Fact #160619
When:
Short story:
U2 release the album The Joshua Tree on Island Records in the UK.
Full article:
Anton Corbijn (photographer) : The title of the album came about as a result of a photograph I had taken of Captain Beefheart, near his home in the Mojave Desert. You can see a Joshua Tree in the background of the picture, which I’d never seen before. The next U2 album at that time was going to be called Desert Songs, so I suggested to Bono, who I’d been working with for many years, that maybe he could do something with this beautiful tree. He thought about it, and next day he came back with a bible in his hand and said, ‘That’s it – Joshua Tree.’ So we went out and found a good one, and the album was named after it.
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U2 drummer Larry Mullen was famously too embarrassed to tell his girlfriend that his band’s new album was going to be named after a cactus. He needn’t have been. 1984’s Unforgettable Fire had pushed back the boundaries of epic rock via the soundscaping wizardry of the idiosyncratically innovative production duo Brian Eno and Dan Lanois, but this second collaboration took things much further. “It’s like a journey,” explained bassist Adam Clayton. “You start in the desert, come swooping in Central America.” By allowing tracks to evolve out of spontaneous studio jams, incorporating grittier elements of roots r’n’b and primitive rural blues into their impressionistic widescreen aural landscapes, U2 had successfully crafted a musical panorama as deep and wide as America’s vast open spaces. Edge’s guitar pushed the imaginative texture envelope to new limits with cuts like Bullet The Blue Sky, while Bono’s voice remained front and centre on sweeping anthems like I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and With Or Without You, perfectly articulating the yearnings of every individual approaching a spiritual crossroads in the decade of vulgar materialism. Who says the devil has all the best tunes?
Johnny Black (review first appeared in a Mojo magazine special edition)
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U2 drummer Larry Mullen was famously too embarrassed to tell his girlfriend that his band’s new album was going to be named after a cactus. He needn’t have been. 1984’s Unforgettable Fire had pushed back the boundaries of epic rock via the soundscaping wizardry of the idiosyncratically innovative production duo Brian Eno and Dan Lanois, but this second collaboration took things much further. “It’s like a journey,” explained bassist Adam Clayton. “You start in the desert, come swooping in Central America.” By allowing tracks to evolve out of spontaneous studio jams, incorporating grittier elements of roots r’n’b and primitive rural blues into their impressionistic widescreen aural landscapes, U2 had successfully crafted a musical panorama as deep and wide as America’s vast open spaces. Edge’s guitar pushed the imaginative texture envelope to new limits with cuts like Bullet The Blue Sky, while Bono’s voice remained front and centre on sweeping anthems like I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and With Or Without You, perfectly articulating the yearnings of every individual approaching a spiritual crossroads in the decade of vulgar materialism. Who says the devil has all the best tunes?
Johnny Black (review first appeared in a Mojo magazine special edition)