Behind the Tracks - Stories of Producers

“That's exactly what we want. We could carry on and be the same rock'n'roll band forever, and maybe we'd even do it well, but we'd rather move in other directions”

“I'm more interested in painting pictures, in creating landscapes within which the music happens”

“That's exactly what we want too”.

He hadn't been the only name on the list, Brian.

Before him, Bono and co. had weighed up the candidacies of Conny Plank (the figure behind records by Kraftwerk, Neu!, Ultravox) and Colin Newman (singer of Wire, who had already produced the debut of Virgin Prunes, in whose ranks played The Edge's brother), but Eno remained the forbidden dream, the standard-bearer of a transformation that had seen Talking Heads go from a rough new-wave ugly duckling to a dazzling prince of the international scene.

Eno was also the best possible gateway into the English art-school tradition, an institutional context that allowed young musicians to flirt with pop culture (as shown by Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Bryan Ferry, Eric Clapton, Syd Barrett, Ray Davies).

For someone who had grown up breathing in the Dublin of the Seventies, a city plagued by a chronic lack of infrastructure, Eno was the door out of the dominant paradigm and into a bit of the playfulness of English music history.

But that's not how it went. The team worked wonders, and "The Unforgettable Fire" marked the long-hoped-for new starting point for U2, moving away from the messianic fury of their early days and into a more expansive, atmospheric mode of expression.

Not even two years later, the band's desire for conceptual reinvention was anything but dormant. Their performance at Live Aid had sent their stock soaring even higher, especially overseas, and someone like Bono could hardly remain indifferent to that call.

Eno, on the other hand, did.

Faced with yet another attempt to get him on board, Brian tried to hand the deal over to Conny Plank instead, and once again it took all of Bono's powers of persuasion to bring him back into the fold.

Meanwhile, Lanois's own stock had also risen exponentially, thanks to his work on a major album with excellent commercial results (still regarded today as a benchmark of technical craftsmanship — a genuine Reference cd): Peter Gabriel's "So".

Everything was set for a new chapter, which the four Irishmen envisioned as a grand, passionate essay on the American myth, ready to push back (at least on a cultural level) against Reaganite politics, and which called for a vision and an approach that went beyond the suspended atmospheres of "The Unforgettable Fire".

At first, Eno and Lanois worked on the tracks separately, taking turns at the equipment roughly every two weeks.

Their method closely resembled the good cop/bad cop routine, with Daniel playing the sensitive facilitator and Brian the dissenting provocateur (Bono nicknamed them Batman and Robin).

As Eno himself put it, back in the days of "The Unforgettable Fire": "Daniel's presence basically allowed me to carve out the role of the perfect bastard. I could sit back and grumble things like 'Mmm, I don't like this' or 'I don't think this is going to go anywhere' or even 'Now that's a really beautiful idea! Let's cut everything else away and see what happens'".

Even though the Canadian hadn't finished his work with Robertson, the sessions for "The Joshua Tree" resumed in early August at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin.

The break hadn't produced any second thoughts about their intentions — if anything, the band seemed ever more convinced of the urgency of telling their own version of America's musical tradition.

Lanois began paying particular attention to the rhythm section on the tracks that already had a defined structure, while Eno focused on the latecomers and the rough sketches, remixing, slowing down and speeding up the available material (or else playing around with reverse playback and the usual cascade of effects).

It was thanks to his persistence that a couple of previously abandoned pieces, "Mothers Of The Disappeared" and "Bullet The Blue Sky", found their way back into the album's final tracklist.

On the former, the producer had grafted in a sped-up drum section lifted from another track, fighting hard to make it fit the new metronomic tempo and Bono's lyrics (a tribute to the dissidents disappeared by General Videla's military junta after Argentina's 1976 coup).

The latter, meanwhile, had been built up from a guitar riff by The Edge and worked on until it gave rise to another set of Bono lyrics, this time voicing deep concern over the emerging civil war in El Salvador.

"Bullet The Blue Sky" was then given further treatment by Lanois and his engineer Flood, who ran the drum audio alone through a large amplification rig in the warehouse next to the studio, re-recording whatever came out of it. The process made the drum sound more metallic and more aggressive, introducing a mid-frequency range that brought the high hat (or charleston) and the bass drum out to perfection.

In the Canadian's own words: "The new drum sound had crossed the physiological line beyond which you enter the realm of the abstract. That's the territory where the people making the recording sometimes end up working like illusionists".

The song's structure had originated on a Yamaha drum machine, which was essentially the only backing track Adam Clayton had available to record his bass part (the actual drums were added at the end). This was something new for U2's working method, in which Clayton would usually re-record his part every time someone added a new element. Here, however, his simple notes, in keeping with the drum machine's minimalism, got the chance to remain exactly the same from start to finish of the recording process, underlining the sense of infinity dispensed by The Edge's effect.

What made the difference, throughout the whole period at Windmill Lane Studios, was Eno's strategy for defining the mood.

His DX7-based textures (perhaps the most-used synth in Eighties pop productions) often helped provide a guideline and a state of mind during the creative phase. The most striking example remains "Running To Stand Still", where the whole cinematic backdrop distilled by the synth (alongside lyrics dealing with the drug problem in Dublin) was removed from the final mix because it didn't suit the need to recreate the feeling of the desert's aridity. This kind of removal was a common feature of the whole corpus of U2/Eno collaborations, which often made the producer a sort of "absent" presence, a kind of small lipstick smudge on the finished material.

The Edge, inspired by Larry Mullen's track, worked out an acoustic guitar part with strong gospel influences. He took a copy of the recording home and came back the next day with a list of his doubts, uttering a line that essentially became a slogan: "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for". And that was the spark for Bono's lyrics, the choruses and everything else.

The American sound of "The Joshua Tree" wasn't the result of a collage of trends fashionable at the time, nor an attempt to ape the classics. It was, rather, a way of reinterpreting decidedly iconic musical traditions in a new light.

As Bono later reflected: "One of the problems we had was fitting the feel of an old gospel melody to our own era, to the moment we're in. And maybe we only managed it by weaving in abstract guitar parts".

Flood recalls that "the kind of sound we were working towards was very different from any other request a producer had ever made of me: openness, a search for a sense of space, of atmosphere. Not normal requests".

This was the key to achieving a hybrid between the conventional song and ambient experimentation; between tradition and modernity. America set against Ireland, roots against post-punk aesthetics, the avant-garde against the mainstream. All of it perfectly in line with Eno's stated desire to find new territories.

Like much of the material, the song had initially been conceived on home recording equipment. Translating a demo from The Edge's Portastudio into a twenty-four-track equivalent proved to be an agonizing, tangled process.

"Probably half the time spent working on the whole album was spent on that one song", Eno confessed in the BBC documentary on the making of the record.

"It was a tremendous, painstaking job, almost a nightmare. My feeling was that it would have been much better to start again from scratch. I'd got to the point of staging an accident, so that we'd have had to redo everything...".

Flood was horrified when he found out how close they'd come to losing the song entirely: "Basically, Brian was so worked up that when Pat [McCarthy, the other engineer] stepped out for a cup of tea, he lunged at the multitrack recorder ready to hit Record and wipe the tape. Pat had to abandon his tea, grab Brian and physically restrain him. [McCarthy] was completely out of his mind; as the youngest member of the team, he was tackling the oldest".

Bono: "'Brian tried to erase the tape of that song. I'm sure a lot of people would have been happier if he had. He loved the song, but he'd started to hate it, because we were taking a bit too long to finish it. He's a grumbler - a gruff old Suffolk man".

The Edge had also thought up a symphonic part for the intro, perfect for setting the mood for the rest of the track but not easy to perform because of the odd length of the bars on the score, which made the process far more scientific than the musicians would have liked.

Lanois: "I remember well standing in front of this huge blackboard, like a science teacher, giving instructions on when to play the chord changes of the intro".

The delicate task of mixing was entrusted to the skilled hands of Steve Lillywhite, who had already produced the band's first three albums. Precisely because of that trusted relationship, Lillywhite was given considerable freedom to further shape that huge collection of material. The only real help he asked for came from his wife (the late Kirsty MacColl) regarding the track sequence, which she simply listed in her order of preference.

Released in March 1987, "The Joshua Tree" instantly outsold its predecessor, going platinum in under forty-eight hours and quickly topping both the British and American charts.

While U2 had all their spotlights trained on America (a focus that would peak on the following "Rattle And Hum"), the rest of the world was starting to look towards the other superpower. The era of the thaw, of glasnost and perestroika, had recently begun under the leadership of Soviet reformist premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Not long after, the Berlin Wall would fall, taking with it a whole series of dualisms and oppositions. U2 would be ready at the start of the Nineties (again under the guidance of Eno and Lanois) for another major statement, called "Achtung Baby".