![]() ![]() ![]() Like The Who after Moon, they’d be lost without him. If you require proof of the incredible musician that Larry Mullen Jr. The standout – although the gospel choir version of ‘Still Haven’t Found’ that would turn up in the movie is pretty handy too - is a pulsing, malevolent ‘Exit/Gloria’ – the sound of a furnace door opening and closing as the band coalesce into one furious animal behind Bono’s channelling of Gary Gilmore via Norman Mailer. The 1987 Madison Square Garden gig on disc two is a triumph, Bono in particular sounding like he’s having a ball, whooping and hollering throughout. The point being, it might seem a sure-fire commercial blockbuster in retrospect, but it wasn’t by any means a cert at the time. Apparently, Paul McGuinness voted against it as the lead single and it’s not hard to see why, it doesn’t really have a chorus for a start and when Bono claims to have been influenced by that great toe-tapper, Scott Walker’s Climate Of Hunter, you can kind of see where he’s coming from. I can still remember scratching my teenaged head as Dave Fanning premiered it. And what about ‘With Or Without You’? It’s hard to credit now – it was canonised as one of their cast-iron classics decades ago - but this sounded distinctly odd the first time you heard it. The coda, after a thousand listens, still gets the hairs on the hairs standing up. The opening rush of ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ - forever associated with that glorious moment in the Rattle & Hum movie where they turn the colour back on, and that introductory build-up before the vocal comes in which has always reminded me, structurally at least, of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Reilly’ - the VU chill of ‘Running To Stand Still’, the infectious joy in ‘Trip Through Your Wires’, and the glorious ‘One Tree Hill’, perhaps cowboy hat Bono’s finest vocal achievement. It was also very hard not to be impressed by the fact that the biggest band in the world came from up the road.īuilding on the experimentation of the previous record, but reining-in the freeform meandering of something like ‘Elvis Presley and America’ – did you know that’s the drum track from ‘A Sort Of Homecoming’ slowed down? - the original Tree tracks still leap from the speakers. Love or hate U2, they did at least offer hope to Irish people at a time when there wasn’t much else of a positive nature going on, planting a suggestion in the national psyche that we might just be as good as anyone else. Where were you, back in 1987 when what would go on to be the best selling Irish album of all time was released? The past is a foreign country, as Mr Hartley would have it, but Ireland in the eighties was another universe that Irish men and women coming of age now would scarcely recognise. They made great records before and after - I would argue that The Unforgettable Fire and Achtung Baby are its equal for a start - but they’ve never bettered this one. This definitive box, a fitting anniversary celebration of the album at the heart of the U2 story, confirms the facts.
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