We’re not even five months into the year and it’s already shaping up to be a busy one for U2.

So far, they’ve released two six-song EPs in 2026 – Days Of Ash in February and Easter Lily six weeks later. Now it looks like they’re preparing for the release of a new single by shooting a video on the streets of Mexico City.

They’ve shared some footage on social media of the shoot, which sees them play on the roof of an old bus in the streets in front of cheering fans. The track is called Street Of Dreams and appears to have a chorus that goes: ‘La calle, calle de los sueños / All the doors are open on the street of dreams’.

In a subsequent post, the band revealed that the shoot hadn’t been without some difficulty: “The thunder and rain crashed the generator for the film shoot, which meant a bewildered but welcoming neighbour let the U2ers crash their apartment at dinner time and out to their balcony.” Whilst the band were sheltering, the crowd below had a bit of a sing-song, belting out Vertigo and Desire as they waited for the shoot to start again.

There’s no news yet on a release date for the single, or the album, from which it’s presumably drawn, though some observers have noted that September 25 – a Friday coincidentally this year – marks the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s first ever rehearsal.

In other U2 news, the site of a famous free gig the band gave in San Francisco in 1987 is to be redeveloped.

It’s the Vaillancourt Fountain (below), a brutalist structure that is part of the city’s Justin Herman Plaza. U2 were in town in November 1987, about to play two shows at the Oakland Coliseum, but before that they gave a free gig, playing on two flat-bed trucks, to 20,000 fans in front of the fountain. The event was titled ‘Save The Yuppies’ due to the fact it was just weeks after the infamous Black Monday stock market crash of October that year.

Footage from the gig – including the band’s cover of All Along The Watchtower - made its way onto the Rattle And Hum movie and soundtrack that was released the following year. You may recall that at Bono ended the gig in a very Bono way – he climbed the fountain and sprayed ‘Rock N’ Roll stops the traffic’ on it.

Anyway, it’s been discovered that the fountain contains asbestos and lead and according to a city official speaking on local TV station KGO has "become kind of an attractive nuisance." And so it has to go.

On 27 March 1987 the four members of U2 and their substantial production team took over the first-floor rooftop of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles.

The plan was to perform a guerilla-style video shoot for Where The Streets Have No Name, the opening song and third single from their recently-released album The Joshua Tree.

The video would become a defining visual moment in the trajectory of the Dublin four-piece and it had a distinct sense of drama and urgency, due to the LAPD threatening to shut the shoot down. This had strong echoes of another iconic rooftop concert back in January 1969, a fact acknowledged by Bono.

“It's not the first time we’ve ripped off The Beatles,” the singer quipped.

In reality, the video for Where The Streets Have No Name was not an impromptu event but an impeccably-planned operation. The video crew reportedly spent a week beforehand shoring up the roof of the liquor store and the police were only galvanised into action after U2 informed the media of the event, which prompted tens of thousands of people to descend on the location of the shoot at the intersection of 7th and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.

In an interview with Classic Rock in March 2022, the video’s director Meiert Avis said it was always the band’s intention “to be disruptive”, adding that the shoot was planned with the aim of “creating a spontaneous media event that one couldn't help but notice”.

But for all its contrivance and the fact the band were obviously performing to a playback of the studio recording, their performance in the video had real conviction.

Certain moments stand out, such as Bono’s Blakean persona, whirling and teetering precariously at the rooftop’s edge, bassist Adam Clayton’s shirtless cool and the throngs of fans staring up excitedly from below.

It’s no surprise that U2 chose Where The Streets Have No Name as the opening track on The Joshua Tree album and as the opening song of their set on that album’s mammoth tour, which kicked off six days later at the ASU Activity Centre in Tempe, Arizona.

Where The Streets Have No Name is a soaring, euphoric anthem with a frenetic, driving edge. It’s also seeped in atmosphere and evokes all the widescreen emotion for which the band would become known.

The first stirrings of the song that became Where The Streets Have No Name emerged as a demo that The Edge recorded in 1986 before the band resumed the Joshua Tree sessions at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin.

The guitarist had recently bought Melbeach House in the leafy, coastal suburb of Monkstown, south of Dublin. He was recording an arrangement of keyboards, guitar, bass and a drum machine on a four-track in an upstairs room.

In the band’s official autobiography U2 By U2 (2006), created by the band in collaboration with music critic and author Neil McCormick, the Edge recalled that he wanted to “conjure up the ultimate U2 live song”.

When he finished a rough mix and listened back, he realised he had come up with “the most amazing guitar part and song of [his] life”. There was no-one else in the house at the time to share his elation with, so he simply danced around to the track while punching the air in celebration.

The band were equally enthused. But playing and recording the song was another matter.

“At the time it sounded like a foreign language,” Adam Clayton said in U2 On U2, “whereas now we understand how it works.”

On Where The Streets Have No Name, the Edge used a heavy rhythmic delay effect. This was achieved by playing a fast-picked arpeggio pattern through a digital delay – most likely his favoured TC Electronic 2290 units and/or his Korg SDD-3000s – and then splitting the signal after the effects chain between two vintage Vox AC30s for the signature wide stereo sound that defines the song.

The guitar he reportedly used was his 1973 black Fender Strat with a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup and the effect was a dotted eighth note delay, set to approximately 354-365ms at 128bpm.

Locking in precisely with the Edge’s dual delay set-up was a challenge for bassist Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. So too was the fact that the song featured two distinct time signatures – 4/4 for the main body of the song and 3/4 for the atmospheric introduction and outro.

Getting all these elements spot-on in the recording process was a problem for the band, the recording engineers and the co-producers on The Joshua Tree, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno.

In a feature written by Colm O’Hare of Hot Press magazine in 2007, Lanois recalled the experience.

“That was the science project song,” he said. “I remember having this massive schoolhouse blackboard, as we call them. I was holding a pointer, like a college professor, walking the band through the chord changes like a fucking nerd. It was ridiculous.”

The band, their producers and their engineers spent weeks working on the one song. Eventually, according to the 1998 TV documentary Classic Albums: U2: The Joshua Tree, Eno allegedly decided that the best solution would be to completely erase the song’s tapes and start from scratch with a fresh performance.

At one point, Eno allegedly had the tapes cued up and ready to be recorded over but it never happened. According to the engineer Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis, fellow engineer Pat McCarthy had gone out of the room to make some tea, returned to the control room, saw what Eno was planning and dropped the tray full of tea he was carrying to physically restrain the producer.

“He was completely freaked out as the junior member of the team attacking the senior member of the team and saying, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea, Brian, to wipe the entire song,’” said Flood in the documentary Classic Albums: U2: The Joshua Tree.

In the same documentary, Eno recounts his own version of events.

“What we kept doing was spending hours and days and weeks actually, probably half the time that the whole album took, on that song, trying to fix up this version on tape,” Eno said. “It was a nightmare of screwdriver work you know. And my feeling was… I’m sure we could get there quicker if we started again.”

“So my idea was to stage an accident, to erase the tape so that we would just have to start again. But I never did.”

The song was eventually compiled from several takes and was one of several songs mixed by Steve Lillywhite in the final months of recording The Joshua Tree.

“It took so long to get that song right, it was difficult for us to make any sense of it,” recalled Larry Mullen in the autobiography U2 On U2, “It only became a truly great song through playing live. On the record, musically, it's not half the song it is live.”

Lyrically, the song is rather obtuse but the initial inspiration seems to stem from a story Bono was told by someone in Belfast about how the street someone lives in reveals so much about them.

In the U2 On U2 autobiography, Bono said he wrote the lyrics on an airsickness bag while staying in a village in Ethiopia, where he and his wife Ali Hewson were staying while on a humanitarian trip as volunteer aid workers.

In December 1987, he told Robert Hilburn of the Chicago Sun-Times that he contrasted the Belfast story with the anonymity he felt in Ethiopia.

“The guy in the song recognises this contrast and thinks about a world where there aren't such divisions, a place where the streets have no name. To me, that's the way a great rock ’n’ roll concert should be: a place where everyone comes together... Maybe that's the dream of all art: to break down the barriers and the divisions between people and touch upon the things that matter the most to us all.”

In a 2017 interview with Rachel West of Entertainment Tonight Canada, Bono said he still felt the song’s lyrics were incomplete. “Lyrically it’s just a sketch and I was going to go back and write it out,” he said.

He also expressed profound regret for rhyming ‘hide’ with ‘inside’ in the opening two lines. But in the same interview The Edge disagreed with his comments: “I love the track, myself. I disagree with Bono. He’s very hard on himself.”

Where The Streets Have No Name was released as the third single from the Joshua Tree in August 1987, and reached No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand, No. 4 in the UK and No. 13 in the US.

Critics lauded the song. Cash Box called it an “achingly beautiful rocker” with “incredible raw emotion and power”. The NME praised Bono’s impassioned singing and The Edge’s guitar playing and concluded that the “last ten seconds are breathtakingly beautiful”.

As the years have passed, its reputation has grown. In 2002, Q magazine named Where The Streets Have No Name the sixteenth most exciting song ever. In 2020, The Guardian ranked it number one in its list of 40 Greatest U2 songs while in 2022, New York Magazine’s Vulture website placed the song number one in its list of all 234 U2 songs.

Where The Streets Have No Name is still widely regarded as one of the group’s most popular and enduring live songs.

“We can be in the middle of the worst gig in our lives, but when we go into that song, everything changes,” said Bono in Visnja Cogan’s 2008 book U2: An Irish Phenomenon. “The audience is on its feet, singing along with every word. It's like God suddenly walks through the room.”

It’s springtime for U2 fans. Last week saw the release of their first new music in nine years, in the shape of a six-song EP, Days Of Ash. Now they’ve shared the short film that accompanies one of those tracks, Yours Eternally.

As with the other tracks on the EP, Yours Eternally – which features a guesting Ed Sheeran - has a political theme. It’s written from the point of view of a Ukrainian soldier and indeed the video, made by the filmmaker Ilya Mikhaylus, features footage of soldiers on the frontline of the war against Russia, which, of course, started four years ago today (February 24). It is part of a longer documentary, which is set to be released before the end of this year.

Mikhaylus has said of the video: “For four years, Ukraine has been resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion, and the soldiers of the Khartiya Corps are among the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians defending their homeland."

“In this short film, and in the upcoming full-length documentary, we attempt to show the beating human heart of those incredible men and women, the struggles and sacrifices they are making everyday for the most sacred thing on this planet – freedom.”

Days Of Ash came out last Wednesday (on Ash Wednesday, you see..) and includes tracks inspired by the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Trump administration’s controversial ICE crackdown on migrants. But in a new interview with the U2 fanzine Propaganda, Bono has said not to expect any of its tracks to be included on the new album the band are currently working on.

“There’s a lot more than 25 songs in the works,” the singer explained. “But I’d say about 25 are worth considering for U2 projects in the next few years. The album contenders are very different in mood and theme than the ones we’ve chosen to put out on the EP. More songs of celebration than lamentation…more of a defiantly joyful kind of feel to take on these anxious times…almost a carnival vibe.”

“You can only kick at the darkness for so long,” he points out. “We’re going to try and make the light brighter real soon… We’re going try finding it in each other and our fans. We’re gonna try to find that carnival atmosphere in our audience, where hopefully we can both show each other not just where we are at but where we want to be at…Serious fun is required. We can’t always be letting the bad news drown out the good news.”

As for when we might expect that new album, Propaganda merely suggested that it’s “not far behind.”

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

The times they were a-changin’. When U2 wrapped up their eighties with a series of homecoming gigs at the Point Depot in Dublin in December 1989, they had already smelt the coffee.

Seven weeks previously, the Berlin Wall had come down. Revolution had spread to Czechoslovakia and then Romania. And the new decade was already acquiring a new soundtrack – dance and hip-hop were the rising forces and the rock bands who assimilated these best looked likely to be the ones to prosper in the 1990s.

So where did that leave U2, with their hoary old blues rock, their waistcoats and mullets? Needing to, in Bono’s words at the final Point show: “dream it all up again”.

Central to that was Berlin, the city which, it quickly became clear, would become the centre of a reunited Germany and a new Europe. When U2 arrived in Hansa Studios ten months later to start recording what would become Achtung Baby, one half of the band had a vague plan. While the whole group were keen that the new record should junk the Americana of the Joshua Tree/ Rattle And Hum era, it was unclear what should be put in its place.

Bono and The Edge were keen to incorporate dance rhythms and industrial textures into U2’s music. The rhythm section – Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr - weren’t so keen. In the 2011 documentary From The Sky Down, the drummer summed up the group’s problems: “Even before we got there, there was a sense that something was not quite right. And when we got there we were on completely different pages.”

“We would go into the room and just bash it out hour after hour, listen back and not like anything that we were doing,” said Clayton. “We were going down a lot of blind allies. There was a lot of friction, a lot of tension. Nobody was particularly happy.”

The band were struggling. Slogging through an early version of Mysterious Ways – then entitled ‘Sick Puppy’ – the group were trying a number of different chord progressions for the bridge when The Edge stumbled upon one that lit up everyone’s eyes.

“I played these on an acoustic guitar and everyone was trying to decide whether they were any good,” the guitarist remembered in the documentary. “And then Danny (Daniel Lanois) said ‘why don’t you play those two ideas sequentially, just one after another’. So I did and everyone was like ‘ooh that sounds really good.’

“So we all went into the big room. I shouted out the chords and we just started playing them. Bono got on the microphone and suddenly something very powerful is happening in the room. It was one of those hairs on the back of your neck moments.”

Bono improvised some lyrics and called out some chords, working out the song bit by bit. In just 15 minutes, a new song had somehow miraculously sprouted. “It was such a pivotal moment,” says The Edge. “We’d been going through this hard time and nothing seemed to be going right. Suddenly we were presented with this gift, it just kind of arrived. It steadied everyone’s nerves hugely in the studio.”

For his lyric, Bono decided to write about what was happening around him and the divisions in the band. One of the many ironies about One is that it took a song about breaking up to bring the group back together.

“There was melancholy about it but there was also strength,” Bono said in the 2006 book U2 By U2. “One is not about oneness, it's about difference. It's not the old hippie idea of 'let's all live together.' It is a much more punk rock concept. It's anti-romantic: 'we are one but not the same. We get to carry each other.'

"It's a reminder that we have no choice. I'm still disappointed when people hear the chorus line as 'got to' rather than 'we get to carry each other.' Like it or not, the only way out of here is if I give you a leg up the wall and you pull me after you.”

It was the first glimmer that the new album, and indeed the band itself – things had got that bad – was salvageable. The Hansa sessions were wrapped up by Christmas 1990, with One the only gleaming fruit of their stint in Berlin. “(Now) we just had put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down,” said Clayton.

In the New Year, the band moved to a seaside home, Elsinore in Dalkey, south of Dublin, where they set up a studio and the bulk of Achtung Baby was put together. One was worked on some more with overdubs and strings added. Feeling that the track was ‘too beautiful’, the Edge added some ‘gritty’ guitar.

Then Daniel Lanois added a little something. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, he remembered: “It was just me and Bono in the studio and he said, ‘Dan why don't you play a little guitar part to try and juice me up,’ and so I overdubbed a part that made the finish line, this little hammer-on kind of part on his Green Gretsch and that provided Bono with some encouragement.”

Even after that, One was still subject to some last-minute adjustments. In September 1991 at the final mixing session at Dublin’s Windmill Lane studios, Bono re-recorded one line and The Edge added a guitar part, before it was put to bed, to the satisfaction of all parties.

Achtung Baby was released two months later. Reviews of the album were generally positive and much was made of how the album sounded different to the ‘old U2’, particularly the use of electronic textures and dance rhythms on some of the tracks. One itself flew under the radar a little.

Few reviewers picked it out as the outstanding track on the album, an exception being Niall Stokes, the editor of Ireland’s Hot Press, who described it as “a magnificent synthesis of elements, words and music, rhythm, instrumentation, arrangement and intonation combine to create something that speaks a language beyond logic, the definitive language of emotional truth"

It was released as the third single in February the following year with all proceeds (including U2’s royalties) going to AIDS charities in each country it was released in. Despite this, it only performed modestly, reaching the Top Ten in both the US and UK. It could be that fans already had the album and passed on the single; it was in the middle of a recession, after all.

After that came Zoo TV. One was played every night of the tour – ironically the one new song that seemed to strike at a profound emotional truth was an irreplaceable prop of a charabanc that saw U2 embrace fun, satire and insincerity. Perhaps it balanced out the rest. It showed fans that under the panstick and layers of irony, their band were still the same old dependable U2.

Of course, one further irony is that the band wouldn’t even have reached the point of touring as ‘the new U2’ without One, which showed that for all the talk of new directions and bold experimentation, a rock band lives and dies by its most precious asset: great songs.

One has earned its classic status by stealth. One marker of this has been the sheer number of covers over the years. British soul singer Mica Paris was first off the mark, releasing a version as a single in 1995. Then Johnny Cash included it among the covers on his American III album in 2000.

It popped up again in the British chart in 2006 when Mary J Blige recorded a version with U2 backing her that reached number two, outperforming the original. Since then artists as varied as Pearl Jam, Lighthouse Family, Joe Cocker, REM and Fontaines DC have all reached for the song.

It’s united soul singers, country legends, indie kids and hard rockers. Hell, even Axl Rose – a man not usually noted for his sensitivity - said in an interview with RIP magazine, not long after its release: “One is one of the greatest songs ever written. Now I can see and understand why people were into U2 years ago."

It began to crop up on those Best Ever lists in the Noughties. Rolling Stone put it at 36 in their Top 500 Greatest Songs in both 2004 and 2010. It came in at 5 in Blender’s Best Ever run down and Q were especially taken with it – it topped their equivalent list in both 2003 and 2006.

U2 had done ballads before, and have done them since. Indeed, they excel at the form. But what is it about One that elevates it above all their other efforts? It's unvarnished realism, perhaps; it comes from a place of honesty – a band struggling to find themselves in a new era. Like many songs that go on to become standards, it found a new way to state a universal truth: life is hard, yet whilst all of us depart this life alone, we cannot live it without others. We get to carry each other; a responsibility and a joy.

Which, frankly, is as close to the meaning of life as any pop song has ever reached.

Bono has given what he has insisted will be the last interview on the promotional cycle for his memoir Surrender and its spin-off Apple TV film Stories Of Surrender.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe during which the singer touches on his heart surgery, family and faith. He also talked about how writing the memoir, and promoting it, and the film has been a cathartic experience for him.

“At some point you have to let go of those demons,” he told Lowe. “And I feel like I’m walking a little different now. I feel free-er and I feel like my voice has come into something different...

"I feel like my voice has got to a place where I’ve never been before and I thank the project of writing the memoir and the play and the book and the film all the rest of it for getting all that out, ready for the future and the sound of the future.”

He also revealed how the singer’s family had attempted to get him to slow down after his surgery in 2016. “They said things like ‘you need to change your life. You need to relax’. (I said) I am not taking up golf! What do you mean exactly? Then they were saying ‘well just do normal shit. Do you watch TV series and streamer?’” It seems his children got him into The Crown and Succession.

The heart surgery also prompted him to take a step back from activism. “I’m there, I’m not going anywhere, but I’m backstage (now). I’m not front of house. And that means I can be more of a servant to...I want to serve Edge, Adam and Larry while they still will let me, and Ali (his wife).”

The U2 singer also hinted that the band’s next album – whenever it does finally emerge – will be a ‘looser’ band record. “Rock n’ roll has gotten quite tight,” he suggested. “We got a little tight for Songs Of Innocence, Songs Of Experience. And then, I felt I want to feel the room. I want to feel the way these musicians bump up against each other. With Nirvana you feel that, Wunderhorse – you know them? You hear them in the room.”

“So that will be part of our future. It doesn’t have to be all of it, because there are moments when you want to disappear into sounds you haven’t heard before. But at the heart of our band is...three musicians. And a salesman,” he said, depositing yet another of those seemingly-effortless trademark Bono quips.

Bono has backed Bruce Springsteen over his comments about Donald Trump, proclaiming that “there’s only one Boss in America.”

The singer was appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, ostensibly promoting his Apple TV+ film Stories Of Surrender when the host asked him whose side he was on: “Trump or Bruce Springsteen?”

Bono pretended to look as if this was a tricky decision to make before unequivocally backing Bruce.

The U2 man is the latest artist to back Springsteen in the wake of The Boss's Manchester gig earlier this month, when he lambasted the current president as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous”. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder said last week at a show in Pittsburgh: “Part of free speech is open discussion. Part of democracy is healthy public discourse.”

A few days later Rage Against The Machine/ Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello hit the nail on the head at a live show in Boston when he said: “Bruce is going after Trump because Bruce, his whole life, he’s been about truth, justice, democracy, equality. And Trump is mad at him because Bruce draws a bigger audience.”

Kimmel went on to ask Bono about a post that Trump had made alleging that he, Springsteen and Beyoncé had all been paid to campaign for Kamala Harris last year. The singer replied: “Two points I’ll make. One: to be in the company of Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and Oprah – I’ll play tambourine in that band.”

“And two: U2 and I have never been paid or played a show to support any candidate from any party. It has never happened. I know that it’s called Truth Social, it seems to be pretty antisocial, and it’s not very true a lot of the time.”

Bono also gave Kimmel an update on new U2 music, saying that they are focused on making “the sound of the future.”

"We’ve been in the studio,” he revealed. “And you’ve sometimes got to deal with the past to get to the present, in order to make the sound of the future. That’s what we want to do. It’s the sound of four men, who feel like their lives depend on it. I remind them, they do. Nobody needs a new U2 album unless it’s an extraordinary one. I’m feeling very strong about it."

He went on to say: "(There are) songs to make up to, songs to break up to, and U2 makes a very unique sound when we play together. The sound of a room is what we’re going for."

Bono’s new documentary-of-his-memoir, Stories Of Surrender received a seven minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere on Friday.

The U2 singer was in attendance at the Grand Theatre Lumiere for the event. After the credits rolled, he thanked the audience, Andrew Dominik and the late Steve Jobs – Apple TV+ will be streaming the film from of this month.

And Bono being Bono he couldn’t resist making a point. Invoking the history of the Cannes festival – it was set up in 1939 as a response to the Venice Mostra film festival being essentially taken over by Mussolini – he said: “The festival was set up to fight fascism. Slava Ukraine.”

Whilst he was in Cannes, Bono also gave an update on the new U2 album. In an interview given to Rolling Stone he said, somewhat mysteriously: “Nostalgia is not to be tolerated for too long, but sometimes you’ve got to deal with the past in order to get to the future and to the present. To get back to now is our desire. Get back to this moment we’re in.”

He confirmed the band had been recording and “and it sounds like future to me,” he said. “We had to go through some stuff, and we’re at the other end of it.”

Meanwhile Larry Mullen Jr is apparently fit again for action. “And I can tell you (Mullen Jr.) is completely through whatever storm of injury he’s been through,” Bono said. “His playing is at its most innovative. He’s just all about the band. He doesn’t want to talk about anything else, which is kind of amazing.”

It’s coming up to eight years now since the last all-new U2 album, 2017’s Songs Of Experience. Since then, the band have been working on archival projects, most notably their 2023 Songs Of Surrender album which saw the band re-record highlights from their back catalogue.

That album was a companion piece to Bono’s own 2022 memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. The new documentary has been billed as a “vivid reimagining” of the live events that Bono gave to promote the book, part live gig – he sings a cappella in places – part story-telling session. You can catch it on AppleTV+ from May 30.

Bono has shared a trailer for his upcoming Apple TV+ documentary Songs Of Surrender, which comes out at the end of May.

The doc is essentially a TV version of the live events the U2 singer embarked upon to promote his 2022 memoir, Surrender. And in typical Bono-style it comes with a nicely-honed, slightly self-deprecating quip. Two, in fact.

“These are the tall tales of a short rock star,” he says by way of an introduction. “This is my story, I’m stuck with it.”

If you’re a fan, you’ll already know that the memoir tells the singer’s story through 40 of U2’s songs. In the live show, Bono mixes these songs with personal reflections and reminiscences from his long career.

It also sees him open up about a formative event in his life – when he lost his mother at the age of 14. “Last time I saw my mother alive,” he says, “was at her own father’s funeral. It sounds almost too Irish, I know. My father’s response to this tragedy was to never speak of her again.”

The singer also talks candidly about his relationships with those that are closest to him: “Turns out, the most extraordinary thing about my life is the people I’m in relationships with. I met my wife, Ali, the same week I joined U2.”

The doc features unseen footage of Bono’s April 2023 residency at New York’s Beacon Theatre and for the techies out there there is a version of the doc in Apple Immersive Video. And that – as you might have guessed – is a version where by it feels as if you are really in the room with Bono telling you his ‘tall tales’, even though you’re actually not.

Anyway, Bono: Songs Of Surrender lands on Apple TV+ on May 30, the same day as a paperback edition of the Surrender memoir, with a new introduction, hits the bookstores.

Apple has announced that they are teaming up with Bono for a new film they are describing as ‘a groundbreaking new documentary event’.

Apple and U2? Hmm. The last time they collaborated was just over a decade ago for the release of the Songs Of Innocence album. Loaded up to every Apple device in the world – whether you liked it or not - it sank U2’s reputation and didn’t do much for Apple either. You think they might have hesitated at embarking on a new project together, but evidently not so.

To be fair the ‘documentary event’ is certainly lower risk. Bono: Stories Of Surrender is, according to Apple “a vivid reimagining of Bono’s critically-acclaimed one-man stage show, Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief." It was recorded at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2023.

It sounds like it’ll be a film of the U2 singer doing what he did on his tour to promote his memoir, Songs Of Surrender. In other words, some readings, some stories and some U2 songs.

But that’s not all. There’s an ‘immersive’ version of this film that will be available on Apple Vision Pro. It’s apparently the first feature-length film available in Apple Immersive Video, a format recorded in 8K with Spatial Audio to produce a 180-degree video that places viewers onstage with Bono and in the center of his story. So it will be like he’s there right in front of you, in your living room/on the bus/wherever!

Apple said in a statement: “With this special edition of the film available only on Vision Pro, viewers will feel completely immersed in the music and storytelling of Surrender. Releasing an immersive version of the film for Vision Pro alongside its debut on Apple TV+ is the latest example of Bono’s enduring commitment to innovation.

"Since U2’s earliest days, Bono and the band have consistently pushed boundaries and embraced new technologies to forge deeper and unexpected connections with their audience.”

The film is produced by Jon Kamen and Dave Sirulnick who have a solid track record when it comes to music documentaries – they worked on Summer of Soul and David Byrne’s American Utopia, as well as Hamilton.

And if you’re not bothered about the immersive film it’s worth pointing out that an abridged paperback edition of Songs Of Surrender is being published concurrently with the film. So if you didn’t get around to reading it when it first came out in 2022, now’s your chance.

It’s three years yesterday (February 24) since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and to mark that sad anniversary, U2 have shared a message and a piece of music in support of the country and its leader, President Zelenskyy.

You can see the Instagram message below. In it, Bono reads out My Friendly Epistle, a poem by Taras Shevchenko, accompanied by piano. The singer said that he and The Edge had previously sent the recording to Zelenskyy himself in 2022, shortly after the initial invasion.

“All who believe in freedom and sense the jeopardy we Europeans now find ourselves in are not sleeping easily on this, the third anniversary of the invasion,” he wrote in the caption. “More to say about this and other bewilderments later.”

U2 have rarely been shy of taking a stand when it comes to human rights. Recently, Bono penned an op-ed in The Atlantic magazine in which outlined his thoughts on how to achieve freedom “in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk”.

Bono wrote about the idea of ‘freedom’, how it has meant different things across time and across nations and how the need for freedom has been expressed continuously in music.

“When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the ’60s, that had its place too,” he wrote. “We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.

“Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation… In U2, we wanted our song Pride (In the Name of Love) to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.”

The article appeared just before the singer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden in January, the highest civilian honour in the US, for being “a pioneering activist against AIDS and poverty.”

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war moves into its fourth year after a week which has seen talks in Saudi Arabia between Russia and President Trump to end the conflict, talks which Ukraine was excluded from.

We already knew that U2 are working on new material, but it sounds like we might be hearing some of it sooner than we thought.

That’s what The Edge seemed to be suggesting when he made an appearance on the Sodajerk on Songwriting podcast. “There might be a new song happening very soon, which you’ll hear about, “ he said. “Can’t say any more than that. We’re in a great place creatively.”

The 63-year-old guitarist also said that he has started to present finished lyrics to his three bandmates - Bono, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr – so they don’t waste time on tracks that are “never gonna work”.

“I sort of tricked myself,” he said. “I was going, ‘OK, this is for The Edge solo album, so… you can’t be, like, leaving these things half finished. It doesn’t have to have finished lyrics, but it needs to really hang together. And that extra discipline, I think, has been very useful.”

He added: “So, I’ve been just working on so much material, and I hope, now that we’re doing some U2 sessions with that material, it looks like it’s paying off in that we sort of know, ‘Yeah, that one really does have some potential here.’ And we still might end up… changing it around a lot, but we’re not gonna be wasting our time on an idea that was never gonna work.”

The Edge also hinted heavily that the band are looking to tour sooner rather than later. “We’re hoping to get to do some shows,” he said. “Because, you know, we did the Vegas run, which was fantastic, but we didn’t get to see much of the world. And… we’re looking forward to hooking up with our fans where they live, as opposed to them having to come to us.”

Other than the 2023-24 Las Vegas Sphere residency, U2 haven’t played live since before the pandemic. And aside from a one-off single in 2023, Atomic City, there has been no new new material since 2017’s Songs Of Experience album.

Instead the band have concentrated on archive projects – the ‘reimagining’ of their back catalogue that was Songs Of Surrender and last year’s re-packaging of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which included a so-called ‘shadow’ album of offcuts, entitled How To Reassemble An Atomic Bomb.

In an interview with Jo Whiley on Radio 2 last November, The Edge described the new music the band were working on as “some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music”. He also said that they were working with “some beautiful Irish musicians” and their old confrère Brian Eno.

On the evening of 5 June 1983, the four members of U2 walked out onto the rain-lashed stage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado to perform a set that would become immortalised in rock history.

The band had first set eyes on this natural amphitheatre, situated between sandstone cliffs in the Rocky Mountains, back in the spring of 1981, when they were on their first US tour promoting their debut album Boy.

"From the moment we saw it, we were thinking, 'Some day we will play here',” said bassist Adam Clayton in the 2006 book U2 By U2. “It was very photogenic.”

The 1983 Red Rocks concert was set up by U2 manager Paul McGuinness as an opportunity to shoot a film that would showcase the band's electrifying live act and help promote them to American audiences and promoters. The resulting video Under A Blood Red Sky would exceed all expectations, helping to break them in America and ensure heavy rotation on media outlets such as the hugely influential new music channel, MTV.

The Red Rocks concert was scheduled in the middle of the band’s 110-date tour of the US, Europe and Japan, to promote their third album War. One of the highlights of the set that evening was their performance of the album’s lead single, New Year’s Day.

It was U2’s first international hit and transformed their careers. New Year’s Day stormed the UK charts, reaching No. 10, and was the band's first song to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.

New Year’s Day was a defining moment for U2. “The song and its sound served as a culmination of U2's work to date,” wrote Denise Sullivan of AllMusic. “It signalled the group's end as a young, scrappy yet determined band on the way up and opened the door toward a longstanding career as professional agents of love and change in the big arenas.”

The band’s vocalist Bono began writing the lyrics to New Year’s Day soon after he married his childhood sweetheart Ali on 31 August 1982. It started out as a love song for her. But the lyrical focus of New Year’s Day and the album soon shifted.

War would become the band’s first overtly political album, drawing inspiration from various worldwide conflicts taking place that year. “War seemed to be the motif for 1982,” Bono told Adrian Thrills of the NME.

Bono’s revised lyrics for New Year’s Day were inspired instead by Solidarity, the Polish trade union movement that was effective in challenging the communist regime in Poland. A series of strikes resulted in martial law being imposed in December 1981 and Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, along with other leaders and activists, was arrested and incarcerated.

Bono told the Rolling Stone in 2012 that he made up the lyrics for New Year’s Day on the spot. "We improvise, and the things that came out, I let them come out,” he said. “I must have been thinking about Lech Walesa being interned. Then, when we'd recorded the song, they announced that martial law would be lifted in Poland on New Year's Day. Incredible."

In his 2009 book U2 Into The Heart: The Stories Behind Every Song, writer Niall Stokes explained how the song evoked broader themes. “The impressionistic political backdrop infused the track with a sense of separation and longing that captured the mood of the time in an unexpected and hauntingly enduring way,” he wrote.

The title of the Live at Red Rocks video, Under A Blood Red Sky, would be taken from the lyrics to New Year’s Day.

The song opens with a distinctive bassline from Adam Clayton, which follows the root notes of the Am - C - Em chord pattern. Clayton reportedly used his Aria Pro II bass to record the song, which was one of the first basses he owned and used. According to Niall Stokes, Clayton came up with this part in a soundcheck while trying to work out the chords for Fade To Grey by Visage.

Sonically, U2 had come a long way since forming in 1976 while they were all attending Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin. What became a post-punk band gradually developed into a far bigger, more anthemic sounding outfit, characterised by Bono’s powerful, expressive vocals and the epic, chiming, effects-based sounds created by guitarist David Evans – aka The Edge

When it came to selecting the recording studio for the War album, U2 returned once more to Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, a studio they had used for their first album Boy (1980) and the follow-up October (1981). The War album was recorded from September to November 1982 and they chose the same producer they had used on the previous two albums, Steve Lillywhite, who had been instrumental in helping them carve out their distinct sound.

Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. reportedly used a click track for New Year’s Day and all the songs on War. The click track was allegedly Lillywhite’s idea and was first tried on the album’s opening track Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Mullen was reportedly reluctant to use a click at first but changed his mind after a chance meeting with Andy Newmark, drummer with Sly & The Family Stone, who also worked with John Lennon, David Bowie, George Harrison, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music. Newmark told Mullen that he regularly used a click track in the studio.

New Year’s Day is big, bold and anthemic. Mullen and Clayton are tightly locked in and driving the 133 bpm track forward with real power and urgency. The Edge’s guitar in particular sounds vast, with sounds ranging from warm, growling overdriven tones to massive delay and reverb. Yet within it all, Lillywhite maintains heaps of space in the mix.

The lyrics still contain remnants of a love song – “I want to be with you/Be with you night and day” – but in the new political context of the song they take on a much bigger, life-affirming meaning.

Ever since the first album, the Edge’s guitar work was the element that really gave the band its unique spacious sound, with a strong use of harmonics and effects such as a Roland RE-150 Space Echo , the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man analogue delay and the Korg SDD-3000 delay.

But the War album signalled a shift to a far more direct guitar sound, with less reliance on effects, and this is evident on New Year’s Day. One of the song’s biggest hooks is the beautifully simple yet memorable piano line played by the Edge. When they performed the song live, he would sit at a Yamaha CP70 electric grand piano with his black Strat on his lap, alternating between instruments – choppy staccato rhythms on guitar and mellifluous piano lines – before standing and striding forwards for the guitar solo break.

Adam Clayton’s dynamic bass line and The Edge’s piano motif intro the song, before a short vocal refrain from Bono and then three snare cracks at 0:07 as Mullen’s drums kick in.

Bono’s vocal, as ever, is a full and powerful instrument. Details are sketchy about what mic he used to record the vocals on this album but he famously went on to use a Shure SM58 in the studio, an unorthodox choice for recording vocals as they are mostly used for live performance.

Opinions vary on the precise set-up The Edge used for the recording of New Year’s Day. On the War tour he used Vox AC-30s and Roland JC-120s but anecdotal reports suggest he used a Vox AC-30 for the recording of New Year’s Day. His main guitars back then were a Gibson Explorer and black 1973 Stratocaster. But the guitar he used to write and record the song was his 1975 Gibson Les Paul Custom.

In March 2007, The Edge donated this guitar and other musical items to charity to raise funds for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “I bought this guitar down on 49th street in New York city in 1982,” he is quoted as saying on the Les Paul Forum. “It was the third guitar I ever bought, after my Explorer and my black Strat. I wanted that Steve Jones’ Never Mind The Bollocks sound, so I got the same guitar right down to the colour. I never could get that sound, but I found a bunch of songs in this instrument… I will miss this one, not for sentimental reasons but because it's my New Year’s Day guitar.”

On 1 January 1983, New Year’s Day was released as a single in the US and then one week later in the UK. Clips of U2’s stunning performances of New Year’s Day and Sunday Bloody Sunday from the Under A Blood Red Sky video at Red Rocks helped to fuel interest in the band. The official video of New Year’s Day, directed by Melert Avis and shot in December 1982 in the depths of the Swedish winter, would also yield heavy MTV rotation.

New Year’s Day set the template for a more direct sonic vision for U2 and marked the point at which they shifted their collective gaze towards political issues around the globe. Lyrically though, they dealt with such subjects with the broadest of lyrical strokes, a decision that would ensure longevity for songs such as New Year’s Day.

“U2’s decision to omit overt, specific references to the political turmoil of the era was a wise one,” wrote Jim Beviglia of American Songwriter magazine in 2021. “As a result, New Year’s Day will never become dated. At the end of each passing year, listeners can hear the song’s combination of clear-eyed angst and imperishable hope and apply it to their own tumultuous times.”

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year.

Best of 2024: U2 were already a big deal in 1984 - 1983's War LP and its global tour, which also spawned the band's well-regarded live album Under a Blood Red Sky, had made the Irish band one of the world's hottest, if not hippest, tickets.

But it was The Unforgettable Fire that pointed the way to the band's record-breaking future as Steve Lillywhite's upfront rock production gave way to Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno's more nuanced soundscapes.

Eno, in particular, seems to have struck a career-chord with The Edge during the album's Slane Castle sessions. "He's not a great keyboard player, he doesn't write great songs really, he doesn't have the craft that say Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney,” he told One-Two Testing magazine in 1984.

"His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it's how he applies that knowledge.

"I suppose it's down to confidence, too."

That pragmatic creativity was something The Edge took confidence and inspiration from, as he'd told Hot Press the year before:"I could see how Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say second-rate, abilities.

"But the way he used them, that he'd been so determined to follow the areas in music he found stimulating to create a career - that must be totally unique.

"Now I don't think I'm a particularly talented guitar virtuoso. My talent if it's anything is my approach to the guitar by the use of effects, by non-acceptance of the usual approaches to the guitar".

There were other, similarly pragmatic forces behind the U2 man's signature style, which was well in place pre-Eno, though.

Back with One-Two Testing: "My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, y'know, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all.

"He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era, the Bunnymen or anybody like that.

"In order to give the group any sort of clarity, therefore, I had to stay away from the bottom end of the guitar as much as I could. So I tended to work around those high chords, that ringing sound...

"So when we started writing our own songs it just developed, this style of using high chords with that sort of ringing quality, not particularly rhythmic but more just a harmonic wash over little hook lines picked out within the songs, essentially very much as it is now.

"Then we started making a bit of money on gigs so I bought an echo unit and various other boxes, and most of the other boxes I discarded very quickly. I hate effects, the kind of things that jump out at you."

"I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have. I think my talent is possibly applying my abilities in a new way, so that could be production, it could be songwriting, it could be guitar playing, it could be anything. I enjoyed Eno because I could see he did that as well."

Read more

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• "Nothing much happens for the first eight or ten hours. Just trust that it's going to work out”: Classic Brian Eno interview reveals how he really produced ambient music

Well, now this is a revelation. Larry Mullen Jr, who has sat behind the drums for U2 for nearly five decades has opened up about his dyscalculia for the first time.

In a recent interview on Times Radio, Mullen has talked about what is commonly regarded as ‘maths dyslexia’. It means that he finds mathematical concepts, times tables and arithmetic in general difficult to comprehend. Which makes it all the more astonishing what he has achieved; keeping time for one of the world’s biggest rock bands all these years. As we all know, being able to count is one of the basic skills you need as a musician.

“I’ve always known that there’s something not particularly right with the way that I deal with numbers,” Mullen Jr. said. “I’m numerically challenged. And I realized recently that I have dyscalculia, which is a sub-version of dyslexia. So I can’t count (and) I can’t add.”

Mullen Jr explained that it’s the dyscalculia that is the reason behind the ‘pained’ look he often has on his face while playing drums, which has long been noticed by U2 fans. “I am pained because I’m trying to count the bars,” he said. “I had to find ways of doing this - and counting bars is like climbing Everest.”

Dyscalculia affects between 3% to 7% of the population. It occurs across all age ranges, abilities and levels of education. It’s much better understood now, but it’s probable that there wasn’t even a test for it when Mullen was at school in the 1960s and '70s.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mullen confirmed that the band were working on new material. “I don’t think it will be what we normally do,” he said. “ I would hope it would be something different. But I’m excited to get back in some capacity.”

Mullen, of course, had to sit out the group’s Las Vegas Sphere residency last year. He cited damage to his elbows, knees and neck that had built up over the years. It was then reported that he had had surgery to address the injuries.

Just a week or so back The Edge gave an interview to Radio 2’s Jo Whiley in which he talked about the band’s new music and described being back in the studio with Mullen as “wonderful”.

“He’s good,” he said of the drummer. “He’s taking it easy but he’s back in the saddle on the drums still doing some recording with us and so we’ll be doing a bit more of that before the end of the year.”

Apparently U2 are working on new music. In an interview with Jo Whiley last night on Radio 2 no less an authority than The Edge confirmed that the band and Brian Eno are busy on what he described as “crazy sci fi Irish folk music”.

The mind boggles. Anyhow, the key thing is that they are on it. These last few years have been lean times for U2 fans (at least in Europe). Aside from one standalone single, they haven’t released any new music since 2017’s Songs Of Experience album.

Instead there has been a succession of retrospective projects – the ‘re-imagining’ of their back catalogue that was Songs Of Surrender, Bono’s memoir and more recently what they’re describing as the “shadow” album to 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, cunningly titled How To Reassemble An Atomic Bomb.

That’s released on Friday and is what The Edge was ostensibly promoting on Whiley’s show. Conversation naturally turned to recent activities – the band’s Sphere residency and Larry Mullen’s current fitness (the drummer sat out their run at the Sphere).

“We’ve got him in the studio,” the guitarist said. “He’s good, he’s taking it easy but he’s back in the saddle on the drums still doing some recording with us and so we’ll be doing a bit more of that before the end of the year.”

“And then Bono and I are working on some crazy kind of sci-fi Irish folk music,” he continued, “which could end up becoming a part of the new U2 album, we’re not sure yet we’ll see. Part of our kind of process is to go so widely away from, off track, and then sort of the process of bringing things back on track is kind of how you get sort of unique sounding music…

"We have Brian Eno involved. And a bunch of, you know some beautiful, Irish musicians, you know so incredibly talented.”

Eno and U2 haven’t worked together since 2009’s No Line On The Horizon. The years since have been difficult – artistically, at least - for the band. After years of over-thinking and procrastination they finally released the follow up Songs Of Innocence in September 2014, as a free download – famously it popped up one morning on every Apple device on the planet. Arguably, the band have yet to recover from what’s commonly regarded as one of the 21st Century’s most notorious PR disasters. Fans will be hoping that by engaging with Eno once more – he co-produced their hugely successful run of albums from The Unforgettable Fire onwards - U2 might yet rediscover their creative mojo.

Whatever your thoughts on it - and Ed Sheeran’s have changed, it turns out - Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? represents a key moment in pop history.

Released in 1984 to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia, It birthed the concept of the star-studded charity single and featured some of the biggest music stars of the time.

Now, as the song gets set to mark its 40th anniversary, Band Aid ringmaster Bob Geldof, who wrote Do They Know It's Christmas? with Midge Ure, has been reflecting on the day it was recorded at Trevor Horn’s Sarm Studios in London. And, in his interview with the Radio Times, he touched on what has become one of the song’s most controversial lines.

The phrase "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you" was sung by Bono, and has come to be viewed by some as condescending in tone, and to perpetuate the stereotype that the people of Africa are ‘victims’ who deserve our pity. And it turns out that, even as he was about to record it, Bono wanted to double-check with Geldof that he definitely wanted to go with it.

“Bono took me aside and asked if I was sure I wanted him to sing this line about ‘Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you.’” remembers Geldof.

“I was able to say, this is not soggy liberalism; this is coded anger, like Michael Buerk’s [news] report. And because he’s got a voice from God and he can absorb the sense of a song like few others, he nailed it.”

For better or worse, Bono’s line became one of Do They Know It’s Christmas’s most iconic. So much so that, when a new Band Aid cast assembled in 2004 to re-record the song, there was a bunfight over who was going to sing it. Both Robbie Williams and The Darkness’s Justin Hawkins were said to be keen, but the debate was ended by the arrival of a familiar face.

"They were still arguing when the door swings open and in walks Bono, who says, 'Are we doing my line yet?'” remembers Geldof. “He came back and sang it again in 2014, when we were doing it for the Ebola crisis." (This time, the line was changed to "Well tonight we're reaching out and touching you.")

This was the version that featured Ed Sheeran, and his vocals are also set to be included on the 2024 Ultimate Mix, which also fuses elements of the 1984 and 2004 recordings (Band Aid II, which was released in 1989 and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, seems to have been completely forgotten about). However, in a statement, Sheeran said that he wasn’t consulted about this, and that, if he had been, he would have “respectfully declined the use of my vocals.”

Sheeran cites a post by Fuse ODG, the British-Ghanian rapper who was also invited to appear on the 2014 Band Aid but turned it down. “I recognised the harm initiatives like it inflict on Africa," he wrote. "While they may generate sympathy and donations, they perpetuate damaging stereotypes that stifle Africa's economic growth, tourism, and investment, ultimately costing the continent trillions and destroying its dignity, pride and identity."

Geldof, though, recently defended Do They Know It’s Christmas’s legacy and rejected the idea that it reinforces “old Colonial tropes.” In a response to an article written by British academic Colin Alexander for The Conversation, he said: "This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive.

"In fact just today Band Aid has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to help those running from the mass slaughter in Sudan and enough cash to feed a further 8,000 children in the same affected areas of Ethiopia as 1984.

"Those exhausted women who weren’t raped and killed and their panicked children and any male over 10 who survived the massacres and those 8,000 Tigrayan children will sleep safer, warmer and cared for tonight because of that miraculous little record. We wish that it were other but it isn’t.

"‘Colonial tropes’ my arse.”

Do They Know It’s Christmas? - 2024 Ultimate Mix will be released to digital platforms on 25 November. The Band Aid Compilation CD and 12-inch vinyl will be released on 29 November. All proceeds raised from physical and download sales will go to the Band Aid Trust.

It’s been over a year since U2 began their 40-concert residency at the Sphere, Las Vegas’s new spherical super-venue, and now bassist Adam Clayton has been reflecting on the experience of playing there.

“It was an amazing building and it was an amazing show to play,” he told Ireland’s The Late Late Show. “Because, normally, musicians are put in these sports buildings that sound terrible, but the Sphere sounded amazing. In fact, it sounded so amazing that people said to me, ‘I can hear the bass’, which usually they don’t say to me very often.”

Given the visual impact of the Sphere’s 16k, 15,000m2 screens, there was always the danger that the music itself would end up playing second fiddle, so it’s reassuring to hear Clayton singing the praises of the audio, too. For U2, though, there was an element of risk involved when they signed on to be the opening act, because they didn’t really know what they were getting into.

“It was kind of nerve-racking, because we signed up for it when we had seen the plan, and it looked like the Death Star,” says Clayton. “It wasn’t built, we didn’t know if the tech worked, and we had to design a show to go into this building. So we agreed to do it because we thought the tech [was] interesting and it’s great to be the first show in. We rehearsed, we built the show outside of the building, turned up day one, did a couple of rehearsals and said, ‘Well, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but let’s go.’”

He needn’t have worried: both band and venue received rave reviews, and shorter residencies from Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles, who are booked in until March next year, soon followed.

For U2, though, the focus is on what comes next: a reissue of their 2004 album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which is released on 22 November. This includes not only a remastered version of the original record, but also the ‘shadow album’, How to Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which features new and unreleased songs that have recently been rediscovered.

And, while these may have been ‘outtakes’, Clayton feels that, with the benefit of hindsight, they deserve to be heard.

“Everything that we didn’t use on the first one was kind of great anyway - we just discarded it and moved on,” he explains, adding that it was U2’s guitarist who first realised that the material was worthy of release. “Edge went back to the discarded tracks and went, ‘Actually, this is the band sounding really good. This is the band playing really well,’” Clayton confirms.

What’s more, the bassist feels that the passing of time means that these unheard songs can now be heard in a new context.

“In the 20 years since we did that [album] music has changed - the way people receive music has changed, it’s streaming,” he points out. “And the sound of music has changed, so when we went back to tracks that were played by a band in a room, we went ‘ooh, vaguely charming, moving, powerful,’ and it just sounded like something that people hadn’t heard for a while.”

U2 albums have long involved drawn-out sessions and an excess of material – a lot of it hears the light of day but enough from 2004's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb's sessions to birth a whole 10-track record; How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb.

How To Dismantle… was very much a continuation of U2 leaning into the calling cards they'd rediscovered on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind – especially what Edge called his 'Coca-Cola' guitar sound. You know, chiming delay propelling big anthems. 

While that may have elicited sighs from fans of Pop and Zooropa's more experimental spirit, U2 do anthemic well, sometimes very well, and How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb's double A-side taster affirms that.

Country Mile is a solid one, but not quite at the level of a City Of Blinding Lights. Picture Of You (X+W) initially feels like a rawer take on the Dublin band's dynamic with the Edge's garage riff, but it takes off into a more majestic space. It also references the How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb lyric that inspired the album's title, suggesting it must have been close to making the cut.

 “The sessions for How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb were such a creative period for the band, we were exploring so many song ideas in the studio," says the Edge. "We were inspired to revisit our early music influences, and it was a time of deep personal introspection for Bono who was attempting to process - dismantle - the death of his father.

"For this anniversary edition I went into my personal archive to see if there were any unreleased gems and I hit the jackpot," the guitarist adds. "We chose ten that really spoke to us. Although at the time we left these songs to one side, with the benefit of hindsight we recognize that our initial instincts about them being contenders for the album were right, we were onto something."

How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb will be released on 29 November exclusively for Record Store Day Black Friday alongside a digital release. A week before the How To Dismantle… record itself will be released as a remastered 20th anniversary edition. 

"What you’re getting on this shadow album is that raw energy of discovery," says the Edge. "The visceral impact of the music, a sonic narrative, a moment in time, the exploration and interaction of four musicians playing together in a room… this is the pure U2 drop.”

Tracklisting for How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb:

1.         Picture Of You (X+W)

2.         Evidence Of Life

3.         Luckiest Man In The World

4.         Treason

5.         I Don't Wanna See You Smile

6.         Country Mile

7.         Happiness

8.         Are We Gonna Wait Forever?

9.         Theme From The Batman

10.       All Because Of You 

While Treason, Evidence Of Life, Country Mile and Happiness have never been heard before outside the band's inner circle;  Luckiest Man In The World leaked online almost 20 years ago under its working title Mercy.  - familiar to fans under its working title ‘Mercy’, an early demo of which was leaked online almost 20 years ago. The other five are newly remastered songs – Picture Of You (X+W), I Don't Wanna See You Smile, Are We Gonna Wait Forever?, Theme From The Batman and All Because Of You 2 – are 'all collected together for the first time to mark the 20th anniversary of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

Fans will notice that All Because of You is a song on the final album, so this could be a different take on it. 

The remastered How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (20th Anniversary Edition) will be released on Vinyl 8LP Super Deluxe Collectors Boxset (Limited Edition); Vinyl 2LP; Exclusive D2C 2LP Black & Red Ink Spot Vinyl (Limited Edition); 5CD Super Deluxe Collectors Boxset (Limited Edition); CD; and Exclusive Red & Black Cassette (Limited Edition). 

The digital releases include HTDAAB remastered (12 tracks); and HTDAAB & HTRAAB (22 tracks). How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (Re-Assemble Edition) – featuring both How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb + How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb - will be available as a dual digital release on 22 November.

Preorder here

• "It was totally, totally nuts": The Edge was so impressed with Universal Audio's Lion '68 amp pedal, he didn't just add it to his rig – it changed the tone for his intro to U2's Las Vegas Sphere gigs

U2 are set to release a new concert movie shot during their residency at Sphere last year. The one catch? For the moment you can only see it...at the Sphere.

V-U2 will be screened exclusively at the futuristic Las Vegas venue from September 5. The film is the first to be shot using the ‘Big Sky’ camera system, which Sphere Entertainment has itself developed. This footage will appear on the venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen in high-definition audio. There are even so-called ‘haptic’ seats, which vibrate to the sound of the music. 

The film’s co-director is also one of the stars. The Edge was the man in charge, alongside his wife Morleigh Steinberg. Indeed he jokes in the trailer below: “After all these years, I get to see a U2 show.”

“The goal was to give the immersive moviegoers as close to the live U2:UV concert experience as possible - and then some,” the guitarist said in a statement. “I’ve never seen a U2 show. I’m so relieved I caught a great one.”

“We knew all the tremendous capabilities of the technology, but we didn’t know what to expect from the process of making this film,” added Steinberg, who has previously worked with the band, directing their Staring at the Sun video. “The work became a true collaboration between band, artists, producers, and technology teams. The end result is a cinematic experience that transports viewers into the energy and beauty of the live show.”

Tickets aren’t cheap though. They start at $100, and subscribers to U2.com and Sphere ‘Inner Circle’ members are first in the queue. There’s no news yet as to whether the film will be screened at similar venues around the world.

The band’s Sphere residency won rave reviews last autumn and proved so successful that a succession of big names have since lined up to play the innovative arena, including Dead And Company, The Eagles and Phish. U2’s run of shows were notable for being the first time in over forty years that the band have played without drummer Larry Mullen Jr, who was still recovering from a neck injury at the time.

U2 are said to be working on a new album, though last November Bono said in an interview with Mojo that the record was “somewhat tied” to Mullen’s ongoing recovery. The band haven’t released an album of brand new material since Songs Of Experience in 2017.

Tore Mogensen and James Santiago head the team at Universal Audio that has big ambitions. They knew their effects and amp modelling pedals belonged on huge stages as well as in homes and rehearsal rooms, what they may not have imagined was that one of the best-known and most fastidious tone-hound guitarists in the world would embrace what they had worked on so enthusiastically.

MusicRadar has already heard from the Edge himself about why he chose to use Universal Audio's UAFX Ruby '63, Woodrow '55 and Dream '65 amp modelling pedals to replace the tube amps in his rig and supply Vox AC30, Fender Tweed Deluxe and Deluxe Reverb tones for U2's sets at the cutting edge Sphere venue in Las Vegas that have helped to change the perception on what is possible to achieve with live music in the audio and visual realms. What we didn't know was there was more.

By the end of the band's residency at the Sphere, Edge and his longtime tech Dallas Schoo had added a fourth UAFX amp emulation pedal; the Lion '68 – recreating Marshall Plexi Super Lead and Super Bass tones. Not only that, its sound had inspired him to swap out a vital tone in the set's intro that was traditionally covered by the AC30, and then Ruby '63 pedal.

For the first time we have the inside perspective from Tore and James on the news that brought their whole project with UA into sharp focus. 

"I have not talked about it all but I did see one of the last shows at Sphere," James tells us as part of an in-depth MusicRadar interview. "And I did go under the stage to meet with the guys right before showtime. They're like, 'You're here, come under this'. The venue was packed, crowded all the way to the front. So they snuck me under the stage right there, about 20 minutes before they went on, to show me the setup."

What struck Sound and Product Designer James wasn't just the setup but how it was being used. 

"I know I can't share any pictures or anything, but they showed me this little rack that basically had shelves that just had Rubys, Lions, Dream – every one of our pedals was on a shelf," James remembers. "Dallas was like, 'We use every one of these and when you watch the show tonight, the opening song, which is the Zoo Station intro that Edge plays to start the concert – that's the Lion pedal. He's not even using the Ruby. He loves the Marshall sound right now. We just got it this morning. And he was into it. He put it in the rig today.'"

The sense of pride was enriched further by how enthusiastic Schoo was about the pedals being added to the rig.

"They were just so excited to have consistent tones and for Dallas it was he got to not be pummelled by the amps, because under the stage used to be where the amps were," says James. "He had to live in this world of just the amps hitting his head and the craziness of keeping a whole locker room full of amps under a stage running during a show. He was so happy, he said: 'It's so great down here. Look at the shelves, and it works perfectly'".

"Then meeting the front-of-house engineer and then just seeing the show was great, because you saw what he had," James tells us. "And we talked about MIDI – Edge has a lot of programmed changes, a lot of timed delays. So he had this crazy amount of rack delays and post-effects stuff. And he goes, "I'm using the pedals exactly like I use the amps", because all he did was get rid of the amps and that cable that would have gone to multiple AC-30s and Tweed Deluxes just went into the pedals as a drop-in replacement for the rig. That's what we're doing."

It was the ultimate scenario of what James and Tore had envisioned when they were tasked with developing Universal Audio's amp pedals.  

"I was shocked to see it because that's what we wanted with someone," admits James. "And we had these discussions, me and Tore saying, 'We want somebody that if they had their pedalboard and their backline at a gig and if the amp went down, they could just take that cable, plug it into one of these pedals and it will do the exact same thing and go straight to house'. That's what they did. 

"And in fact, it was a full circle moment because I had talked to some of the [other UA] guys before we even did the stuff. So it was like, 'Hey, remember that thing you talked about trying to do? You did it and the pedals are here tonight, and they're onstage and you're about to see them go live in 10 minutes go live.

"It was a real live version of what Tore was hoping would happen, when this idea came up but he pushed us through to get this sort of team together to make these amp pedals."

Back in November 2023, MusicRadar reached out to the Edge after reports surfaced that he'd added UAFX amp pedals to his rig. He confirmed to us that was indeed the case and they'd replaced his usual backline of vintage amps for the Las Vegas shows.

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” Edge added. 

While UA's amp pedals have provided a solution that's seemingly without compromise for Edge, it's really interesting to hear how the Lion '68 actually inspired a change in the sound of Zoo Station live.

"It was totally, totally nuts," says James. "And then you realise that he talks to his other buddies and then you get a call from Joe Walsh going, 'Hey, man, I was talking to the Edge and he said I should try these pedals.' And then that guy talked to John Mayer. And then you realise all these guitar nerds talk to each other. Bob Weir talks to Mayer. That's how the natural growth happens. Because you can't just make somebody like a product or a sound. 

"I think any one of us know the same thing where you have a friend and they say, 'You should try this pedal', or, 'You should borrow mine and check it out'. And that natural growth of tone nerds sharing cool ideas and new products.

Check out our full interview with James and Tore as we talk about the process of developing amp pedals, the challenges so far and why they see them as passing the torch of classic amp sounds for a new generation to enjoy. 

Coldplay are huge – the stadium-level few bands with a guitarist in reach. When they emerged on radio with the Brothers & Sisters single and The Blue Room EP in 1999 they were undoubtedly a rock band. But somewhere along their huge trajectory, they changed, for Bono at least.

In a new eight-episode BBC radio series interview, The Genius Of Coldplay, the U2 frontman revealed that he doesn't think they're a rock band at all, and shouldn't be treated like one.

 “Coldplay are not a rock band," he says. "I hope that’s obvious. There is something much more interesting going on there like the Isley Brothers or something.

“They should not be judged by rock rules," he warns. "There's dance, it's ambiance – so many things. Rock's a different thing. Rage is the river running under most rock formations. Coldplay’s music has a different source and I think it’s best revealed in this song Clocks.."

Clearly, the argument anchors on your definition of what's running under most rock formations. The band have certainly become less guitar-driven over the years, with Clocks – from 2002 second album A Rush Of Blood To The Head being an early example Bono draws upon.

In U2 news, the band recently gathered with Gavin Friday and Pauli The PSM to look back on their residency at the Las Vegas Sphere. You can watch it in full above.

The Edge has dug deep into his electric guitar collection to donate one of his out of production – and ergo super collectible – signature Stratocasters for a charity auction raising money for critical healthcare services in Los Angeles.

A longtime supporter of the Venice Family Clinic, the Edge will see his guitar sold alongside a trio of UAFX’s MusicRadar-approved amp emulator pedals, with the lot expected to raise upwards of $75,000. The bidding currently stands at $30,000 and closes tomorrow, 11 May.

Launched in 2016, the Edge’s signature Strat was based on his 1973 black Strat but refreshed with a number of modern updates. The Edge did not want to create a replica, and yet, with that headstock size, it nailed the look, and it would nail the tones, too. 

It was wired up with a pair of Fender Custom Shop Fat ‘50s single-coil electric guitar pickups at the middle and neck positions, with a DiMarzio FS-1 at the bridge, just like the Edge’s original.

In short, it was a crowd-pleaser, and sold like hot cakes, with Noel Gallagher famously among its fans. Now discontinued, you’ll be hard pressed to find one anyway.

This one is being sold with its original hardshell guitar case. The Edge has signed the back of the headstock, and if there’s any wear and tear on it then it is the sort of wear that adds value to the instrument because it will be from the Edge playing the guitar. This was one he used at home and in the studio.

The UAFX Amp Emulation pedals are not to be sniffed at either. This is serious kit. They include the Dream ’65 Reverb Amplifier, Ruby ’63 Top Boost Amplifier, Woodrow ’55 Instrument Amplifier, and altogether that bundle would set you back $1,200 new.

And if you’re looking to put together a rig for replicating the Edge’s tones then you can put that Vox AC30 tube amp back in the loft because he recently swapped to UAFX for his live sounds at the Irish rock legends’ residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

“For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators,” the Edge told MusicRadar in November 2023. “When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it’s a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple.”

The Edge’s patronage of the UAFX line is quite the endorsement. There were surely high-fives and fist bumps at the Universal Audio HQ when the news broke that he was using them, but outwardly the company was keeping it cool, keeping it together.

“Edge has bought most/all of our pedals,” it said in a statement. “He’s also shared his feelings with us directly, but we are not using it to promote specifically, out of respect for him.”

You can check out this listing and more at the Venice Family Clinic auction. 

When you think of U2, and The Edge specifically, you often think of huge soundscapes, a wall of guitars and enough delay to drown a stadium full of screaming fans…. But what happens when you turn the delay pedals off?

Underneath the delay-soaked guitar lines are a bunch of very interesting chord choices by the Edge. In his quest to fill as much sonic space as he can, he often employs interesting chord voicings to try and cover more ground. 

In this lesson we’re going to check out four interesting and unusual chords that The Edge used in some of U2's biggest songs… and one they wrote for another icon to sing.

C#m7b5

Did you know that Bono and The Edge wrote the theme song form 1995’s James Bond movie Goldeneye, which was sung by Tina Turner?

Technically, there is no guitar in this, but if there was, a C#m7b5 chord would appear in the chorus of the song. If you decide to cover this on guitar, you’ll need to learn this diminished chord.

G/B

This chord appears in the verse of the song Where The Streets Have No Name. Through the verse The Edge is playing a muted 16th note pattern, but every so often he throws in a little section of this chord played in a funky manner.

This chord could also be viewed as a Bm#5.

Badd4

In the second verse of the song Pride (In The Name of Love), Edge breaks into an arpeggiated chord pattern. The first chord you hear in that pattern is the Badd4. 

This chord is based around a regular six-string major barre chord, but the B and E strings and left to ring open. 

This shape can be moved to other rooted chords along the Low E, but they won’t all function as add4 chords. The open strings will change the interval make up.

D6no5

In the chorus of Bullet the Blue Sky this D6no5 chord makes an appearance. The added B note at the top makes it a D6, but the absence of the 5 interval on the A string is interesting. The Edge would often pull out intervals to create space in the mix for other instruments.

You could also view this chord as a Bmin triad with a D in the bass, making it Bm/D.

• The Edge: "I'd like to be the vanguard of this resurgence of guitars!"

We don't think it's a knowing song choice considering the guitar gear involved, but it might as well be. U2 has released pro (read: full bells, whistles and drone) footage performing Achtung Baby hit Even Better Than The Real Thing at the Las Vegas Sphere as the band resumes their residency there. And we now know there's no tube amps involved.

What we're hearing from the Edge below is his Rickenbacker 350 Jetglo through Universal Audio's UAFX amp emulator pedals with the Fractal Axe-FX for effects – ditto in the clip of The Fly below that. As the guitarist confirmed to MusicRadar last year, he's using the Dream '65, Ruby '63 and Woodrow '55 pedals to cover the Fender Deluxe, Vox AC30 and Fender Tweed tones through his Vegas sets. And who knows, maybe he's even added the new Lion '68 for some Marshall Super Lead thrills by now!

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar when we reached out following speculation online. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” he added. 

Will this kind of amp and effects modelling be part of the Edge's rig for other venues going forward? Time will tell, either way, we think it's a safe bet he'll always have spectacular tones. 

Update: The Edge has now confirmed to MusicRadar that he is using Universal Audio's UAFX Ruby '63, Dream '65 and Woodrow '55 amp modelling pedals for U2's Las Vegas Sphere shows.

"For various reasons at the Sphere I decided to switch from amplifiers to digital amp emulators," the U2 guitarist told MusicRadar when we reached out following speculation online. "I'm using UA Ruby, Dream and Woodrow amp pedals with some Fractal Axe-FX units handling additional amp emulation and FX. 

"When you introduce radio leads and all the electronics involved it's never the same as a simple guitar into amp tone so it's a case of high-level complexity to make it sound simple,” he added with regards to the reasons behind the switch.

The move for 2023's most high-profile rock shows is a huge vote of confidence in the work UAFX's Senior Product Designer James Santiago and his team have done with the Universal Audio's line of digital modelling amp pedals. 

“We heard the news and are so proud to see UAFX pedals gracing some very high profile stages lately,” James told MusicRadar. “We believe these are the first amp emulation pedals that really get tube tone right. So it’s very rewarding to see them inspiring legendary artists.”

The Edge is notoriously particular about every element of his rig, from his huge rack of 43 guitars on tours to his effects and vintage amps. The move to amp modelling pedals is a huge statement about their validity on the world's biggest stages.

The Edge's amp requirements have always been very specific. On the band's 2009 MusicRadar visited Dallas Schoo, Edge's tech since 1986, on the road in New York and found him using his ever-present 1964 AC30 from '64, '58 Fender Deluxe with a Vox speaker and a '57 Deluxe with a Jensen speaker, rare mid-'50s Fender Harvard with another Vox speaker and early '70s Vox amps as backups." 

The UAFX Woodrow, Ruby and Dream pedals are based on the Fender 5E3 Deluxe Tweed from 1955, Vox AC30 and AC30 Top Boost models and the 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb, respectively.  

The reports that the guitarist had moved to UAFX pedals for the Las Vegas Sphere shows first came after a fan posted a grainy shot of the U2 legend's rack from a distance that seemed to show the amp pedals and posted them on The Gear Page, while a pic of his pedalboard had blank spaces where the previous tube amps would have been labelled. That whole thread has since been removed from The Gear Page. 

Over on the official Universal Audio forums, a representative confirmed that the guitarist is a fan of its pedals.

"Edge has bought most/all of our pedals. He's also shared his feelings with us directly, but we are not using it to promote specifically, out of respect for him."

We already know this wouldn't be the first time the guitarist has performed with modelling amps – Fender CEO Andy Mooney revealed to us that The Edge used the company's Tone Master amps for a TV performance.

"I had an interesting conversation with Edge and his guitar tech Dallas [Schoo], it was during the Joshua Tree [anniversary] tour, and I went backstage with him when he was in LA and he was showing me the setup. Live he's playing through four tiny amps; two fenders and two Voxs, 130 effects pedals; all of them analogue. And 23 different guitars, because this is how he rolls," said Mooney. 

"Each song was a very precise combination of a guitar set exactly to the same volume, tone control, and from the 130 pedals, these 15 are going to be used on this song. So that's great when you're on tour and you have massive rigs to kind of carry from venue to venue. But the next night they were playing Jimmy Kimmel Live. And he said, "I can't take this to Jimmy Kimmel Live." So there he used modelling amps. And he goes, 'It's not the same, it's absolutely not the same'. But it's close enough. And it's the only practical way to perform in that type of venue."

Our reviews of the Woodrow '55, Ruby '63 and Dream '65 pedals remarked on how UA's modelling was setting a new standard for the digital detail of tube amps being captured. The recent release of the UAFX Lion '68 Super Lead, based on capturing three iterations of Marshall Plexi heads, aims to continue that great work. 

The pedals offer up to six different classic speaker emulations alongside reverb, boost and replications of the amp's and their controls. In the case of the Ruby, there are the original and Top Boost interactions of the AC30. 

• Universal Audio UAFX Woodrow '55, Ruby '63 and Dream '65 amp pedals review

The story of a single mum attempting to learn the guitar in order to bond with her teenage son might not scream ‘must-see movie’, but hold on, because the trailer for Apple TV+’s Flora and Son has landed and it tees up said tale nicely.

Directed by John Carney, whose previous musical-comedies include Once, Sing Street and Begin Again, we learn that the eponymous Flora (Eve Hewson) brings home a guitar after the police tell her that she needs to find something to occupy the time of her off-the-rails teenage son, Max (Orén Kinlan), or he’ll end up “behind bars.”

Disappointed to discover that he has no interest in learning to play, Flora decides to take up the guitar herself, and seeks out video tuition on YouTube. Seemingly overwhelmed by what she finds, she ends up having one-to-one online guitar lessons with down-on-his-luck LA musician Jack (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Whether romance ensues we can’t say - Flora is based in Dublin, Ireland - but we could hazard a guess.

There’s another twist, though: it looks like, rather than play the guitar, her son decides to start producing electronic music on his laptop. Could a mother/son collaboration be on the cards? Again, we can’t say, but we could hazard a guess.

Flora and Son premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the early word has been pretty positive. Whether it can go on to achieve the same level of success as Coda, the Apple-distributed, music-focused movie that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar in 2022, remains to be seen.

Eve Hewson, of course, has some strong musical heritage, being the daughter of none other than U2’s Bono. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter about Flora and Son earlier this year, she confirmed that she performed all of her character’s vocals in the film, and that producers resisted the temptation to fix any imperfections.

“It is all me singing,” she said. “The whole thing and not even with Auto-Tune when you can just fix that little bit to make it a bit better. We actually really like that. It’s sort of off and sounds like a real person. I overcame a massive, massive fear doing that. I would rather swim with sharks.”

Hewson also revealed that, although she grew up playing music, the guitar wasn’t her instrument of choice.

“I actually hated the guitar,” she confessed. “I hate the strings and the calluses and once I got to chords, I was like, fuck this. But yeah, I played guitar when I was younger but was more into the drums and piano.”

As for whether she sought her father’s advice while working on her Flora and Son songs, Hewson says that he only got to hear them when they were finished.

Bono caused a stir last year when he admitted on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast that he turned “scarlet” with embarrassment whenever a U2 song came on the radio because he didn’t like his vocals.

“The band sound incredible,” said Bono. “Though I just found the voice very strained and kind of not macho, and my Irish macho was kind of strained by that. I’ve only became a singer, like, recently! And maybe it hasn’t happened yet for some people’s ears, and I understand that. [Laughs]”

According to Bono, the late Robert Palmer once approached bassist Adam Clayton in the ‘80s and undiplomatically told him to take U2’s songs down a few keys, adding, “He’d do himself a favour, his voice a favour, and he’d do us all a favour who have to listen to him.” Charming.

Back in the early days, on material such as Pride (In The Name Of Love), U2 were just going for it. Bono says he was singing “out of his body”. It was only when listening to Joey Ramone that he realised he didn’t need to go for so much power.

But Bono is not alone in arriving at an epiphany with his vocals. In the new cover feature of Guitar Player, his six-string lieutenant the Edge admitted it had never occurred to the band before that they could have written for the singer in the first place and it could have served everyone better. 

“Bono kicked up a pretty serious media furore recently when he admitted that some of his early vocal recordings were a source of a certain amount of embarrassment for him,” said the Edge. “You can hear the strain in his voice. Mind you, it never even occurred to us in those days to lower the key to better fit his range. Today, with each arrangement, we were able to go, ‘Where do you want to pitch this one?’”

With the Edge’s voice operating in a similar register to Bono’s, working that out was easy, and proved that even after selling over 175 million albums and booking out residencies at the new immersive Sphere venue in Las Vegas to celebrate Achtung Baby, there are still songwriting lessons to be learned with each passing release.

“I was able to take some good guesses for what would work for him,” said the Edge. “It was like tailoring the songs to suit him as a singer… That was the ultimate goal: to serve the song by serving the singer.”

As for the singer, who else could have worked with that early U2 material better? Maybe Bono having to reach for the notes is what gives the tracks their energy. 

Either way, Bono is in a good place was far as the Edge is concerned, with the frontman a “better interpreter of songs than he’s ever been”.

The Edge also said U2 have “a lot of great material in the pipeline”, and hinted at a return to an electric guitar-driven sound. “I’m finding myself for the first time in a little while getting very excited about the electric guitar again,“ he said.

To mark the release of U2’s Songs Of Surrender, a studio album that revisits some 40 tracks from the band’s catalogue and reworks them as more intimate arrangements, Bono and the Edge dropped by NPR for a very special Tiny Desk concert. 

They performed a quartet of tracks on acoustic guitar – all from 2000’s All You Can’t Leave Behind – accompanied only by the voices of a teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. All of which is very much in keeping with the ethos behind Songs Of Surrender. 

The Edge alternates between a Martin D-18 and a 000-18 tuned in open E throughout, and appears to be running both of them mic’d up and through an Orange Crush 35T guitar amp – an unorthodox choice of amplification but for a compact show in an office, why not? No need to get too precious with the tones, and the Crush 35T is one of the best combos you can get for £229 street. 

It gives the power chords in A Beautiful Day a bit of great, just what it needs. Besides, this was an occasion that is all about finding the chords and making do and having fun. “All these years trying to avoid a desk job but actually it’s really [okay]. I love it,” joked the Edge. “I’m getting into it.”

For a pair of artists who defined the arena and stadium rock show in the early ‘90s with giga-watt multi-media presentations, this live performance was a change of pace, and clearly a welcome one. On record or on the stage, U2’s sound can be high-concept and a work of spectacle. But this was a chance to show how their songwriting can be upscaled or downscaled to accommodate different interpretations. 

In MusicRadar’s lesson 5 ways to play like the Edge, the focus is on electric guitar, and on his famous man-and-machine approach to the delay pedal, dialling in dotted eighth notes for his signature sound, adding overdrive to delay for those crispy arpeggios that punctuate so many of his compositions. 

Songs Of Surrender, which serves as a companion piece to Bono’s memoir, goes easy on the percussion, and stripping everything back to build upon the foundations of the song. But there is still synth. There’s still the sheen of a box-office production even if that gloss is applied to something more ambient. But here, these tracks are all acoustic. 

A Beautiful Day is followed by In A Little While, the first time the track has been ever performed acoustically, and Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, before the duo close the set out with Walk On, which is dedicated to the people of Ukraine.

“We were sitting around a year ago, the Edge and I, and we were working on these songs, which are now called Songs Of Surrender, and they are reimaginings, reworkings or early U2 songs – reimagined for the moment we are in,” says Bono “And the moment we were in that day, a war was breaking out in Ukraine, and a stand-up comedian was standing up to the bully that was Vladimir Putin. Standing up for freedom. So we rewrote our song, Walk On, for him and for the upstanding people of Ukraine, and we are going to play it for you now.”

Songs Of Surrender is out now via Interscope.

Fender has unveiled a bass amp with some serious star power behind it, a signature 50-watt, all-tube combo for Adam Clayton of U2. This design is a true blast from the past from Fender, its first new all-tube bass amp in over four decades, but as Clayton explains in the demo video, it is exactly what he needs for his sound.

Clayton’s journey on the bass guitar is like that of many purveyors of low-end; he was in a band with two guitarists and they needed a bass player, and thinking the four-string looked cooler he moved down an octave and the rest is history. 

Over 150 million album sales, 22 Grammy Awards and an entry in the Rock And Roll Hall later, Clayton’s decision would seem to be vindicated.

The ACB 50 is a portable 1x15” combo fitted with a lightweight Eminence neodymium speaker. It has a transformer-coupled XLR output with groundlift, so you can send it direct to the desk or DAW if needs be. But in the room, turned up loud, it gives Clayton exactly what he needs; plenty heat, a little punch, and enough detail in the upper registers.

• “Of course Bono gets too much for me sometimes!” – The Edge explains why he's never quit U2

A two channel design, with dual inputs per channel, the ACB 50 mounts its black chickhead dials on a chrome control panel, with a white jewel light illuminating when the amp is powered up.

Channel 1 has a classic Fender bass amp tone, with dials for Volume, Bass, Middle, and Treble, and a three-way selector for (Lo, Mid, High) for fine tuning its midrange. As Clayton explains, his sound is all about the midrange, which, given that it’s the the sort of thing you might hear from a guitar player – even after 46 years playing bass in U2, old habits die hard.

The second channel, meanwhile, is described as having “a modern hi-fi, flat EQ” profile, with controls for Volume, Treble and Bass. 

The XLR out is located on the rear of the amplifier, alongside a balanced 1/4” line out and a 1/4” 8-ohms speaker output for hooking it up with an ancillary cabinet and expanding your bass rig. It’s there you will find Clayton’s signature. 

Otherwise, this is simply an old-school Fender bass amp design. Under the hood you will find a trio of 12AX7s and a 12AT7 in the preamp, and a pair of 6L6 power tubes. The cabinet is constructed of lightweight ply-wood, covered in black vinyl.

The Adam Clayton ACB 50 is available now, priced $2,199. See Fender for more details.

U2 are one of the few bands of their generation who are still intact with the original lineup, and still touring. In fact, they are one of the very huge bands in that rarified club now. But even they have their moments.

“The fact that bands can stay together at all is a kind of miracle,” The Edge told the Telegraph in a new interview. “I think we’ve been bound by common goals: the sense that you are here to serve, and make the world a better place.”

But surely he and the band's larger-than-life frontman Bono must have had a few creative (and non-creative) tussles over the years? 

“Of course Bono gets too much for me sometimes!” he admitted, laughing – and possibly remembering the incident detailed in the video below. “I’m sure I drive him mad, as well. If that wasn’t the case, I think we would be doing a disservice to each other, because it’s in the realm where we push each other, challenge each other, annoy the hell out of each other, that you know there’s something going on. If you never get to that place, dude, you don’t really have a proper ­creative relationship.”

One thing that isn't a laughing matter is the news that for the first time (apart from one 1993 ZOO TV tour show in Australia when Adam Clayton couldn't make it) U2 will have had to replace a member onstage; drummer and founding linchpin Larry Mullen Jr will not be playing their Las Vegas Achtung Baby residency this Autumn.

“No one is more disappointed than us that Larry won’t be joining us in Vegas,” says Edge of the dates that have already been delayed since 2021 to open the Nevada city's ambitious new Sphere venue. “We made a commitment,” says Edge. “In the history of U2, you can count the shows we’ve missed on the fingers of one hand.” 

Mullen is sitting out the dates as he recovers from surgery required after the years of touring with the band have taken their toll. His temporary replacement will be Dutch band Krezip's Bram van den Berg.

“We’re lucky to have him. He’s a powerhouse,” says Edge. “The people who are going to miss Larry the most, I think, will be Bono, Adam and myself. It’ll be strange to turn around and not see him behind us after all these years. But the shows will be amazing.”

The band are also looking ahead beyond their new mellow collection of reworked songs, Songs Of Surrender. “I’m not sure U2 are going to turn into AC/DC exactly," Edge warns, tempering expectations fuelled by Bono recently that he might pull an Angus Young on the next album. 

"I’ll still be trying to find ways to use the instrument that are new and unfamiliar. But I’m absolutely convinced that the guitar is going to be front and centre within mainstream music culture in a year or two, and I want to be part of that revival.”

• The Edge's guitar rig: "Edge is very guitar-specific – last night he used 21 different guitars for 24 songs"

Achtung Baby is arguably U2's creative peak; a moment of bold change in the early 90s that saw the band, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois emerge from Berlin and Dublin seclusion to successfully redefine their sound without sacrificing the knack for towering anthems that had already made them a stadium act. The Zoo TV tour that would follow set a new benchmark for huge live shows. Now they're revisiting it all with a Las Vegas residency.

The news was announced during a Superbowl commercial last night; the band will play the city's brand new Madison Square Garden Sphere venue at the Venetian Resort.

The choice of Vegas may seem somewhat kitsch to some fans and detractors of the Dublin band but it's very much in keeping with the Zoo TV ethos, and the band are huge Elvis fans, of course. 

A much longer trailer below clocks in at nearly four minutes and sets out the concept of an Achtung Baby sphere arriving on Earth as various fans of the band from different countries are abducted by it. Oh come on, you weren't expecting modesty, surely? 

Will we see the return of Bono's devilish comic-book MacPhisto alter ego? One thing is for sure, we'll see the Edge showcasing some of his most brilliantly creative parts in this set. 

No dates are announced but it will take place in the fall of this year. Fans can register their interest in tickets at livenation.com. 

But come on, where are the UK and Ireland dates for an Achtung Baby set? With the climate change crisis highlighted at the start of the video above, we can't have fans hopping on planes to the US. 

Surely the band have plans to go home to Slane Castle at least? Perhaps the original 30th anniversary tour plans that came and went in 2021 were changed following the pandemic. For those of us without the will or way to get to Vegas, we await more news. 

There is a sphere that's been approved for Stratford, London… but there's not even a potential opening date yet. 

• The Edge explains how Madchester, Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM all fed into U2's sonic reinvention on Achtung Baby

U2 frontman Bono has revealed that the Irish stadium-rock institution wants to strip their sound back to record a full-on electric guitar album inspired by AC/DC’s pared down rock approach – and he suggests Mutt Lange as a producer. 

Speaking to the New York Times, Bono said that a “progressive rock virus” had crept into the band’s sound with the experimental No Line On The Horizon, so much so that he saw albums such as 2014’s Songs Of Innocence and its follow-up, Songs Of Experience, released in 2017, as correctives that restored U2’s songwriting equilibrium.

“We all make mistakes,” he said. “The progressive-rock virus gets in, and we needed a vaccine. The discipline of our songwriting, the thing that made U2 – top-line melody, clear thoughts – had gone.

“With the band, I was like, this is not what we do, and we can only do that experimental stuff if we have the songwriting chops. So we went to songwriting school, and we’re back and we’re good! Over those two albums, Songs Of Innocence and Experience, our songwriting returned.”

Songs Of Innocence and …Experience were a change of pace for U2. Regular collaborator Brian Eno was out, and in came a cast of high-profile producers including Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, Ryan Tedder, Andy Barlow and Steve Lilywhite. But Bono believes U2’s rehabilitation is still some way short. What’s needed now is a rock ’n’ roll album – “a fuck-off rock ’n’ roll album”.

• Classic U2 interview: "Edge is very guitar-specific – last night he used 21 different guitars for 24 songs"

“Now we need to put the firepower of rock ’n’ roll back,” Bono said. “I don’t know who is going to make our fuck-off rock ’n’ roll album. You almost want an AC/DC, you want Mutt Lange. The approach. The discipline. The songwriting discipline. That’s what we want.”

The idea of U2 making an AC/DC-inspired album is a tantalising prospect. It would be unlikely that the Edge would decommission his battery of delay pedals for the occasion, but a stripped-down rock album would be quite the palate cleanser for a band who has often pursued sonic maximalism in its sound. With Mutt Lange onboard, you can bet there will be plenty of occasions in which Larry Mullen Jr’s snare drum has the mix to itself as it punctuates the beat. 

While Lange has been out of rotation as AC/DC’s go-to producer since 1986’s Who Made Who – with Brendan O’Brien an ever-present in the control room since 2008’s Black Ice – he has kept himself busy, most recently working with Bryan Adams on So Happy It Hurts. Would Lange be available? Would Lange be up for it?

He might need to be ready, because Bono says he wants to put this “noisy, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album” out before the long-mooted Songs Of Ascent gets an airing. And Songs Of Ascent, he insists, is nearly finished, with 20 songs ready to go.

Even his detractors surely have to admit Bono has a way with words, and the new extracts from his forthcoming memoirs vividly conjure the major events of his past; Live Aid, conquering American stadiums, U2's first gathering in Larry Mullen Jr's kitchen… and the things that didn't go so well, including their decision to partner with Apple in 2014 and give all iTunes users their album Songs Of Innocence. Whether they wanted it or not.

The band convinced Apple CEO Tim Cook of the plan to give away their then-new album. Instead of the option to download for free, users would find it in their iTunes libraries in an unprecedented move for an artist. 

"If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea,' writes Bobo in an extract published by the Guardian. "But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.

"On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town," he continues. "In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

But as well as taking the experiment with good humour, Bono is always willing to take the blame for the hostility that came from iTunes users. 

'I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue," states the singer. "I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite.'

For some detractors, the combination of U2 and Apple was unpalatable – and certainly not punk rock. Bono seems very much aware of this in hindsight.

'At first I thought this was just an internet squall," he writes. 'We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.'

The blowback would have a pretty profound effect on the band – and there would be no more stunts from U2 again… for now. 

'We’d learned a lesson, but we’d have to be careful where we would tread for some time,' he concludes. 'It was not just a banana skin. It was a landmine.'

With such brouhaha it's sometimes easy to forget that U2 were once a bunch of school kids trying to get something started. In Larry Mullen Jr's kitchen, no less.

Bono was one of the hopefuls who responded to fellow Mount Temple pupil Mullen's school notice board advert for 'Drummer seeks musicians to form band.' 

'All How casually our destiny arrives,' reflects Bono in the book. All four future members of U2 were part of the throng that gathered in the drummer's kitchen for the first 'rehearsal'. 

'On that first Wednesday after school it felt as if no one was in tune but Larry, who appeared quite at home around all this metallic chaos. Well, he was at home. It was his kitchen. Everything I still love about Larry’s playing was present then – the primal power of the tom-toms, the boot in the stomach of the kick drum, the snap and slap of the snare drum as it bounced off windows and walls. This indoor thunder, I thought, will bring the whole house down.'

Bono also recalls the other two young gentleman who would become part of his destiny; 'Adam Clayton was there on bass. I couldn’t quite make out what he was playing, but he looked the part. David Evans, whom no one had yet named the Edge, had the coolest aura of anybody. He didn’t have to be in tune with anyone else, because he was in tune with himself.'

But there were other budding Dublin musicians too who wouldn't go on to form The Hype, the band that was to become U2, after Radiators From Space singer Steve Averill suggested the moniker for them. 

'In the room briefly was our friend Neil McCormick’s brother, Ivan, Larry’s friend Peter Martin, who owned a pristine white Telecaster replica that looked as if it had just come from the shop window (he was happy enough to lend it to me, but was probably not so happy about my fingers bleeding all over it),' continues Bono, 'and David Evans’s older brother, Dik, a well-known brainbox. 

'Dik and Dave were so clever that they built an electric guitar from scratch. So clever that they used to try to blow each other up with chemistry experiments and, according to their nextdoor neighbour Shane Fogerty, did blow up the Evans garden shed one day. They had a reputation as weirdos – pleasant weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless.'

• Read the full extract over at The Guardian. Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono published by Cornerstone on 1 November 

By his own recent admission, Bono is embarrassed by some of his lyrics but we're betting Sunday Bloody Sunday isn't one of them. The U2 singer and The Edge marked the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland with a poignant acoustic rendition of the track with new lyrics. 

The track is the opening song on the Dublin band's 1983 third album War, and remains a firm live favourite with fans. for this rendition Bono changed the final verse lyrics to;  'Here at the murder scene / The virus of fiction, reality TV / Why so many mothers cry / Religion is the enemy, Holy Spirit guide / And the battle just begun / Where is the victory Jesus won?' 

Bloody Sunday was a massacre on 30 January, 1972, when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 14. While 13 of those people died at the scene, another would succumb to his injuries four months later. 

Bono says the guitar on The Fly is "the sound of Edge's brain"

Now celebrating its 30th birthday, Achtung Baby marked a turning point for U2 at a time in music where great change was happening round them; the grunge, industrial and Madchester scenes with dance's infiltration into the mainstream caused the band to shift their own sound following the huge global success of The Joshua Tree and Rattle And Hum era. But it was the Achtung Baby's first single that became a blueprint for their finest hour.

"I remember Paul McGuinness, our manager saying, 'Now Bono, you don't want to look like the band too stupid to have a good time at number one, do you?" chuckles Bono to broadcaster Jo Whiley in a recent Radio 2 interview looking back at the album with The Edge. 

"We'd been making these very serious photographs with Anton Corbijn in the desert – four very serious men. So yeah, we wanted to cut some space for ourselves - to break out of whatever that was, that image we'd built up for ourselves. 

"The images we'd made for albums like The Joshua Tree," the singer continues, "Anton was saying, 'I'm not shooting you as people, I'm shooting your music.' So really everything comes out of the music. The songs tell you want to do etc. So we wanted to find some material, some songs that would allow us to be the people that we were in our earlier incarnation with the band. Even in the late '70s, coming out of punk, we were a lot more surreal band and far less earnest."

The idea was in place. But for The Edge it meant channelling the music around him. 

"I just remember at that time being completely lost in music; the music that was coming out, and it was so diverse. The amazing Manchester-based movement that was the synthesis of club music and rock n' roll, but also there was this industrial music which was Einstürzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM. I was really taken by a lot of the 12-inches that were coming out around that time. 

"To me it was sonically such a rich time," continues The Edge. "You had this reestablishment of rock n' roll as a kind of rhythmic form, which was what Manchester was about. And then this kind of exploration of the sonics of industrial music which was so aggressive and so experimental. So this opportunity, this playpen opened up and I was just going for it."

The Fly became the amalgamation of all those ideas and the band insisted it became the album's lead single. 

"The reason we wanted it as the first single is it defined, in some ways, the whole theme of the album," explains The Edge. "It was a great lyric from Bono and the hallmark of it is the singer is a bunch of contradictions. From sublime through to the most absurd statements that are clearly untrue. And right at that moment we were starting to wake up to the fact that trying to be earnest, we were on a hiding to nothing. Actually, the more interesting thing is to own up to your contradictions and explore them.

"So The Fly gave Bono the chance to do that and as a theme it stretched right the way through the whole tour and really we've held on to that idea ever since. But that was the moment when that pivot happened." 

U2 had embraced the rock n' roll star image with both parody and sincerity. And the acclaimed Zoo TV tour found them blurring the lines between the two.

"It's somewhat psychotic," adds Bono, "but it's that Oscar Wilde line, 'the mask reveals the man' and you'll notice this at Halloween when you see people dressing up and out they come. People hadn't seen us as rock n' roll stars; we were the Pilgrim Fathers going through the desert. And so we got up there in some plastic pants and the next thing you know we started really quite enjoying being a rock n' roll star. And at first it was a parody, and then it got a little close to the bone.

"But The Fly, the sound of the guitar is the sound of The Edge's brain," continues Bono. "If you hear that 'ner ner ner nernernerner', if you lean close as I am now, you can hear that's the sound of The Edge's brain. And then this rant of lyrical aphorisms."

And U2 fans have one b-side demo to thank for not just The Fly but two other Achtung Baby tracks. 

"Because we were exploring rhythm we had this tune called The Lady With The Spinning Head and we couldn't seem to finish it, but in the course of trying to finish that we ended up with Zoo Station, Light My Way and The Fly! They all came out of that exploration. So failure, in our case, is often extremely productive." 

One, Where The Streets Have No Name, Pride (In The Name Of Love), Bullet The Blue Sky, The Fly, Beautiful Day… in the 40 years since the band released debut album Boy, there’s been a steady stream of go-to U2 anthems built around the uniquely creative, pioneering guitar approach of The Edge.

But his creativity isn’t confined to the epic arena-fillers, so we’ve picked five lesser celebrated but nonetheless spectacular examples of his talent that are well worth discovering or revisiting. 

For a player pigeonholed by some as a literally repetitive delay merchant, these songs are quite different from each other – both U2 generally and The Edge in particular have been underrated over the years for the variety in their output and it’s odd to think that, for example, I Threw A Brick Through A Window and Miami are the work of the same songwriters.

The same depth of field applies equally to the guitar playing: and hopefully, this small selection will persuade the dubious that there’s much more to The Edge’s six-string offerings than the familiar chimes and delay trails of the mega hits.

1. A Sort Of Homecoming

The confrontational theme of 1983 album War demanded a brutal and stripped-down approach to sonics, exemplified by Sunday Bloody Sunday’s martial snare, strident arpeggio riff and dissonant solo. 

To avoid being pigeonholed as angry protest rockers, on follow-up, The Unforgettable Fire, the band teamed up with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, The Edge bought two Korg SDD-3000 digital delay units and they recorded in a spooky castle to consciously explore a more sophisticated sound.

Opening track A Sort Of Homecoming sets out the stall of their new ambient, yet anthemic soundscape: The Edge was still obliquely spelling out chord progressions with arpeggiated chords, but now they shimmered and flickered in a wash of ghostly modulated delay and reverb. 

His playing on the track is if anything more energetic and physical than ever: the song’s intro combines muted string scrapes, edge-of-feedback squeals and rapid finger slides through delay and the song’s main section is driven by fiercely strummed sus4 chords and chiming open strings. 

The difference from before is on this album, his role changed to enable him to create layered guitar sounds to build atmosphere, rather than always coming up with attention-grabbing standalone licks that carry the entire song. The result, on A Sort Of Homecoming particularly, is a rich, shapeshifting soundscape that reveals something new on practically every listen and it’s a great leap forward for The Edge as a sonic mastermind.

2. Love Is Blindness

Achtung Baby is a noisy, belligerent record, but its closing song provides a raw and introspective finale. It was written on piano by Bono and originally intended for Nina Simone, but having played it together, the band decided to keep it for themselves, building its mood around organ and a tremolo-like pulsing bass sound. 

Throughout, The Edge punctuates the lyric with drifting volume swells of modulated distortion, sticking to single notes to create a maudlin, crying-note effect through their repetition.

When it comes to the solo, though, he electrifies the sombre atmosphere with a crackling, intense lightning storm of a guitar solo that comes from a different place entirely – it’s arresting, angry and completely at odds with the song’s otherwise somnambulant mood. 

One of the ideas ‘knocking around’ during the session was to distract musicians during their solos to create less predictable results. “I was not enjoying this concept at all,” and Edge told The Times. “So I stopped and more or less told them to leave me alone. Then I put down the solo that we ended up using, and it’s one of my favourites.”

During the making of the album, the guitarist was going through a divorce and perhaps this was on his mind when he summoned this sudden outpouring of wounded tremolo picking, recorded using the gritty sound of a small amp: he wasn’t even deterred by breaking a string. “He just kept playing harder and harder,” Bono recalled. “Another string broke. And he has such a light touch, ordinarily, he’s so gentle. All that left him for a kind of rage.”

3. Gone

From small amps and tremolo picking to monster effects riffery – U2’s 1997 Pop album was an ambitious extension of its recent predecessors’ experimentations that saw the band work with producers Flood, Howie B and Steve Osborne to incorporate samples, looping and programming from the world of electronica into the U2 sound. 

The album ultimately divided opinion among critics and fans, but The Edge at least took the opportunity to explore the new possibilities the framework offered him, including using filtering, looping fragments of his own sampled guitar and working on new creations such as the mighty sound dominating Gone.

The setup was nicknamed the ‘747 sound’ for its sonic bloom and jet-like swoosh. Flood described it as a semi-hollowbody Epiphone or Gretsch into a Korg SDD delay set to heavy feedback, fed into a Fuzz Face and a second fuzz pedal, with a DigiTech Whammy on its octave +2 setting used to create the manually controlled sweeps: overall, the guitar part has a five-octave range. “The way he’s got it set up,” Flood told Guitar Player in 1997, “the guitar starts feeding back in a controllable way that sounds very uncontrollable.”

4. Until The End Of The World

U2 have made a few forays into film soundtrack work over the years. In 1986, The Edge created the mostly instrumental soundtrack to Captive, still his only solo album, and in 1995, U2 contributed Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me to the Batman Forever film soundtrack – the same year, the whole band collaborated on 1995’s Passengers project with Brian Eno on Original Soundtracks 1, a series of ‘visual music’ explorations soundtracking (mostly) imaginary films. 

Having agreed to provide a song for 1991 Wim Wenders sci-fi road movie Until The End Of The World, The Edge revisited an old demo called Fat Boy featuring a promising Bono riff, stuck a capo on and threw every trick in his considerable arsenal at it.

Bono narrates the song from the viewpoint of Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus, and after a tortured Whammy intro, Edge responds with an unholy concoction of resonant distorted echo-laced arpeggios, octave riffs, harmonics, a Zepp-esque main riff and a mean and vengeful solo section that combines piercing high notes with descending string slides and fleet-fingered legato, enveloped on the record by swells of reversed guitar noise. An uncharacteristically OTT display of unadulterated guitar heroics, it’s one of his most commanding and creative recordings.

5. Unknown Caller

By the time of 2009’s No Line On The Horizon, The Edge had been a production-savvy player for decades and Unknown Caller is a procession of beautifully judged guitar parts building to an expertly crafted rock symphony. 

Doubled guitar parts on either side of a stereo mix are a reliable way of creating space and depth and here, they offer a great way to hear The Edge’s individual arpeggiated guitar parts ringing out with excellent separation. Subtle dashes of acoustic are used to emphasise accents, fuzzy single-note lines follow the bassline to build tension and The Edge contrasts diffident volume swells with sonorous pinch-picked compressed chord passages to dynamic effect.

The song’s solo, which follows a middle section featuring the peculiar bedfellows of French horn and church organ, has been described by longtime guitar tech Dallas Schoo as “one of Edge's major solos in his life – you won’t hear better than that on any other song.”

Unusually clean and stark for an Edge creation, it was lifted in its entirety from the track’s original demo, a one-take performance created as the band improvised in a temporary studio setup they’d created in a rented Riad in Fez, in Morocco.

5 songs guitarists need to hear by… The Beatles

Gretsch and U2 star Bono have launched a special (RED) edition of the double-cutaway 5623 Electromatic to raise funds for the global fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

The guitar, which is optimised for high-gain playing, features a spruce centre-block inside the bound archtop, thinline body. Tone-wise, the guitar is kitted out with a pair of 'Black Top' Filter'Tron pickups with conventional three-position switching plus master tone and volume controls.

It also promises to be as playable as other guitars from the Electromatic range, with a 22-fret bound rosewood neck featuring vintage-vibed thumbnail inlays. The retro-theme continues in the hardware spec, which equips this sharply styled guitar with Grover Deluxe tuners, 'G' cutout tailpiece and anchored Adjusto-Matic bridge.

Five per cent of proceeds from the sale of these special-edition guitars goes towards the (RED) charity, co-founded by Bono and philanthropist Bobby Shriver in 2006, which has so far raised $275 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. www.red.org.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

America’s Forbes magazine released its annual rich list recently. Here we present you with the 10 highest-earning guitarists to appear in the list, along with their band earnings from the last 12 months (to the nearest million dollars).

According to Forbes, the figures are pre-tax and management fees. Although we realise not all of these figures will be recognised as guitarists first and foremost, they are all guitar-players and use the instrument live and in their recordings.

Steve Lillywhite told Guns N’ Roses, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

Of course, saying you walked away from Chinese Democracy is no biggie - dozens of music makers came and went during that album‘s 13-year gestation period - but Lillywhite turned down the chance to produce Appetite For Destruction, a record with global sales approaching 29 million. It's the kind of disc most people in his line of work would gladly give their eyeteeth to list on their CVs. Lillywhite doesn’t regret his decision for one second - for him, it all came down to Axl Rose’s voice.

“If I don’t like a singer, I’ll say no to a band,” says the genial, British-born Lillywhite. “Guns N’ Roses are a perfect example. I realize that half the world considers Axl Rose rock royalty, but to me, he’s just a bad pub singer. They made the record they wanted to make without me, so it was all for the best. You can‘t dwell on what you didn‘t do. It’s what you did do that matters.”

The results speak for themselves: over the course of a three-decade-plus career, Lillywhite’s efforts - debuts by U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, plus groundbreaking releases from XTC, Morrissey, Peter Gabriel and dozens more - have defined an era. “I’m thrilled to know that so many people have connected to this music,“ he says. “But to me, making albums is ultimately a very personal experience.”

According to Lillywhite, the art of record production functions best when it mirrors a marriage. “Bands are like families,“ he says. “Sometimes you like your family, sometimes you don’t. But at the end of the day, you have to deal with it. Basically, I’m a ‘people person,‘ so I’m very fortunate to have chosen a profession that was a good fit for me, because you have to be a ‘people person’ to do this kind of thing well. One day I’m a friend and honorary bandmate, the next day I’m a therapist and kind of a den father - no two days are the same.“

Even so, since making his first recordings, Lillywhite says that his goal has remained constant: “I want to capture greatness,” he states. “There’s never one way you achieve that, but that’s what makes this a fascinating and challenging job. Every album is a new chance to do something different and exciting.”

He thinks for a second, then adds with a laugh, “Of course, it always helps if I can tolerate your singing. If the voice is there, then we‘re halfway home!”

Read on as Steve Lillywhite talks us through 16 of the most important and memorable albums of his career. First up: Ultravox

“I was a young tape operator at a studio. Basically, a tape op is the guy who presses the buttons and things like that. In those days, you could get promoted from tape op to engineer, and one way to do that was to bring in bands on weekends to engineer on your own. If the studio boss saw you could handle things, chances were good you’d get promoted.

“So I brought in this band called Tiger Lily - they would change their name to Ultravox - and we did some demos which landed them a deal with Island Records. As luck would have it, they told the label they wanted me to produce their album.

"It wound up being a three-way production between me, the band and Brian Eno. The label said the band needed a name guy, and because they loved Roxy Music, they chose Brian. This would be my first time working with him.

“The great thing about Brian is, he comes in, does his thing and leaves - whereas I’m there all the time and micro-manage. It was a good learning experience. The album was critically acclaimed, but it didn’t have that all-important hit single. This was during the early days of punk, when attitude was everything. Ultravox came from punk, but they were more art-rock.”

“I had a fantastic time with XTC. With some artists, I have to help work on arrangements and put a lot of things together in order to create an album. This was hardly the case with XTC.

“Andy Partridge came in with songs that were fully formed - there was no fat on them whatsoever - which made things fairly easy for me, really. More than anything, I just conceptualized the sound of the album.

“It’s a really good record, in my opinion. The song Making Plans For Nigel still sounds wonderful to me. By this point, I guess you could say I was off and running as a producer.”

“Peter phoned me up, and I thought it was somebody pulling a prank on me. I didn’t believe it was Peter Gabriel on the other end of the line. But we had a meeting and got on famously.

"This was a new experience for me in that it was first time I was producing somebody who was ’before my time,’ if you will, somebody older than me and, quite frankly, an artist I was kind rebelling against. Remember, I was still coming from punk, and Genesis certainly weren’t punk at all.

“Peter surprised me in all the ideas he had. When he said, ‘I don’t want to use cymbals on the record,’ I went, ‘Ahhh! I love that.’ Because I was playing around with a lot of ambience on the drums, and cymbals were always very annoying. So we recorded without cymbals, and the result was an album with a beautifully unique sound.

“The record is very dark, but the mood in the studio was fun and joyful. Peter had loads of ideas, but he was very open to try anything. Whenever he suggested something, I’d go, ’That’s great! Now, can we go one step further?’ Which he loved. I think we both learned a lot from each other.”

“One of a few times I’ve worked with brothers. With the exception of this Christian band called Switchfoot, any time I work with brothers, they always fight. Richard and Tim Butler would go to the pub, then they’d come back and be arguing about something. Other than that, they were great.

“The catchphrase in the band was ‘beautiful chaos,’ and I think we captured that on this album. There were six members in the group, and they created this big noise. My job was to take that chaos and noise and make sense of it all.

“We did the whole thing in 10 days, between Peter Gabriel sessions. Quite an adventure.”

“I was their second choice for a producer. Originally, they wanted Martin Hannett, who had worked with Joy Division. But when that band’s singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, Martin decided he wasn’t in the right headspace to produce U2.

"So they came to me, I saw them play, and we worked on a single called Stories For Boys. They liked it a lot, so we set about recording the album.

“It’s funny to think about it now, but back then, they weren’t the band you would expect to make it - not when you stacked them against Echo & The Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes. They just weren’t that hip at the time.

“I did like their sound, though. More than anything, I liked their spirit: U2 didn’t think about winning, they thought about not losing. They were keenly aware of their limitations, but they wouldn’t be stopped.

“Bono’s voice struck me right away. I never thought of him as a rock singer, but rather as a crooner. To me, the band is like Frank Sinatra - if Frank Sinatra had electric guitars behind him. It’s incredible to see how The Edge has become such a guitar icon, because on that first album, he only had one guitar. [laughs] But he did quite a lot with it.”

“This was the beginning of the next phase. With punk, the musicianship wasn’t so good. The attitude was great, but the playing wasn’t there.

"Big Country were different: They were fantastic musicians, and a couple of the members, Mark Brzezcki and Tony Butler, knew how to play their instruments really well. Mark and Tony were already session guys - they had played with people like Pete Townshend.

“One of the reasons why I love this album, and I love my contribution to it, is that they had worked with another well-known producer, and things didn't turn out right. So they came to me and said, ’Steve, we know we’re a good band, but the sound we’re getting is boring. We’re not happy.’ So I went in and took everything apart and put it all back together. And in doing so, I helped them get that big sound they became famous for.

“The guitars sounding like bagpipes? We were totally aware of it. But it wasn’t so much because of their guitars or their gear or anything technical; it had more to do with the parts they were playing. They were very simple, striking, anthem-like lines that just rang out. I have a very special place in my heart for this album.”

“Up to this point, I’d pretty much recorded UK-based bands, and I wanted to have success with an American act.

"Funnily enough, Marshall came to England and was your typical Anglophile musician. He went to Liverpool, did all those things. ‘Why are you going to Liverpool, of all places?’ I asked him. And he said, ’Well, that’s what you do, right? The Beatles…’ Anyway, when we decided to work together, we did it in the States, at that great studio The Power Station, which is now called Avatar.

“The Power Station had that enormous live room where Bowie did Let’s Dance and Springsteen did Born In The USA. The huge drums you got in that room sounded fantastic on those records, but they might have been too much for a Marshall Crenshaw album.

“Marshall took a lot of heat from his fans and critics for Field Day. Based on his first album, he was sort of this Great White Hope for stripped-down pop-rock. But Marshall always defended Field Day. He said it was the record he wanted to make and the sound he was looking for.”

“I had this stupid idea at the time that I could only do one album with any band. I thought, Well, if I can produce other artists, shouldn’t bands work with other producers?

"After Boy, I told U2 they should use somebody else, which they did do - they had tried doing some stuff with Sandy Pearlman. But one day in 1982 I got a call from Bono asking me what I was doing in September. I still get those calls, in fact!

“With October, they didn’t know what kind of record they needed to make. With War, however, they knew exactly what they were aiming for, lyrically and sonically. They were going for art, but in a very primal way. XTC were art from the head, whereas U2 were more art from the heart.

“One of the biggest things the band wanted to accomplish on War was to have an album that captured the power of their stage show. I remember Bono saying to The Edge over and over again, ’No, no, don’t play like The Edge! Play like Mick Jones from The Clash.’”

“A real man would never turn down The Rolling Stones - that’s how I looked at it. But I did realise very early on that this would not be a classic Stones album. This was going to be a strange and difficult record.

“Mick had just released his first solo album, She’s The Boss, which became affectionately known to Keith and his gang as ’that fucking disco album.’ Keith was very annoyed at Mick for making that record. To him, loyalty is everything, and he saw Mick going outside the band as no different from seeing your wife cheating on you.

“Mick and Keith were hardly in the same room together - the tension was pretty thick. So I kind of saw my role as being the Henry Kissinger for the guys, keeping the peace. The album had some OK tracks on it: Harlem Shuffle is cool… One Hit To The Body is half-cool. Still, it was the worst Stones record they had made up till then. On the other hand, every subsequent record has been worse, so I don’t feel that bad.” [laughs]

“This is the album that just keeps on going. The other day, I saw a Subaru commercial on American television that used the title track. Couple that with the fact that Fairytale Of New York is now the biggest Christmas song in the history of the UK. Plus, my wife at the time, Kirsty MacColl, sang the duet on Fairytale, and she was killed at Christmas… So the record is very significant in my life.

“Making the album was another exercise in chaos, but as it was with the Furs, it was an enjoyable chaos. We had something like seven or eight people playing together, this incredible cacophony. My job was to keep my eye on the ball at all times. At the end, I remember Spider [Stacy] coming up to me and saying, ’I don’t know how you did it, but this is a great record!’

“They were a crazy band, but once I got used to their craziness I was fine. For example, I learned not to get Shane MacGowan to do a vocal at the end of the day; I got him to do a vocal at the beginning of the day. The only thing was, his day didn’t begin until nine o’clock at night!” [laughs]

“You’d listen to this record and think that we all had a giant party in the studio. Strangely enough, it wasn’t such an enjoyable album to make.

“I knew the songs were absolute diamonds, but getting them on tape wasn’t so easy. Lee Mavers [the group’s singer-songwriter] had this blueprint in his head for the record, but it was like an acid trip that kept coming back to him, and it would mess him up.

“We’d record six songs that were fantastic, but if there was one thing wrong on the seventh song, he’d become convinced that everything else was terrible, and we’d have to start everything all over again. There’s nothing wrong with seeing as an album as an artistic whole rather than a collection of songs, but when that view is to the detriment of getting things done…well, it can be a problem.

“That said, I would put Lee right up there with any of the singer-songwriters I’ve ever worked with. He‘s an amazing talent, and the album we made is sort of timeless.”

“The band got a record deal and spoke to a lot of my contemporaries about producing their debut. I talked to a few of the guys who were being considered, and they said things like, ‘They’ll never be successful. There’s a jazz drummer, a violin player, they play drum solos and there’s an acoustic guitar - who wants to hear that?’

“I never saw any of those elements as negatives. I went to see the band play live, and I was very impressed by the buzz they were generating. I thought they had very strong material, a great singer - Dave can sing in a lot of registers; he‘s sort of like Peter Gabriel in that way. My attitude was, There’s nothing here for me to change. All I really have to do is take what they’ve got and accentuate it.

“The band made the record they wanted to make, and in my opinion, that’s usually when you come up with something really special. The bottom line is, there’s incredible songs on the album, things like Satellite - I mean, c’mon, that’s a great fucking song!

“This was my first time recording up in Woodstock, New York, and I fell in love with the non-corporate environment of music that exists there. A really fabulous place.”

“Morrissey! God bless him. I’ve did three albums with him, but this one was definitely the best.

"I think one of the reasons why Morrissey and I worked together on a number of records was because he really liked my production of his voice. I took a lot of time recording his vocals, which was very important to him because he loves listening to himself!

“I don’t know what I did differently from other producers. To me, I was simply focusing on what one should - a unique singer.

“Morrissey is one of those guys who says very little, but when he does it means something. I remember one day we were working on a track, and he was out of the room for a while, down the hall or whatever. He came back in, listened to the song and simply said, ’Steve…The Who, Shepherd’s Bush, 1964.’ And he walked out. All at once, I went, ‘Ahh! Now I know what to do!’ [laughs] He’s that kind of fellow. You have to know how to read him.”

“All of a sudden, this punk rocker is deemed the man who does prog-rock - or jam bands, if you will. What a U-turn! But you know, I love all art forms, the exception being opera. Opera I probably wouldn’t be very good at.

“Phish, for me, are the musical equivalent of watching a flock of birds fly across the sky: They don’t scatter every which way, but rather, they move with each other; they dip and dive, they go up and down; but at all times, they seem to have this radar, this instinct, for where the bird in front or in back of them is going. Musically, each member of Phish knows what the other is doing, which then carries over to the whole.

“The band can play anything, which then raises the question: Well, what should they play? With Billy Breathes, it’s the closest they got to making what I would say is a good stoner album.

"You know what I mean: you put on the CD, you fire up a big one and you just go down that road. There hadn’t been a good stoner record since Dark Side Of The Moon. Billy Breathes got close. I keep telling Trey Anastasio we can make a better one.”

“I’ve had different jobs with U2 since the first three albums. I remember on The Joshua Tree, they were 18 months into making that record when Paul McGuinness, their manager, finally said to them, ’When you recorded with Steve, you’d do a record in six weeks. Let’s get him in here and finish this thing.’

“My role with U2 gradually became being something akin to the closing pitcher - the guy who comes in at the end and helps win the ball game. I think a lot that has to do with the fact that when the band sees me, it reminds them of their early work and they know they have to get down to in. On Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, All That You Can’t Leave Behind - they would always call me to wrap things up, and sometimes to work on the hits.

“During much of this time they were working with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, but on Atomic Bomb they started the sessions with another producer. Eighteen months into it, they decided they had to fire the producer and start all over. The band was feeling pretty down about things.

“I came in and listened to what they had done. They played me a song called Native Son. I liked it, but I said it wasn’t right, it hadn’t been recorded correctly. So I set the band up in a whole different way, they started playing, and halfway into it Bono said, ’I can’t sing this song. The words aren’t good enough.’ And I said, ’Well, the music’s pretty good.’ So he went off, wrote different lyrics, and the song became Vertigo. At that point, after we had Vertigo, we took our feet off the brakes and the album progressed at a nice pace.

“Musically, the band still struggles, but they’re overachievers - if they can’t do something, they’ll hammer away at it until they can. They want to do their best work, even today. Complacency never took root in U2. They want to make great albums, and they want to have hits. More than anything, they want their music to mean something to people. I can’t say enough good things about them.”

“The fabulous Leto brothers, Jared and Shannon. I really enjoyed this project. What happened was, Flood started the album, but things were going kind of slowly, so Flood had to leave and I came in.

“We were recording at the Leto brothers‘ house, which certainly had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side of things, it’s a cheap way to make a record; on the negative side, there’s not much of a clock.

“The album is pretty gargantuan. It’s funny, though: The whole idea of getting the fans to sing on it and be the choir, well, that’s great and all, but the only problem is that most of the fans are women. We’d record them, listen back, and it sounded like a load of kids! [laughs] So we had to bolster it up with some guys’ voices, all of us singing, just to put some weight on top of the choir.

“They’re a great band. I think Jared is really talented, and I’d love to get some more stuff going on with him. You sit him down with an acoustic guitar and listen to him…he’s spectacular.”

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