Three decades later

‘ACHTUNG BABY’: WHEN U2 MADE THE WORLD TAKE NOTE Bono and boys’ attention shifted to Europe and its place in geopolitics.

Thirty years ago Irish rock band U2 released an album that was such a massive departure from its predecessor The Joshua Tree that many people, fans and critics alike, said it foreshadowed the end of Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen jr.

Achtung Baby was created – inspired, and reflecting one of the most important moments in modern history: the Berlin Wall. It shape-shifted a cultural change, concomitant to a giant shift in global geopolitics, and became one of the most important records of the nineties.

Bono described the album as “the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree.”

Achtung Baby was a chameleon-like about-change for the band, who, after the success of The Joshua Tree, had to reinvent themselves to remain relevant.

Let us take a small step back and look at what the record and the Zoo TV Tour that followed, brought the mainstream.

Front man Bono became a rock star of immense influence, a band that showed that it sustained and developed its social conscience beyond column centimetres and one-offs.

Here was an outfit that wanted to change the world, one fan at a time.

The Zoo TV Tour saw Bono develop an alter ego, too: MacPhisto. A devilish drag dressed in a shiny suit that dialled up world leaders and made those poor souls that answered the phone pretty uncomfortable, in front of thousands.

In the 1993 tour former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Beatrix and Diana, Princess of Wales were called among others.

Two years before lockdown, MacPhisto was resuscitated for the Innocence and Experiece Tour, this time, making politically charged speeches ranging from issues like trafficking in the “warehousing children” address, through to commentary about the Iran nuclear deal.

Music gave U2 a channel to try and change the world.

The stage provided the tools and albums like Achtung Baby sealed the deal. The message was one of change, of a world where the ice was broken but had so many loose ends to mend. Yet it related these themes back into everyday ideas, ideals and disappointments. There’s a parable in almost every track.

The buttered guitar and muffled vocals of the opening track, Zoo Station, already signals thes departure from the old. While it was one of the last tracks recorded for the album, it became the curtain call for a new-era band, that left the protest songs from the past behind along with the wide-open spaces of America, and who fell in love with the themes of Europe’s post-World War 2 angst and Cold War ideology.

Other notable tracks with significant depth include the haunting One. Although popular at weddings as a first dance, it speaks to gushing love’s opposite. One is the result of an argument between band members about musical direction, an a-ha moment that followed, and a binding together of emotion, frustration and hope – in a song that few artists have managed to achieve. But lyrically the fractious moments are woven into every second, the melancholy of four guys trying to find a platform to build music on.

Until The End of The World was intended as a film soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film title of the same name. But digging deeper, the song became a dialogue between Jesus and Judas Iscariot. It’s a sad, sweeping song, with eternally relevant lyrics, as timeless as its protagonists.

The music video featured Bono in leathers with wraparound sunglasses, and the band looking neo-modern industrial. A far cry from the desert songs and desolate visuals of The Joshua Tree. Lyrically, it was feast with lines like “every artist is a cannibal, every poet a thief”. Achtung Baby is about a world in metamorphosis. And on its thirtieth anniversary year, the world is there again.