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Fact #64509

When:

Short story:

Bono of U2 records a track, Silver And Gold, for the anti-apartheid Sun City album with Keith Richards and Ron Wood of The Rolling Stones on guitars, at Right Track Studio, New York City, USA.

Full article:

Bono : I hadn’t been to sleep for about two days when I wrote Silver and Gold. It’s a song about sanctions, and it takes the idea of people originally going to South Africa for the silver and gold. A lot of world crises are economic issues. They are disguised by religious or political fronts, but the root of them is often economic, and the song is getting at that.

We, as a group, formed our sound devoid of any background because our record collections started in 1976 with Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith and The Clash and the Jam. Silver And Gold was my desperate attempt - and I wrote it in two hours - to write a song that belonged to a tradition. I was writing about South Africa, about a man who was at the point of violence, which is something that fascinates me.

The line that started it for me was one about a boxer, the idea of a prize fighter in his corner being egged on by a trainer. It’s a sport that I’ve found increasingly interesting over the past year (1985). I find a lot of aspects of it very sordid, a bit like cock fighting or something, but the image was very powerful for the song.

Silver and Gold is the first song I’ve ever written from somebody else’s point of view. U2 songs are always from my point of view, but this is a departure into the third person. It’s also the first blues-influenced song I’ve written.

Keith Richards and Ron Wood played on it, as did Robert Palmer, the blues critic, who ran home to get his clarinet.

I play the guitar with my foot miked up, the way that old bluesmen like Robert Johnson used to do. And I’m banging the sides of my guitar with my knuckles to keep the rhythm. As the song goes on, the tempo keeps getting faster and the mood more and more intense.
(Source : not known)