Remembering an all-time classic.
Despite the commercial and critical success of their most recent album, 2014’s Songs of Innocence, it’s fair to say that U2’s output since the turn of the millennium has garnered a mixed reception from audiences worldwide.
For about a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, popular acclaim wasn’t really an issue for the Dublin four-piece, who reached their peak with the release of the Joshua Tree in 1987.
U2’s best-selling album of all time with over 25 million copies sold worldwide, it acquired number one status all over the world and remained at the top of the US charts for nine consecutive weeks.
A regular on lists of the greatest albums of all time, it’s a masterful work.
Divisive as it may be, here are our five favourite tracks.
Bullet the Blue Sky
The Joshua Tree is a very radio-friendly record and was very successful because of it, but Bullet the Blue Sky illustrates that it also has a darker edge.
The band's rhythm section comes to the fore in this number, with Larry Mullen's opening drum beats setting the tone and Adam Clayton's bass line prominent throughout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdmNC8ylrXI
Clip via Jordan Lloyd
Running to Stand Still
The question of whether Bono is from Finglas or Ballymun has caused plenty of division and debate over the years; Bono himself said it depended on who he was getting a hiding from when he was younger.
This track, however, is still identified with the latter, and the Ballymun flats in particular, to this day.
A slow and poignant number with Bono providing mouth organ towards the end, echoes of it can be heard in Bruce Springsteen’s Secret Garden, a track made famous by the movie, Jerry Maguire, in the mid-90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvUI-s4Azw4
Clip via awesomenessk
With or Without You
What, not number one and not even number two?
Perhaps it’s over exposure that has cost this admittedly great song a place at the top spot, but your humble author would like to think that it’s the quality of the songs ahead of it on this list.
The incredibly catchy bass line carries this song along but this is one of Bono’s finest hours as both a singer and a songwriter, with the full limits of his vocal range on show in a chorus that almost any music fan could shout out at a moment’s notice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmSdTa9kaiQ
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Bono’s vocal and songwriting talents are once again to the fore on the second track of the album, but the song derived from a more unconventional Larry Mullen drumbeat that helps separate this track from a lot of what U2 had done before and have done since.
While a perfectly acceptable pop song, it also has more than a hint of reggae about it, which was why it blended in so seamlessly with Bob Marley’s Exodus when the band combined the two songs live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vye_tNZYL8
It’s all about that intro, an intro that gets both this song and the album off to such a perfect start.
The sound of the organ, combined with the Edge’s guitar lick at the start, is already enough to get the hairs standing on the back of your neck and then it really comes alive when the bass kicks in and Bono bursts into ‘I want to run…’
Each to their own and everything, but I defy anyone to listen for motivational purposes and not be fit to run through a wall after.
Magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzZWSrr5wFI
