1984 Music: The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops

Release date: 30 April 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? No, not until I moved to Glasgow in the early 90s. 

Note: apart from the Melody Maker and NME reviews, all quotations in this post come from Allan Brown’s book, Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile, which I recommend. 

This album makes an interesting comparison with Sparkle in the Rain. It’s much slower and more contemplative – introverted where Sparkle in the Rain is extroverted, minimalist rather than maximalist – but here too we are in an electrified and modern city (‘Tinseltown in the Rain’, ‘Automobile Noise’). In keeping with the lack of specificity about geography I’ve already noted in blog posts about other 1984 albums, there are no unambiguous topographical details on A Walk Across the Rooftops. Nonetheless, no one who’s ever lived in Glasgow will be in any doubt as to why the waterfront is depicted as lashed with rain on the Simple Minds album, or why the ‘big rhythm’ of the city on ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’ is indistinguishable from the hiss of falling water.

So we’re in Glasgow. 

Or are we? 

Certainly a lot of listeners assume we are. Here, for instance, is fan Yvonne C. Stewart talking about ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’: 

For me the song is all about Glasgow. It reminds me of walking up Argyle Street in the rain, like the day I bought the record. It reminds me of seeing everything in black and white for some reason, just as it’s about to get dark and all the lights come on. A wet Glasgow evening. Lots of people around. Lots of noise. The lyric ‘Is there a place in this city/a place to always feel this way’ gives me the feeling of being safe and happy, just being there. 

But arguably none of this is in the song – someone who lived in Manchester could as easily project their own experience on it (plenty of other cities have ‘redstone buildings’ for example). And while the group themselves may have had Glasgow in mind as the backdrop for several songs, ‘Heatwave’ and ‘From Rags to Riches’ were explicitly inspired by the (then-)recent history of Beirut, while ‘Easter Parade’ was a film noir snapshot of 1940s New York, where the Easter Parade is a regular fixture. 

Like Yvonne, I brought my own set of prior assumptions to this last song when I was living in Glasgow in the early 1990s, where parades are mainly occasions for sectarian provocation by the Orange Lodge. So I thought there was an interesting contrast between the sentimental, nostalgic atmosphere of the song – only recorded on successive Sundays in the studio to preserve its air of sanctity, though I didn’t know that then – and the harder actualities of life in Glasgow. But I brought that contrast to the song, as more careful attention to the lyrics would have told me, with their references to typewriters, hats, radio, etc.

Nonetheless, the songs on A Walk Across the Rooftops do have this quality: they cry out for listeners to fill in their gaps – to move towards them imaginatively – because they have a kind of hollowed-out quality. As David Quantick explains: 

[I]f a song is a house, most bands wallpaper it and put in the pictures. The Blue Nile seem to have done all that, then taken all the furniture and pictures out and painted it white. It’s not that they write Spartan songs, they write songs where everything has been removed. It’s the art of subtraction that they specialise in. … With ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’ or ‘A Walk Across The Rooftops’ people use terms like cinematic and Cinemascope. But they’re tiny records. They’re like looking at a beautiful city then realising you’re looking at a miniature model. 

One of the most common words used about The Blue Nile’s records is ‘emotional’, especially about Paul Buchanan’s rich, saturated vocals. But there’s another word that comes up over and over again in Allan Brown’s book: ‘detached’. Referring not only to the abstract lyrical perspective and the group’s attitude towards fame, fortune and publicity, but to their whole identity as mediated through the music, which exists in the tension between these two seeming opposites: emotional and detached. As Buchanan put it in an interview with the NME published on 12 May 1984: ‘I don’t think we really want to present ourselves as players or personalities or people.’ 

This negation of self assumes an almost spiritual quality: Brown describes the first album as ‘dry, precise, reverb-free music; as still and devout as children praying’. In that sense, its strategy is quite different to Sparkle in the Rain and The Unforgettable Fire: there’s nothing ‘big’ about this album, which, as Quantick suggests is better understood as ‘miniature’, and not only because it entirely eschews sonic exaggerations like gated reverb. 

Another word that comes to mind is ‘synthetic’. A Walk Across the Rooftops was very much a studio concoction – the group didn’t perform any of this album live until the tour for their second album, five years later. So the album has a hermetic, self-enclosed quality. And it was constructed meticulously over a much longer length of time than was normal for a debut album – mainly due to a collaborative arrangement with the album’s producer, Calum Malcolm, who also owned the studio where it was recorded. Its creation was famously financed by Linn, then known solely as a manufacturer of hi-fi equipment, who had decided to start a record label to demonstrate the superiority of their analogue equipment for reproducing the music they released. So studio precision was built into the brief. 

The sound is dominated by keyboards, many of them treated or manipulated; by synthetic drum pads – played by an actual drummer, Nigel Thomas, though working under mechanistic constraints (he wasn’t allowed to use cymbals or fills); and a string quartet on loan from the Scottish National Orchestra, which, like the drums, you might initially mistake for a synthetic substitute, except for the richness of the sound. The bass is central, but, while there are sometimes guitars in the mix, they’re rarely prominent. Some of the sounds are samples, or improvised effects, presented as short fragments repeating within the song structures – but the non-sampled sounds often have this quality too, which is why it’s easy to mistake their origins at first listen. In any case, sampling required a great deal of ingenuity given the state of technology in 1984. Paul Buchanan: 

To generate all the sounds in “From Rags to Riches” was hard work. None of it came out of a synth, apart from the little Jupiter. … We found objects and recorded them, changed them, moved them, put them under water, we did a thousand things to get what we were looking for. 

And floating above it all – that voice. Much of what it’s singing is very simple, even banal – but it’s the way he’s singing it. It reminds me of a quotation from Terrence Malick, which was a kind of motto for me when writing The Angels of L19:  

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public. 

This perhaps sells Buchanan short. For every couplet like ‘Do I love you? Yes I love you,’ there’s a line like ‘Tall buildings reach up in vain’. In any case, in a song, lyrics don’t exist in isolation: they are presented to us through a performance and against a background of instrumentation. 

Obviously the music press loved them, even without any gigs in support of the album. Here’s Paul Du Noyer in the NME from 5 May: 

For this listener at least, recollections of the ’84 Spring sunsplash will forever be entwined inside the record I’ve played so constantly in the past two weeks. Meet The Blue Nile and greet their album debut: some music to shade your dreamtime in subtle colours, a quiet influence, delicious persuasion. … It’s a record with scant similarity to anything else around at the moment, perhaps the fruit of some reclusive, obsessive vision. 

It’s difficult stuff to describe (often a good sign), … It’s easier to suggest the moods it evokes: romance, doubt, a rich sadness. The keynote is restraint; far from straining for effect, The Blue Nile allow their music to find its own atmospheres … a kaleidoscopic shift of textures where nothing intrudes to upset the balance or divert the steady, even flow. 

And Helen Fitzgerald in Melody Maker on the same day: 

Good music can always complement the mood you’re in, but you know you’re on to something really special when songs can create and influence these moods of their own volition. The Blue Nile’s stunning debut album seduces the emotions as well as the senses, and instead of fighting its effect, the sensible thing to do is relax and enjoy it. 

Seduced initially by the intoxicating width of the title track with its heart-stopping open spaces and sensuous basslines, you’ll recognise straight off that you’ve hit on a vein of hedonistic luxury. There’s a mesmeric quality in this music that makes you want to savour every track with the respectful appreciation of a connoisseur. … 

“Tinseltown In The Rain” stands out as the sweetest flavour. Lush strings and a dynamic beat forming a backdrop for the incisive clarity of Paul Buchanan’s vocals. Lesser mortals have compared his mellow tones to Tom Waits, John Cale (on “Easter Parade”) and even Nils Lofgren, but that’s all preposterous nonsense. 

Rich and smooth, his tones have no sharp edges, no unpleasant gravel. … 

Experimenting with texture is obviously a Blue Nile fascination, from the sparse piano/vocal simplicity of the ballad “Easter Parade” to the more complex constructions of “Heatwave” and “Tinseltown.” The authors are bent on moody intricacy without being artificially clever. 

Individually, the tracks weave patterns that leave traces of spectacular emotions. Nostalgia, romance, elation and reflection are woven into their fabric with gossamer-fine delicacy. 

Their spacious arrangements are deceptively fluid. Listen to “From Rags To Riches” (the instrumental version, “Saddle The Horses” is the single’s B side) on headphones and you’ll see that their simplicity is a carefully crafted illusion.

1984 Music: The Waterboys, A Pagan Place

Release date: 1 June 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

The Waterboys were my favourite band from 1985–8, and the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to was their gig at Liverpool University Student Union on 2 May 1986. As the previous post suggests, I only became aware of them after This Is the Sea was released in 1985, but I quickly bought everything I could find – and nowadays I consider 1984’s A Pagan Place to be the superior album. Its successor is a little too pompous, the cavernous reverb on the wall-of-sound production a little too much. 

It’s worth noting that the version of A Pagan Place now available on digital download and CD after a remaster in 2002 is not quite the album I bought on vinyl in 1985. There's an inferior outtake ('Some of My Best Friends Are Trains') inserted in the middle, and two of the songs included on the original release have been altered: the outro for the second track ‘All the Things She Said’ is pointlessly extended, adding an extra minute or so to the running time to no good effect, while the third track ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ substitutes a different take with a much looser vocal than the original release – one might argue it’s more emotional; alternatively one might describe it as more amateur. I have no idea why these alternate versions weren’t just included as extra tracks – fiddling around with the contents of an album many years after its release (beyond remastering) makes no sense to me. But this is a great album in whatever iteration one encounters it. 

The Waterboys are really a vehicle for songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Mike Scott. The group’s composition changed from album to album, and this was part of Scott’s design, to keep things fluid (hence the name). Indeed, the first album released by the ‘group’ was really a collection of solo demos with occasional contributions from other musicians, notably saxophonist (and later mandolinist) Anthony Thistlethwaite. A Pagan Place was therefore the group’s first proper release, and notably features keyboard virtuoso Karl Wallinger (later of World Party), though he was not present for the earliest sessions in 1982. 

This fluidity creates a sense of musicians newly excited by the possibilities of working together, and reconfiguring regularly to recapture that excitement. It's there in the immediate burst of energy in the album’s opening seconds, when a fastly strummed acoustic guitar charges forward into ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’, and is then joined by Wallinger’s rolling piano, drums – and trumpet from Roddy Lorimer. This song is one of the great album openers of all time, and the first lyrics we hear are a quotation or paraphrase from CS Lewis’s The Last Battle: 

Bye bye shadowlands 

The term is over 

And all the holidays have begun

At the time, Scott was also a fan of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and was interviewed in Strait, the Christian music paper I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes. However, as the album’s title of A Pagan Place suggests, he did not define his beliefs as narrowly as Lewis did, and has subsequently I think disassociated himself from this connection entirely. He was for many years (perhaps still is) a resident in the Findhorn community in Scotland, which doesn’t seem to have any doctrinal commitments beyond a belief in holistic ‘spirituality’ and a commitment to ecology. More of a hippie than a Christian then – he even looks a little like Donovan. But in 1984 the lyrical allusions on the album and the sense of yearning for transcendence the music shares with U2 were more than enough for me to identify a kindred spirit. 

The childlike frame of reference borrowed from Lewis is important I think – part of the album’s Romantic openness to innocence and wonder. At the climax of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ a chiming, soaring electric guitar solo follows the similarly childlike declaration ‘Isn’t that a pretty sun? Sitting in a pretty sky. Ooh, will we stay and watch it darken?’ 

Interestingly though, the album’s ‘relationship’ songs are all clouded by adult emotions and regrets (‘All the Things She Gave Me’, ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ and ‘Rags’) – my distant memories of reading Scott’s memoir suggest that these songs may have been inspired by the same person. 

One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘Red Army Blues’, about a Soviet soldier condemned to the gulag in 1945 for fraternizing with Americans. It has revealing lyrical weaknesses: ‘I prayed for Mother Russia, In the summer of 43, And as we drove the Germans back, I really believed that God was listening to me’ doesn’t really sound like the sentiment of a loyal Soviet atheist, and ‘Bit my lip against the snow’ hardly does justice to the savagery of the Russian winter. But the song ultimately works because it has a very clear dramatic structure: in other words, it works as a story. And the music serves that Doctor Zhivago conception of individuals caught up in larger turmoil, with fake Russian choirs and pseudo- balalaikas, and epic saxophone solos. It all requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it takes you places.

The album’s closer, ‘A Pagan Place’ takes us back to the state of mind of its opener, and its ‘Church Not Made With Hands’ – significantly, Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet reappears here. And we are definitely back in the world of Romanticism, where nature is the gateway to the world of the spirit, not its antagonist, and where some some sacrificial, Christ-like hero – or perhaps just a fellow seeker – serves as our point of identification: 

How did he come here? 

Who gave him the key? 

It slipped into his hand 

So secretly 

Who put the colour 

Like lines on his face? 

And brought him here 

To a pagan place

Like the subject of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ the figure invoked here is mysterious, elusive. It’s important that the lyrics are phrased as a series of questions. For Scott, unlike CS Lewis, it’s being open to the questions that matters – not pretending to have the answers. And if this figure is a ‘god’, then perhaps it is Pan, who is named in ‘The Pan Within’ on This Is the Sea and ‘The Return of Pan’ on Dream Harder. I’m also reminded a little of Herne the Hunter in the fictionalised pantheism of Robin of Sherwood, a television series first broadcast in 1984, though this is certainly a coincidence rather than an influence, since it wasn’t broadcast until most of A Pagan Place had been recorded.

I haven’t mentioned the album’s most famous track. ‘The Big Music’, which gave its name to the sound of all the groups who shared Scott’s wide-eyed wonder – it’s not one of my favourites. 

For the music weeklies in mid-1984, Scott was a person of interest, but not a star. Someone to keep an eye on for the future perhaps, but not yet entirely convincing. For the NME, the album’s release seems to have fallen into the gap created by the strike I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes, but David Quantick reviewed one of the group’s first concerts at Strathclyde University on 5 May: 

The Waterboys are one of those bands who get played on David “Kid” “Jensen”’s show without actually manifesting any signs of existence outside that world; I contend that nobody owns a Waterboys record. At all. This is a pity, since Mike Scott and his Garçons D’Eau are the purveyors of what we forest folk call a rocking sound. … 

Mike resembles Chris Jagger, which fact of course instantly reminds the funky young reviewer of the rough-edged and smelly-men-in-food-stained-coats aspect of the Waterboys’ music; you could say the boys play a kind of r’n’b, but you’d need a very supportive family to get away with that simple a remark, because The Waterboys have a sense of pop as well, one which occasionally gets too grandiose, granted, but a sense of pop that knows a good tune and goes out with it for years until people wonder when the wedding is. … 

I like The Waterboys: although occasionally harking back to a ‘70s idea of rocky pop and songwriterly posing, they stay on the right side of contemporary. Their main problem is that they’ll always be a serious-minded and intelligent group lacking the power actually to move you. …

In Melody Maker, Jeremy Lewis wrote a short review of the album for the 2 June issue: 

The Waterboys have gone halfway to making a great record, filled with bright and brassy pop. Roddy Lorimer’s incisive trumpet breaks the surface of the music with a flourish as bright as gleaming chrome, and although their little portrait of the world contains more grey than that of the Pale Fountains, the same reliance is placed upon enticing melodies and synth-less sound. 

Yet there is an outmoded element within the album that revolves around the persona of Mike Scott himself, a sort of pre-punk early Seventies folksiness that occasionally spills out all over the sound and mars the enterprise.. If Scott falls short of excellence, then it is because he pulls himself down into the more of some rather tacky past influences.

Occasionally, though, it works. “Rags” unrolls with an almost organic elasticity towards a series of great, gushing climaxes. “The Big Music” is filled with booming echoes, vitality and tension balanced in a dramatic equilibrium. “Red Army” has a powerful, pained saxophone replete with tragedy. … 

An odd record, wearing a mask of commerciality, but with something a little more elusive at its core. I don’t think Mike Scott wants to be pinned down and his record is rather like a blurred snapshot of a slippery spirit. … A record marked by too much cant and not enough candour: “I have seen the big mountain/And I swear I’m halfway there”. Perhaps next time, he’ll give us the view from the peak. 

Some of this doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the music at all – the accusations of unfashionable influence just seem silly now. And r’n’b – even ‘pop’ for that matter? Surely this is music positioned interestingly between folk and rock (something increasingly obvious on subsequent albums)? Its ‘elusive’ qualities are correctly identified – but this is a feature, not a bug. Just when you think you’ve got Scott pinned down, he’s on to something else. 

The NME also ran an earlier interview with Scott on 21 April, in the run-up to the album’s release. Paul Du Noyer’s framing remarks here are notably more positive: ‘[advance single ‘The Big Music’ is] his strongest effort yet, the record’s a blessed match of power and grace. It’s definitely rock, and proudly so; an avalanche of acoustic guitars, real drums, impassioned vocals, trumpet and sax as bold as brass can be’. They later ran another interview on 11 August, in which Scott explained: 

“I am really interested in life. What it is, where it comes from, what is behind physical being … and I think all that is religious. It’s hard for me to give you an answer. I care about what I say. 

“I went to church as a little boy. I was always quite pissed off with church. It was really miserable, all these miserable people in their best clothes with flash cars outside, inside these four walls, singing dirgey hymns. It didn’t seem like a celebration of life, and there’s no better way to pay tribute to the thing that gives you life than by celebrating life. Bob Marley said, I don’t go to church – I am a church. That was how he celebrated life.” … 

In the thoughtless modern way of categorisers, The Waterboys will be simply indexed with U2/Bunnymen/Big C and their garrisons of hero-rock. Almost any sector of ‘A Pagan Place’, with Scott’s overwhelmed voice at its heart and the music swelling and swirling all around him, keeps that promise: of warrior legions galloping to the crest of a hill … 

“… Over which lies the new world!” Scott offers a sharp giggle. “I don’t see that really …”

1984 Music: U2, The Unforgettable Fire

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.