J.S.’s Reviews > U2 by U2 > Status Update

Bono: U2 have had two really rotten fashion phases. One was the October tour, where I had a skunk on my head. It looked like a badger, actually with peroxide… The second was the The Unforgettable Fire period. Forget about a bad-hair day, I was having a bad-hair life.
Edge: Looking back at photographs… the lack of style is astonishing.
Adam: We were really trying to be a little bit looser… something like refugee-chic.

We were able to start renegotiating what had originally been quite a poor record deal. Other major labels were starting to approach us with better offers. But what Island could give us was the return of our copyrights… giving us back our songs, extending the record deal, upping the royalty and improving terms generally. The band knew how important it was to own their own songs…
-Paul McGuiness (manager)

No one was singing [the refrain from “40“ at Red Rocks]. They were all too cold and there weren’t enough of them. We had pulled off this concert that no one thought we could, it would have been so nice to hear the crowd chanting… Then our tour manager had got the mike and was hiding beneath the barrier, trying to get the crowd to sing… and slowly they started singing… The edit made it appear a little less organized.

Adam: 'New Year's Day’ started as a soundcheck jam. I was basically trying to play 'Fade to Grey’ by Visage. Sometimes your mistakes are your best bits.
Bono: It's just a killer bass line, and Adam's haircut is really the clue to it. He considered himself vaguely sympathetic to the New Romantic movement. So listen to 'Fade to Grey’, the Steve Strange track, and you'll get a little glimpse into 'New Year's Day.’

Bono: The [October] cover was my fault. I had this strong feeling about Docklands, Dublin… I think the instinct was right, but it just didn't come off.
Larry: Although it's not a particularly ingenious or clever album cover, there's no pretense. It's just a picture of four guys with funny haircuts.
Adam: A lot of people tried to dissuade us…but we were so much up our own arses that we didn't have the sense to listen.

‘I Will Follow’ came out of a screaming argument in the rehearsal room. It's a song about unconditional love, which is what a mother has for her child. If you walk away, I will follow. No matter what you do, you cannot separate yourself from my love. Which echoes the scriptures: 'nor height, nor depth… shall separate us from the love of God’… This is mind-blowing to me looking back. What drugs were we on? None! -Bono

I had a clear idea of what the cover should look like, a child's face coming out of white, like a photograph before it's fully developed… the end of adolescent angst, the elusiveness of being male, the sexuality, spirituality, friendship. It had a huge gay following, that album. I couldn't really fathom it at the time. But I look back now and see that it's full of homo-eroticsm: ‘in the shadows, boy meets man.’ Bono

“There was a time when I would have thought that being in a band meant sex, drugs and rock and roll. It would have been an aspiration originally. But, once I found myself in that situation, I wasn't so keen on it. I wasn't so sure that I wanted to be laid by that person or take those drugs, so there was comfort in the fact that the other three people in the band were actually kind of sane on that level.” - Adam

“I was waiting to find the thing that would become my life's work - and it found me. I fell into it and eventually, when the band started getting good, I realized this was what I wanted to do. It wasn't that I had always harbored a secret ambition to become a rock star... If I hadn't stumbled into Bono, Adam and Larry, I would probably have gone to college... I really have no idea where I would be without U2.”- Edge

“U2's appeal was it's ambiguity. It had open-ended interpretations. In my mind's eye, I was thinking more of a U-boat than I was of Gary Powers and the spy plane, and I quite liked that. Strangely, it turns out that the train line in Berlin that took you to Zoo Station was called the U2 line. You see it everywhere you go in Berlin.
I hate the name, by the way.” - Bono