The album propelled U2 to the status of biggest band on the planet and captured the full attention of the country that had inspired it. A Rolling Stone review from the time stated that while “ The Joshua Tree is U2’s most varied, subtle and accessible album … it doesn’t contain any surefire smash hits.” That verdict would be proved wrong by the mammoth success of “With or Without You”, which gave the band their first US No 1 single, and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, which gave them their second. Out of step with much of popular music at the time (it was preceded at No 1 in the US Billboard charts by Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill and followed by Whitney Houston’s Whitney), some critics weren’t sure what to make of it. The album propelled U2 to the status of biggest band on the planet and captured the full attention of the country that had inspired it On the thunderous “Bullet The Blue Sky”, Bono sang about seeing “fighter planes/ Across the mud huts as children sleep” and an unnamed man, who he later revealed to be Reagan, “peelin’ off those dollar bills/ (Slappin’ ’em down)/ One hundred, two hundred.” He instructed The Edge to: “Put El Salvador through your amplifier,” and the guitarist responded by making his instrument scream and wail. With their makeshift recording studio assembled, the band set about finding a sound that would complement Bono’s observations on the duality of America. “We just thought: This is what we want… The sound of a room,” The Edge told Mojo in 2017. In an effort to steer away from the increasingly digitised sound popular in the mid-Eighties, the band brought in Mark “Flood” Ellis as recording engineer, after being impressed by his work on Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 1985 album The Firstborn Is Dead. They converted the grand dining room into a control room, complete with tape machines and a mixing desk, and replaced a pair of massive double doors with a Plexiglass screen so that the elegant drawing room could become their live recording space. Struck by the contrast between these competing visions of the most powerful nation on earth, the fantasy and the brutal reality, Bono sketched out ideas for the next U2 album, which he tentatively titled The Two Americas.īono, The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr all moved in, joined by producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who had also worked on The Unforgettable Fire. The couple were shot at and watched with horror as villages were burned by US-backed rebel groups. The following year, frontman Bono and his wife Ali Hewson travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua where they witnessed firsthand the devastation wrought by American foreign policy. They filled their hearts and minds with the myth of America. As they drove, they read the works of Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor and macho journalist Norman Mailer. They travelled in tour buses borrowed from country stars, complete with decorative cow horns. An extensive tour in support of their fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire, took them not just to landmark shows at major venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden but also to the towns and cities spread across the American heartland. In the spring of 1985, U2 fell in love with America.
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