U2 thread

stickyfiddle

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

poopot

This has to be up there as an all time great live moment.

https://youtu.be/rta9CHp7bEE

can watch that for days

digitalkettle

‘Numb’ is this weekend’s earworm for some reason…delayed response to working through the albums the other week (Boy-> Zooropa).

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

theimageofall

U2 played a huge part of my mid to late teens with Achtung Baby and Pop, but I love pretty much all their albums up to that point.

Edge’s guitar playing was a real inspiration to me when learning as well.

They have produced some good music in my opinion!

stickyfiddle

First reply and someone's already doing the classic "I'm here to tell you I don't like this thing" post. Why?

poopot

stickyfiddle said:

First reply and someone's already doing the classic "I'm here to tell you I don't like this thing" post. Why?

Didn’t say I didn’t like them!… Im a bigger fan of slapstick tho’ 

Musicwolf

c1981 my girlfriend was working alongside a girl from Ireland.  Knowing that I was in a band she told me that she was following a band from 'back home' and that she was on the guest list whenever she could get to a gig.  She asked me if I wanted to come along next time they were around but, for whatever reason, it never happened (I probably wasn't that interested because no one had heard of them).

Of course they turned out to be U2.

DesVegas

Any version of Bullet the Blue Sky tends to be rather amazing but i'd say my favourite U2 recording is thus

dindude

I was listening to Achtung Baby the other day, still one of my fav guitar records, the guitar tones, textures and playing on that album are on fire.

I like this - forget Jimmy Page and Slash, this is what a Les Paul should sounds like, beefy yet chimmey. 

https://youtu.be/WGZQn-8yefg

stickyfiddle

@dindude totally agree - that's what Gibsons are all about imo, and the Elevation live versions are SO GOOD. Far better than the usual LP+Marshall thing.

Danny1969

dindude said:

I was listening to Achtung Baby the other day, still one of my fav guitar records, the guitar tones, textures and playing on that album are on fire.

I like this - forget Jimmy Page and Slash, this is what a Les Paul should sounds like, beefy yet chimmey. 

https://youtu.be/WGZQn-8yefg

I love this version and yeah this is a superb tone.

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 

Cirrus

He does play a wrong chord in the first verse there. But yeah, that track is excellent Les Paul action. I actually have always wondered what the signal chain on the album version is, the riff is a lot cleaner than the crunchy live version

CaseOfAce

Kinda forget just how good he and the band are - "familiarity breeds contempt" right..?
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.

Cirrus

I think "All that You Can't Leave Behind" is the transition for me from a group genuinely trying to push themselves and create real art. An illustration of who they were before; The same band that released "I Still Haven't Found..." played a song at the MTV awards 10 years later based on a pitch shifted, fuzzed out screaming note sliding around over a sequenced bass groove, in an utterly un-ironic, non-cash in attempt to bring their love of dance culture into their music.

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.

Emp_Fab

For me, the startling transformation of Bono's voice in the transition between All I Want Is You and Where The Streets Have No Name at the 2001 Slane Castle gig gives me goosebumps.  It suddenly becomes a soulful cry, very moving, in a timbre you don't expect from him.  His father had died just twelve days prior.


Starts at 04:45 here - (sorry, the YouTube version has been pulled)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkuk62

ICBM

I agree that ATYCLB is their last great album. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb has some good songs on it, but there's no real musical development any more, and after that the number of good songs gets fewer and fewer on each album.

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.

Emp_Fab

ICBM said:

It's hilarious how much abuse jealousy 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. 

FTFY

stickyfiddle

I basically agree with all of the above. 

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.

stickyfiddle

Emp_Fab said:

ICBM said:

It's hilarious how much abuse jealousy 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. 

FTFY

I wiz'ed, but I do think it's more complex than that. Most folks don't realise just what a skill it is to do something simple and have it be great. And even fewer realise just how tightly contracted and performed Edge's parts have to be to not turn into complete mush. Even most U2 cover bands I've seen online don't manage it.

RocknRollDave

Thanks @stickyfiddle for the thread. When I suggested it, I meant to get round to starting in myself, but covid lethargy derailed me!

Not saying it’s my favourite song of theirs but a nice rare live outing for a neglected song:
https://youtu.be/35h1BhD5DkI

RocknRollDave

Also, fell down a YouTube rabbit hole looking for live versions of Red Hill Mining Town (the live vid from the 2017 tour I watched was sooooo bad) and stumbled upon a frankly astonishing tribute band called Lemon, from Chile. 

EDIT:
U2 tribute https://youtu.be/tedUp5RiIJA