Achtung Baby: Zoo Station

Celebrating AB´s 20th anniversary, here goes interpretation of the song (adapted from Niall Stokes´U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song')

Bono was interested in the zoo.He´d read a novel about setting free the animals, a kind of introduction to Dadaism...He was interested in the zoo as a metaphor. So there was a certain surge of recognition  when they landed in Berlin to record the album. This place was a f***ing zoo alright. Even the train station was called Zoo Bahnhof, Zoo Station. The point was that the song would open the album with a statement of intent.Forget the previous reference points. You are about to embark on a journey into the unknown...

The first verse reads as if it could have been written from the point of view of a child about to be born :"I´m ready to say I´m glad to be alive/I´m ready, ready for the push." And that suspicion lingers  throughtout, as if Bono is drawing inspiration from  having watched his own first child struggling to find her bearings in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world. "In the cool of the night/in the warmth of the breeze," he sings, "I´ll be crawling around/on my hands and knees."

...Bono had engineer Flood distorted his voice. It gave  Bono a different sound, and also a new persona to play with.
The band sounded different too.The drums were hard, insistent, industrial. There were moments of sunlight, as the train emerged from the underground, flashes of openness captured on The Edge´s guitar. But this was the beginning of a journey into the dark underbelly of human experience and the suggestion of a child´s eye-view only made it more poignant...

U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song (Stories Behind the Songs, Niall Stokes)

Interview on October, 1982

A great interview made to the band in 1982 conducted in Hattem, Netherlands prior to the concert there on May 14 talking about October. We can see that Bono was already an advocator of peace.

Posted by Tim Neufeld, @U2 staff.

U2 on October

October, originally with the working title of Scarlet, was released in the summer of 1981. In several countries, October was re-issued on 5" CD in March 1996 as part of the Island Master series. This Island Masters re-issue featured higher quality paper and extra pictures from the original LP's inner sleeve. However, a different back cover featured a black and white photograph of the band instead of the photo of the docks in Dublin from the original version of October. In Argentina, a promotional copy of October was released with the title Is That All?, title of the last track on the album. The album peaked at No.11 on the UK album charts during its first week of release. Conversely, it never cracked the Top 100 on the US album charts and didn't rise higher than No.104 where it was certified platinum by the RIAA. UK magazine New Musical Express voted the album No.4 in its annual poll.


'October was the most dificult of the three records I did with them basically because of the well-chronicled story of Bono losing his lyrics during the American tour. The fact that the first album had a bit of success in America meant that the band toured over there for a long time to do the groundwork. When they came back and it was time to do the second album, nothing was ready!'


Steve Lillywhite in Propaganda 5



'I listened to it last week for the first time in ages and I couldn't believe I was part of it. It's a huge record. I couldn't cope with it. I remember the pressures it was made under, I remember writing lyrics on the microphone and at fifty pound an hour that's quite a pressure. Lillywhite was pacing up and down the studio... he coped really well. And the ironic thing about October is that there's a kind of peace about the album even though it was recorded under that pressure.'


Bono, 1982 





'A lot of people who liked Boy were disappointed by October, while people who didn't like Boy, preferred October..... you can't come to terms with our music in one or two listens. I think October will prove to be a very important album for the band.'


Edge 


" 'October'...It´s an image," Bono said in 1981. "We´ve been  through the '60s, a time when things were in full bloom. We had fridges and cars, we sent people to the Moon and everybody thought how great mankind was. And now,  as we go through the 70's and 80's, it´s colder time of the year. It´s after the harvest. The trees are stripped bare. So 'October' is an ominous word, but it´s also quite lyrical."

Achtung Baby Review - Jay Cocks In Time Magazine (1991)

Here we all were, fretting over the parlous state of rock and help was on the way even while we were dithering. All of a sudden there's a clutch of superb albums out there: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' Better Days; Robbie Robertson's Storyville; Van Morrison's Hymns to the Silence. And now, to put the capper on the company, U2's dashing, demanding Achtung Baby.

This new 12-song collection, the first since the band's Rattle and Hum of 1988, has something in common with all the other good stuff currently in circulation. It has the raucous, free-for-all spirit of the Jukes; it shares the narrative ambition and sense of musical mystery of Storyville (the band collaborated with Robertson, in fact, on a tune on his first album); and it taps into the same deep Irish roots, at once weird and winsome, as does Morrison, who is a kind of godfather to all Irish rockers.

But U2 does something unique here. The band not only reasserts itself but reinvents itself too. After Rattle and Hum, there was some thought that it had overreached itself, gone a little too mainstream, got a little too big even for its own grand ambitions. Achtung Baby restores U2 to scale, and gives the band back its edge.
The album is full of major-league guitar crunching and mysterious, spacy chords. Evanescent melodies float seamlessly between songs of love, temptation, loose political parable and tight personal confession. The notes credit all songs to the band collectively -- lead singer Bono of late had taken a separate credit for lyrics -- and Achtung Baby does sound more cohesive than anything else U2 has done. Tunes like The Fly are restless, even reckless, with invention, and the band can write ravishing, slightly eerie romances like Mysterious Ways better than anyone else who can fill a stadium with cheering fans. There's a lot indeed to be cheered on Achtung Baby. And celebrated. It's a monster.

Achtung Baby: 20 years on

Next November,19th Achtung Baby will be 20 years old. Considered by many as "U2`s second(?) masterpiece after The Joshua Tree" , recorded in the middle of mayhem (of the band and the world), it was the answer to what U2 considered "dream it up all again".

Achtung Baby was widely regarded as a sonic and visual reinvention of the band: a step too far in some territories, where Adam's nude image on the sleeve was covered with an appropriately fixed X or clover. 

The album peaked at No.2 on the US album chart and at No.1 on the UK album chart. It was certified multi-platinum by the RIAA with 8 million units sold. In Switzerland, Achtung Baby reached No.3 on the album charts and stayed in the charts for a total of 19 weeks and was certified Gold. In Australia, Achtung Baby was certified 5 times platinum by the ARIA.

U2 won the Grammy for Best Rock Album by a Duo or Group and producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno won Producers of the Year for Achtung Baby. Additionally, the album was nominated for Album of the Year. In the Rolling Stone annual reader's poll, it came No. 1 for Best Album and Best Album Cover.

Produced by Daniel Lanois with Brian Eno mainly at Hansa Ton Studios, Berlin, Dog Town, S.T.S., and Windmill Lane, Dublin. Engineered and Mixed by Flood with Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and Even Better Than The Real Thing mixed by Steve Lillywhite

'All I know is that it feels like what I want right now, it's raw and rough and straightforward and down to the essence of things, quite unpolished in some ways and I like that.'

Edge in Propaganda 15 

'I certainly think this record, 'Achtung Baby', is a new start and things move in shifts. I mean, there's another record that belongs with this, just as 'Rattle and Hum' belonged with 'The Joshua Tree'. I know that record, I can hear it in my head already.' 

Bono, November 1991 

'If you manage to get the four of them in one room with instruments in their hands you're going to get results. That has a lot to do with my job - just getting them in the room and playing.'

Daniel Lanois on making Achtung Baby

Achtung Baby was included in All-TIME 100 Albums by TIME , in Rolling Stone 's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (ranks 62) and the RS readers considered it one of the best albums of the 90`s.

  

From here to 19th November, we will be going over song by song of this superb album.

www.rollingstone.com //www.u2.com//www.time.com

Rattle and Hum

A review of the album by David Silverman in The Chicago Tribune, 1988.

"Charged with the same politics that has set U2 apart from the bland pack of lyricists that abound in rock music today...'

They gave it all. We wanted more.
On Tuesday, it will be here.
Just a year after their "Joshua Tree" album and tour placed them at the pinnacle of rock music, U2 has returned with its sixth album, "Rattle and Hum."
This Irish band with a fascination for American culture has produced an album that is a unique amalgam of its own musical roots and indigenous American music: pop, country & western, gospel and the blues. The combination is musically stunning. It is a double-album bulldozer.
Brimming with the passion of live performances from the "Joshua Tree" tour, "Rattle and Hum" also includes nine new songs that range from an introspective Irish ode to the power of the just-released single, "Desire." The origins of the new music reads like a history of American music, as U2 draws from the musical roots of John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Roy Orbison and The Judds.

The album is a prelude to the release of the U2 tour movie "Rattle and Hum," scheduled for release Nov. 4. The rough-edged tenor vocals of Bono (Paul Hewson) and the chanting guitar work of The Edge (Dave Evans) dominate the 72-minute album. Along with drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton, they present surprising new arrangements of some of their best known work, including a gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
The new music is charged with the same politics that has set U2 apart from the bland pack of lyricists that abound in rock music today, but it is U2's approach to American roots music which is the albums' most attractive quality.
With performances by Bob Dylan, playing Hammond organ on "Hawkmoon 269," and singing backup to B.B. King's blues guitar and vocals on another new track, "When Love Comes to Town," as well as scattered performances by keyboardists Brian Eno and Van Dyke Parks, it appears that U2 is not willing to be satisfied with the style of music that brought them to fame.
The album's drama builds from the first track, a live version of John Lennon's "Helter Skelter," recorded in Colorado last winter.
"Charles Manson stole this song from John Lennon," Bono tells the audience. "We're going to steal it back." And they do, with a version that contains all the intensity of the Beatles' original, but adding a sound that is their own. It makes this cover sound more new than old.
The album's new songs are a collection written by Bono, with the exception of "Van Diemen's Land," written by The Edge.
"Van Diemen's Land," the second song on the album's first side, is a laconic ode to Irish poet John Boyle O'Reilly. As the album's only song with direct roots in the Irish style of the Clancy Brothers and Dominic Behan, it is frought with a startling, pent-up rage.

Most of the band's new material was recorded across the country, with stops at the famed Sun Studios in Nashville (where Elvis Presley made his start) for the recording of three tracks: "When Love Comes To Town," "Little Angel of Harlem," and a collaborative effort with Dylan, "Love Rescue Me"
The rest of the new material is scattered throughout the album, creating a mix of music that is charged like an electric eel, and moves just as quickly.
In a book that is set to accompany the release of the movie, Bono stated: "The Joshua Tree gave us the position to get to a larger audience and musically we now have the freedom to do whatever we like."
U2 has taken advantage of that position with an album that is certainly new, and possibly its best.