12. U2Achtung Baby
I was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist – I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written – it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”
