U2

U2's unforgettable U2 classic Fire turns forty. A pivotal step in the Irish band's rise, born from one of those encounters that end up changing a career. Memorable indeed was the meeting between Brian Eno and U2 in 1984, when the Suffolk genius agreed to produce the Irish outfit's fourth album, "The Unforgettable Fire", released on October 1st of that same year. U2 thus became one of the rock bands blessed by Eno's genius, kicking off a fruitful partnership with the multifaceted English musician and composer that would last for years to come.

Evolution within continuity

After three LPs, "Boy", "October" and "War", all entrusted to Steve Lillywhite, Bono and co. decide it's time for a change of producer - on the advice, in fact, of Lillywhite himself, who had "weaned" them and helped them grow, and who cares about their fortunes almost as if they were his own creation. The idea of turning to Eno, after sounding out a few other names, comes from guitarist The Edge, who by temperament and mindset is potentially the band member most attuned to the typically analytical approach of the thirty-six-year-old British artist, already a living legend by 1984.

Having risen to prominence as a member of Roxy Music, in the strictly rock arena Eno had already contributed to the so-called Berlin trilogy (namely the albums "Low", "Heroes" and "Lodger", released between 1977 and 1979) by David Bowie, and had produced just as many long players for Talking Heads, among them "Remain In Light" (1980), pushing David Byrne's band to an even higher level, if that were possible. With Byrne himself, Eno had also launched a fruitful collaboration, already embodied in the seminal album "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" (1981), a pioneering work in its use of electronics and sampling, as well as an influential one for the development of world music.

Is that it? Not by a long shot. Eno is also remembered for essential solo works such as "Another Green World" (1975) and "Before And After Science" (1977), as well as for another collaboration - this time with American composer Harold Budd - which in a way brings us back to U2: it was in August 1984 that the two released the joint album "The Pearl", whose fourth track, "Against The Sky", contains a sample that, twenty-five years later, would resurface in the song "Cedars Of Lebanon", featured on "No Line On The Horizon", the album Eno would produce (and largely write) for the four Dubliners.

The only snag: at first, Eno has absolutely no intention of producing "The Unforgettable Fire". In fact, he shows up to the first meeting with U2 accompanied by Canadian musician and composer Daniel Lanois, with whom he'd been collaborating for about three years, making it clear from the outset to the Irish band that he intends to bow out of the whole affair and hand it over to his young protégé, claiming as his reason that he's no longer interested in music production and wants to focus on visual art.

Chris Blackwell too, founder and owner of Island Records, the U2's label, is skeptical about hiring someone who describes himself as a "non-musician". Career-wise, U2 haven't released anything in a year and a half, and an album steeped in the influence of discreet music, which is the risk with a record produced by Eno, rather than one packed with radio-friendly hits, as the label would prefer, could prove commercially counterproductive. The band, however, insists, and in the end they get their way, both with Blackwell and with Eno himself, who eventually agrees to produce the album in tandem with his assistant (and for the price of a single producer). What ultimately wins him over is above all the chemistry that immediately develops between him and the four ambitious Dubliners, together with their eagerness to learn and to question themselves (and, of course, on top of their songwriting talents).

As mentioned, U2 have a radical stylistic shift in mind. The live album "Under A Blood Red Sky", released in mini-LP format in November 1983 (with the accompanying concert film out on VHS in July 1984), closed the first chapter of their career, the one marked by the aforementioned first three albums which, despite their differences, placed them within the varied post-punk landscape from which a sort of exodus is already underway, with quite a few bands from that scene trying to distance themselves from it. Carrying on down the same road would therefore be a mistake: a change of direction is needed, starting with their working method. The "live band" label risks boxing them in; a paradigm shift is needed to push them further.

A new attitude is therefore called for, a more professional approach to studio work, which must go from being a tedious stopover between tours to becoming central to their whole conception of music. As a first step, the band drops the habit of walking into the studio without songs already written, or at least sketched out — a bad habit that had often forced them to compose on the spot and finish recordings down to the wire, as in the case of "War", where the band booked for the next slot was literally knocking on the door to get in. Sketches of some of the songs that would end up on "The Unforgettable Fire" were in fact already taking shape by the end of 1983, in some cases even during the soundchecks of the final dates of the War Tour.

The new weight U2 now place on the sonic outcome of their new record is reflected in the location chosen for the recordings: Slane Castle, a striking manor owned by an Anglo-Irish nobleman, located in the village of the same name in County Meath, about fifty kilometres north of Dublin (though the fortress on the album cover is actually a different one, Moydrum Castle). From 7 May to 5 June, U2, together with Eno and Lanois, set up camp in the wing of the castle used for hospitality. Here they record the material they then take with them to the legendary Windmill Lane Studios (no longer in existence today), where the recording sessions are completed on 5 August. The material produced was captured on tape at both locations, allowing the band to later choose the best version. One of the tracks for which the Slane Castle edit is dropped in favour of the Windmill Lane one is "Pride (In The Name Of Love)", chosen as the lead single (though the castle's ballroom is where much of the main video was shot), released on 3 September.

Between MTV and experimentation

The album is carried above all by the single "Pride (In The Name Of Love)", sung by Bono in an epic, anguished register and underpinned by a memorable guitar figure from The Edge, which perfectly distills his style, rich in power chords and delay. It's a heartfelt tribute to Martin Luther King, a figure who had left a deep mark on Bono and co. "Pride" would go on to become one of the great anthems of the decade, alongside the moving title track, more melancholy and rhythmically looser (it almost sounds like a song by a new romantic band), a majestic, symphonic evocation of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the "unforgettable fire").

"Pride" and the title track are the only two songs on the album with the right qualities for radio play and MTV rotation. So well-suited, in fact, that they allowed the band to take broad "avant-garde" liberties with the rest of the material. Indeed, they would be the only two singles from a record otherwise marked by a strong experimental streak, one in which Eno's contribution — who doesn't take part in the songwriting process, but whose input is too distinctive and forceful to be reduced to the mere label of "production" — is unmistakably felt. The result is an ethereal, hazy, intangible sound, an "impressionist" record, as it would come to be described.

"A Sort Of Homecoming" is a shock in this respect. People remembered U2 for "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and for the "macho", combative edge of their explosive live performances, yet the opening track has a soft, dreamlike pull, and is inspired, of all things, by a Romanian-born Jewish poet, Paul Celan. "Tonight we'll build a bridge across the sea and land", sings an elegiac Bono, drawn to lofty ideals of openness and togetherness. Indeed, both "Pride" and "MLK", the closing track (less a song than an invocation underscored by a drone-like bed of sound), are dedicated to the figure of Martin Luther King.

These themes are mirrored in the way they're portrayed. The vocalist barely sounds like himself anymore. His vocal style changes radically, bringing to light tones and emotions left unexpressed until now. In a sense, the singer lays bare his own feminine side, and by extension that of U2 as a whole. Eno would call him a soul singer. The Edge, for his part, develops an even more scientific approach to his instrument, and it's no coincidence that in the future Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead would also reveal his fascination with the guitar parts on this album. New doors open for the rhythm section too: Larry Mullen Jr.'s drumming becomes far more "melodic" (in his case it's mainly Lanois guiding him), while bassist Adam Clayton's style becomes much less raw.

Like "War", "The Unforgettable Fire" is also partly defined, thematically, by its gaze outward onto world events. The album's title is also that of an exhibition at the Peace Museum in Chicago visited by the band, which featured paintings and drawings by survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dread of nuclear holocaust was a widely debated topic in the first half of the 1980s; it's no coincidence that it's also at the heart of another major 1984 album, "Lament" by Ultravox.

"Promenade" is likewise a triumph of delicacy, a romantic interlude Bono dedicates to his wife Ali. The "spiral staircase" in the lyrics belongs to their first home as a married couple, the Martello Tower in Bray, a seaside town not far from Dublin. Just as loving is the dedication The Edge makes to his firstborn daughter Hollie, whose birth date, "4th Of July", gives the title to the track that closes the first half of the tracklist (or opens the second, depending on how you look at it). In the U2 "village", sharing is the rule, and whatever happens to one member — especially a happy event like the birth of a child — concerns all the others too, all the more so since Hollie is the first "stork" to visit the U2-ian community. The track is actually an instrumental with strong ambient leanings, which makes it the most distinctly Eno-esque episode on the record, a musical bridge leading into "Bad". And here we reach the emotional peak of the album. Despite never being released as a single, "Bad" would nonetheless become a classic in the band's catalogue, just as "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" had. In the collective memory, though, it's not so much the studio version that endures as the live one, immortalized on various later releases starting with the EP "Wide Awake In America", released on 20 May 1985, or performed on historic occasions like Live Aid, on 13 July of that same year. "Elvis Presley And America", too, though the weakest track of the bunch, has a seductive, hazy quality. The fact that he never truly finished the song would remain one of Bono's regrets. By contrast, the "old", combative, street-hardened U2 resurface on "Wire" — like "Bad", one of the band's first songs to deal with heroin addiction — and on "Indian Summer Sky".

Springboard to stardom

"The Unforgettable Fire" gives no hint of the rediscovery of American musical and cultural roots that would define U2's next studio album, "The Joshua Tree", yet it's the record that paves the way for the masterpiece that in 1987 would cement the band's place among the greats of world rock. It's also the U2 album on which Brian Eno's hand is most strongly felt. As mentioned, the "non-musician"'s partnership with the quartet wouldn't end with this record but would go on for a quarter of a century (assuming, of course, that it doesn't happen again someday), yielding five more studio albums plus various other scattered production credits.

In "The Unforgettable Fire", two featured guests are indeed exceptional, even if they aren't trumpeted and remain relatively in the shadows. The first is easy to spot straight away: it's Chrissie Hynde, the charismatic frontwoman of the Pretenders, who lends her voice to the backing vocals on "Pride" and is credited as Mrs Chrissie Kerr, having just married Jim Kerr, the frontman of Simple Minds (from whom she would divorce in 1990). The second contribution is none other than Peter Gabriel, though this would only come to light in 2009, with the release of the album's 25th-anniversary edition. The reason for the delay is that his presence on the backing vocals of "A Sort Of Homecoming" relates only to an Africa-tinged remix of the track that Lanois put together almost as a lark in 1985, when he was in the studio with the ex-Genesis man to co-produce the latter's fifth solo album, "So".

It would take far less time, however, for U2, thanks to "The Unforgettable Fire", to rise to the global stature in which they would prove entirely at home. The album tops the British chart and matches the number-12 peak of "War" in the American one. But above all, it earns the band their first truly major tour (playing venues holding as many as 20,000 spectators), the cover of the famed American music magazine Rolling Stone with the accompanying anointment: "Our choice: band of the 80s", and the legendary performance at the aforementioned Live Aid, where Bono, flouting the event's rigid protocol, pulled off an unscripted moment that would go down in history and that made U2's performance — according to many observers — second only to that of Queen. But that's another story.

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08/03/2026