Release date: 1 October
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so.
U2 were the focus of much critical ire and jealousy almost from the start of their career, but the Liverpool bands whose thunder they stole were perhaps especially bitter. Head-On, Julian Cope’s memoir of his time in the Teardrop Explodes contains this ironic, self-mocking anecdote:
Meanwhile, our New York show was a stupid and mistaken ‘double bill’ with U2 at the Palladium in Lower Manhattan.
In Liverpool, we thought that U2 was a bad joke, a record company’s idea of a northern group. They talked of passion as if it was their exclusive right. Ho-hum. …
Double Bill, huh? We went on first, did really well and left. I’d seen U2 in the soundcheck. Led Zep, man. Uncool. But they were dead sweet and a bit younger than us, so we gave them some leeway. They weren’t gonna do shit anyway. To quote Gary Dwyer, U2 were really called the Hope Brothers. ‘Cause they’ve got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and No Hope.’
This dismissive attitude is perhaps the only thing on which Cope and erstwhile friend Ian McCulloch agree. The latter has several famous bon mots about U2, but I’ll quote one from a 2011 interview: ‘U2 have never been liked in Liverpool. We know a fake when we see one.’
‘Fake’ was of course the direst insult anyone could muster for a pop or rock group in the 80s, although it was flung in all directions – notably against synth bands by fans of ‘real’ music, that is, music made with ‘real’ instruments – like guitars. In the eyes of their detractors, however, it was U2’s obvious straining after sincerity that left them most open to the charge of fakeness. Such are the incoherent politics of authenticity.
I can only say that for this Liverpool resident and several of my friends, the release of The Unforgettable Fire was the most exciting musical event of 1984 (sorry Ocean Rain). It also received a cautious welcome in the music press of the time. Here’s Paul Du Noyer (another Scouser) in the NME on 6 October:
It seemed about time for U2 to make their worst album. But they haven’t.
It seemed like they’d moved from an early artistic peak (‘Boy’) to a commercial peak (‘War’) and what with America sewn up they were set for something rather more comfortable, and rather disappointing. In the old U2 you saw a straining after greatness, and that was the magic. But by 1983 their shows suggested a band who’d now achieved their own notion of greatness, and looked content to re-cycle it for as long as anyone wanted it.
It got a bit pompous. And I got a worrying suspicion that if you crept up to this magnificent edifice U2 had become, and if you gave it a little rat-a-tat-tat with your knuckle, you might hear something hollow. Just in time, U2 have swerved off to one side. In ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ I think they’ve made the record they needed to make. Swopping Steve Lillywhite for the production team of Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois, they’ve staved off the predictability which threatened to wreck their original promise. The results are generally as welcome as they’re surprising.
The old four-square rock unit has been de-constructed. In its place there’s a panoramic soundscape, multiple textures, subtle shifts in emphasis. In parts, U2 are scarcely recognisable. String and synth arrangements abound, sometimes replacing the group line-up entirely.
Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker wrote along similar lines, although with stronger reservations:
“The Unforgettable Fire” is the other side of the coin from “War”. Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Fire” launches into the long shimmer of “A Sort Of Homecoming”, whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve: “See the sky the burning rain/She will die and live again/tonight”, sings Bono. It’s all a bit Kerrygold-country.
We’re a long way from Steve Lillywhite here. In place of the harsh rock attack with which both he and U2 became inextricably entwined, producers Eno and Daniel Lanois have forged U2 into an electronic chamber-unit. The strident belting clamour of yore is virtually absent – the lovely single “Pride” is the closest to it, and even that offers a few different tints – and instead there are interleaving layers of synths, guitars and percussion. Melodic instruments are frequently used as near-abstract tonalities, shedding any distinct identity in favour of producing a wash of sound whose components can’t always be exactly enumerated. …
My friends and I liked U2 because they were ‘our’ band: their lyrics contained many coded or overt references to their Christian faith. So they are also the favourite band of Robert, the protagonist of my novel, The Angels of L19. But my novel ends in summer 1984, so it doesn’t include any reference to The Unforgettable Fire. As the above reviews suggest, it was rightly seen as a significant departure from U2’s previous sound. To me, it remains a more daring break than the more trumpeted change of direction on Achtung Baby, and – along with Zooropa – it is their most experimental album. All the more remarkable then that it was their greatest success to date, and confirmed their hold on the American imagination, though possibly that had as much to with the accompanying world tour as the album, where the songs were presented more conventionally.
Reviews of the album are likely to use several words from the following checklist: atmospheric, shimmering, wash, texture, smear, effect (you’ll already recognise several of them from the NME and Melody Maker above). Adam Sweeting’s observation that it was no longer always possible to distinguish or identify individual instruments in this landscape of sound seems crucial. Previous albums had certainly used a lot of guitar effects – this was part of The Edge’s signature sound – but the sounds were still very identifiably a guitar. And any keyboard or violin overdubs were clearly and distinctly positioned in the mix. Here, instead of the astringent folk-inflected violin of Steve Wickham, used on War, there was a full chamber orchestra, and, whereas previously the group’s live sound was just four clearly separated channels, here they needed pre-programmed sequencers to come anywhere near to replicating the album’s sound.
Beyond all the vague adjectives I’ve just listed, I might note that the drum sound here is completely different from the gated reverb on War (or Sparkle in the Rain): it’s more muted and diffuse. And the drum patterns are also different: less of the goose-stepping martial snare and more rolling tom-toms, possibly in several different layers. Less beat, more rhythm.
Obviously Eno and Lanois were partly responsible for all of this, but they didn’t push the band anywhere they weren’t ready or willing to go. And in fact the tracks that most clearly suggest the influence of Eno’s ambient albums, ‘’Promenade’ and ‘4th of July’ feel insubstantial and pointless in this context. The penultimate song, ‘Elvis Presley and America’, with a backing track of the album’s first song played backwards, is also unimpressive: interminable and lyrically incomprehensible, while the closer ‘MLK’ is just a sketch. So the album’s claim to greatness rests on its peerless opening sequence of four songs, including the singles ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ and ‘The Unforgettable Fire’, and on ‘Bad’ and ‘Indian Summer Sky’ from its second side.
Is this a Romantic album like The Crossing, or a Futurist one like Sparkle in the Rain? The cover suggests the former, with a ruined castle shot on black-and-white infrared film to render it more unworldly, and a colour scheme of imperial purple and gold. The opener ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is certainly set in a natural landscape: ‘See faces ploughed like fields … The wind will crack in wintertime’ (‘Kerrygold country’ as Adam Sweeting says), although it seems to be a landscape ravaged by nuclear catastrophe. ‘Indian Summer Sky’ contains the lines: ‘In the forest there's a clearing, I run there towards the light, Sky, it's a blue sky’. But several other songs have no discernable setting at all, and insofar as they are (allegedly) about (someone else’s) heroin addiction, they presumably take place in Dublin (‘These city lights, They shine as silver and gold’).
Really the landscape here is an internal one, and the songs are about psychological states – in particular, they’re about struggle. The absence of anything resembling a conventional love song is notable – there are relatively few of these in early U2 in general, and none at all here. In ‘Pride’ and ‘MLK’, the struggle is against external agents of oppression, but, perhaps significantly, this is someone else’s struggle (Martin Luther King’s); for the most part, the battle here is against oneself, or ‘the world’ in more general terms. In other words, it is as much existential as spiritual – the lyrics are also notable for the absence of the explicit references to God or the Bible one can find scattered through their previous albums.
‘Wire’, the third track, tends to be treated rather dismissively, but it was then and remains one of my favourites:
Innocent, and in a sense I am
Guilty of the crime that's now in hand
Such a nice day, throw your life away
Such a nice day, let it go …
Is this the time
The time to win or lose
Is this the time
The time to choose
It doesn’t get much more existential than that.
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