoo TV. A song that presents itself as fairly flat and emotionless on record reveals itself to have hidden depths and Bono starts to stray into Operatic drama "Midnight... Midniiiight". The segue into "With or Without You" and Lemon holds its own against that classic.
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Starts at 04:45 here - (sorry, the YouTube version has been pulled)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkuk62
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
That said, find another band who have been going for over forty years - especially with no line-up changes - and even got that far before they started to run out of ideas.
It's hilarious how much abuse The Edge and Adam Clayton get from supposedly "good" musicians as well - for me, they're both perfect examples of really great players who play only for the song, and what they do is actually far harder than it sounds. Larry Mullen doesn't seem to provoke the same reaction, although perhaps that's only because I don't hang out on drummer forums...
And yes, Bono can certainly seem like a pompous twat. It doesn't mean that he's not a great singer and lyricist, and he's achieved more for the world than many more apparently humble people, so possibly he needs a slightly outsize ego to have done that.
Regardless, they'll always be one of my favourite bands.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
It's been diminishing returns from Atomic Bomb onwards but there is decent levels of merit in everything prior to that. I've never been that big into War (or October, but that's less controversial) but I think Zooropa and Pop - and particularly where those songs ended up by the last leg of each tour - contain some of their best work... it's just that neither album had quite the final rigorous QC and finesse that the other greats did.
I'm quite sure that they aren't quite the live force they were in late 1993 or 2001, I was there for what remains their last show to date and it was utterly spectacular. I'd love for them to get a little more fire back for wherever they're going next. A little more jeopardy and a bit less "taking 5 years to polish everything" would be nice. But I'm hardly begrudging them an "easy" life when it comes to recording and live shows. I think they have more albums I would happily listen to start-to-finish than any other band.
Not saying it’s my favourite song of theirs but a nice rare live outing for a neglected song:
https://youtu.be/35h1BhD5DkI
U2 tribute https://youtu.be/tedUp5RiIJA