U2: From the Sky Down

“What people are doing when they’re forming a band is they’re forming what an anthropologist would call a clan.  It’s a group of people who may not be genetically related but share interests of some kind, and have pledged loyalty to each other.  I think men in particular have a kind of instinct in for banding together and being in a group together.  Most of the identity of that group is formed by a “separateness” from everybody else.”  – Brian Eno, 2011

“Making Achtung Baby is the reason we’re still here now.  That was the pivot point where we were either going forward or ‘is this our moment to implode?’” I thought to myself ‘this is it – we’ve come to the end of the road’ – band breaks up over ‘artistic differences’ – classic cliché.” – Bono, 2011

2011 marked the twentieth anniversary of U2’s Achtung Baby album.  To commemorate this anniversary the band released a super deluxe version of the album.  The documentary U2: From the Sky Down is included as part of this mammoth box set.  This documentary was made by Davis Guggenheim, the same man who made It Might Get Loud.  This documentary chronicles captures a band which faced an existential crisis.  It is a fairly thorough look at the making of Achtung Baby.  What is especially good about the documentary is all the participants from those events that occurred twenty-two years ago aided in the making of the film.  U2: From the Sky Down is told from a first-person point of view, not by an outsider looking in.

The first half of the documentary is a brief history of U2, from the very beginning until they made The Joshua Tree album and the subsequent Rattle and Hum movie.  When they made The Joshua Tree, this was their big artistic statement.  This was the time when they were a very popular band and suddenly they became a HUGE band that had to tour stadiums so that all the people who wanted to see them live could do so.  Then they got this idea – let’s make a movie!  Perhaps they had visions of making their version of A Hard Day’s Night, which captured the zeitgeist that was Beatlemania.  Rattle and Hum was like a home movie a four guys looking to discover American music, and a joyless home movie at that.  Bono said they had lots of fun making the movie, but that fun was never captured when the cameras were on. They thought it would be ‘interesting’ to watch them ‘discover’ American music.  They knew nothing of the blues, knew nothing of country music.  It didn’t occur to them that their naiveté wasn’t as interesting to us as it was to them.  The reviews of Rattle and Hum were scathing:

When self-importance interferes with the music – NY Times

It’s a tad early for the band to be lobbying for admission to the pantheon – Washington Post

Rattle and Hum is the sound of four men who still haven’t found what they’re looking for – Rolling Stone

The guys in U2 were a bit shell-shocked.  Bono’s wife told him “you’ve gotten so serious.  The boy I fell in love with was so full of mischief, so full of madness.  You were a much more experimental character – what’s happened to you?”  Ali Hewson nailed what was ‘wrong’ with U2.

“A group is a collective ego in a sense, and that ego is very easily offended.” – Brian Eno

As long as I’ve been following this band [since 1983], U2 have been critical darlings.  But with the perceived pretense of Rattle and Hum, it was “open season” on U2.  Music critics are renowned for building up musical acts, only to tear them down again.  U2 was no exception to this rule.  This was their first time of getting extreme negative feedback from their critics, and they were unsure how to take it. According to Bono, the band was exhausted and thought they’d ‘run out of steam.’ He said that “‘you start to believe what people are saying about you.  You start to think ‘maybe this is the end.’”  By the time they played a hometown gig on Dec 30, 1989, Bono told the audience ‘We have to go away and just dream it all up again.’”  “We looked like a big overblown rock band running amok…When we were kids, 16-, 17-years old, gone to see the Clash in Dublin, this was ‘the enemy.’   Have we become they enemy?  We hadn’t created any great crimes against humanity or art. All we had done was been a little self-conscious and overblown.”  The answer to the band’s problem – “Let’s get a big fuckin’ chain saw and cut down the Joshua Tree!”

They wanted to go to Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin, where great things happened, like David Bowie’s Low and Heroes and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.  They felt that just by being there, the “greatness” of what had happened there previously would just ‘magically’ visit upon them.  Inspiration was lacking, as was the “greatness” they thought would visit them.  Bono - “We felt as we walked into this place ’well, you know, it’s so full of greatness, that greatness will visit with us.’  So we’re there, and greatness is nowhere to be seen.  Greatness has left the building, it seems, years ago.”

Before they went to Berlin they all had a sense that something was “not quite right,” that they were all on completely different pages.  It was like “each man for himself,” which betrayed the concept of a band.  There is a nice piece of animation that was very illustrative of what was happening to U2 at the time.  As the time the Berlin Wall came down and the separation between East and West was disappearing, walls between all the band members were coming up, and communication was lacking.  There were musical walls coming up within the band.  After Rattle and Hum, The Edge listened to and was influenced by the work of KMFDM, the Young Gods, Einstürzende Neubauten.  He was into that “machine age music” that took the humanity out of things. He also liked what he heard from what was called the “Madchester” scene.  Bono told his interviewer the first album he bought for Ali [his girlfriend then, now his wife] was Man Machine from Kraftwerk.  Bono and the Edge were in the same musical headspace, but Larry Mullen went the other way.  He went back to classic rock.  He liked Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Blind Faith.  He liked to hear Ginger Baker play.  How does one reconcile such disparate tastes in music?  U2’s method of songwriting up until this time was that of getting together in a room, jamming together, and seeing what comes out the other end.  Suddenly, Bono and the Edge worked on stuff together beforehand, and awaited input from the rhythm section.  Adam Clayton said this method gave him a sense of abandonment that led him to some unpleasant places.

U2 flew into Berlin the night Germany reunified in October 1990.  They were on the last jet to land there while it was still a divided city.  Knowing there would be celebrations all over the city to mark the momentous occasion of German reunification, the band set out to join such a celebration.  What they found was something quite the opposite.  They ran into a bunch of people who wanted the wall to go back up.  They were a grim bunch.  They soon found out they were in the midst of a demonstration to put the wall back up!  They ended up in the Palast Hotel – everything was brown.  The walls were brown, the carpeting was brown, the furniture was brown.  The weather was cold and gloomy.  It was a depressing place.

Why Berlin?  There was a lot of experimental music, avant garde music that was coming out of Berlin in the early 1990s.  Berlin was a place the band perceived where a culture collision was going on.  They’d heard about Hansa from Brian Eno, who had worked with David Bowie during his “Berlin” period.  Their engineer [Flood] had worked in Berlin before.  They wanted to get away from Dublin in order to become more focused to make a record.  Away from Ireland, the members of the band didn’t have the domestic issues [family] to deal with while they were making a record.  The Edge played a solo acoustic version of Love is Blindness.  While this is playing you hear the story of Edge’s bad times.  He was going through a marriage breakup.  For him, leaving Dublin for Berlin was a refuge, a distraction from his failing marriage.  He wasn’t in a good, positive headspace.  Adam Clayton described the time in Berlin as going down a lot of blind alleys, a lot of friction, a lot of tension. 

Nobody was happy.  Within the band Bono and the Edge were trying the hardest to try new things.  The idea was to do something rhythmic, something rooted in dance club culture.  They were trying to find their way into dance music that wasn’t clichéd.  Larry was the most resistant and questioned why Bono and the Edge were taking the musical direction they were taking.  Larry had no idea that The Edge was using a lot of loop and drum machine elements, and the hard part was trying to mesh that mechanical sound with his own live playing.  There was a lot of tension, a lot of grumbling.  They felt like they were getting nowhere.  And then…

My favorite part of the film happened when they played back a rough mix of Mysterious Ways.   Edge threw in a new bridge he was trying out and it had this chord sequence – Am-D-F-G.  Bono was reading something when he heard this chord sequence, and he had the same reaction I did when I first heard it.  He suddenly whipped his head around and his reaction was “hey – I know those changes.”  Apparently they all had the same reaction twenty years prior, for that was the moment that the elusive “greatness” they had been seeking, that they had been praying for had finally found them.  The Edge had another chord sequence – C-Am-F-C.  Daniel Lanois asked the Edge to play the two chord sequences together.  Voila! A new song was born – One.  Bono said a way to get through writer’s block was to write a bittersweet thing about division, about disunity.  U2 were definitely in that state, but coming up with that one song [no pun intended] proved to them they could continue as a band.  They stayed in Berlin for two months, then went home for Christmas.  At least they left Berlin with two things – Mysterious Ways and One.

Adam Clayton described the Berlin experience as a “baptism of fire.” It was something that they had to go through to realize that the “thing” they were looking for wasn’t in a particular geographic location.  The “thing” they were looking for was inside them, not in some other city.  They just simply had to put the work in, figure out the ideas and hone them.  Back in Ireland, things finally began to click.  Bono had an epiphany – if we’re being accused of megalomania, why not confound his critics by inventing a character that was the complete opposite of his serious, unsmiling, pompous and pretentious public persona?  Bono described it as sort of judo, to use the very thing that is attacking you against those doing the attacking.  Here comes “The Fly.”  There was this over-the-top character, wearing leather, wraparound black shades, jet-black hair, and a very distorted voice.  Bono said that if he was going to go into the gutter, he wanted some body armor [The Fly] to protect him.  He could sing about all the personal stuff he wanted, but since it was a character and not Bono that was doing the singing he could just say that he was ‘playing a part.’  There was a film clip of him in full Fly gear where he’s telling the interviewer that he’s ‘learning how to lie, learning how to be insincere.’  For his ‘Fly’ character, he took Lou Reed’s sunglasses, Jim Morrison’s leather pants, Elvis’ jacket and a little of his haircut, and poof! – instant rock star!  With this device, the band discovered they could have fun.  They could make people laugh.  They didn’t have to be quite so earnest. 

Brian Eno had this bit of insight into U2 - “They’re very, very loyal to each other, and they’re really, really kind to each other.  It’s no good to have somebody ‘not well’ in the unit or ‘not happy.’  The others don’t say ‘hard luck, mate, we’re carrying on.’  The others say ‘ok, we’ve got to get that person happy again.  We’ve got to draw them back into the circle.’”  It’s this attitude that accounts for the band’s longevity.  I don’t think they wouldn’t have lasted this long otherwise.

There’s a quote from Bono that Guggenheim uses twice in the film [so it must be important], so I’m thinking that this is the central theme to the film.  It sums up what U2 went through to create Achtung Baby - “You have to reject one expression of the band first before you get to the next expression.  And in between, you have nothing.  You have to risk it all…”  What he’s saying is that in order to enjoy the ‘fun’ U2 that came after Achtung Baby, you need to exorcise the ‘preachy’ U2 that came before.   I think there’s a bit of truth to that.  When I go back and see Rattle and Hum, I’m annoyed to watch Bono’s posturing and hectoring for social justice.  Just put me in the ‘shut up and sing” category.   When I see a rock show, I don’t want to be lectured to.  Apparently that occurred to them as well, because now when I watch a show like U2: 360 I can watch U2 without cringing or without wanting to reach through the TV and strangle Bono.

And there you have it.  This film might not interest you if you’re not a fan of the band or their music. I am quite sure that if you’re only a casual fan, you won’t be interested in the pangs of rich Irish rock stars.  But if you’re a fan and can’t get enough of all things U2, you need to see this.