The Zurich venue is a sports hall with a comfy, lived-in air of slight dilapidation almost as if the National Stadium had been multiplied by six.
Six pm dinner time for the eighty members of the menagerie green pea soup and lamb chops, trout almondine and beef stew with Guinness or stuffed aubergine for the vegetarians, as a Lou Reed tape hums in the background.
No hordes of fans roam the hotel grounds and business connections with the Swiss promoter and the local record company are reduced to a minimum so the Zoo TV tour falls back on its own company. There's no socialising with the polite but distant Swiss. Here in Zurich, the tour becomes a self-sealing capsule. For a mile along the airport road and this in an area that shows no other signs of poverty or urban decay, all the buildings are blotted with spray-canned graffiti, as if some rogue group can't abide Swiss social hygiene. The Zurichers are Swiss-German, their city seems to shut down implacably after midnight and the guidebook in my hotel room tells me about Zurich's reputation for shopping but nothing about James Joyce's grave or his association with the city.Īll this self-discipline must generate a counter-reaction. "The city conducts its own symphony" is an old Bono line but I can't tell you much about Zurich since airport, hotel and venue are all confined to the same peripheral quarter of the city, apparently far from its centre. And this night in Zurich, I learn the reasons for their early reserve. Instead a few informal chats, playing their own spin-doctors with a few selected scribes. But nothing formal, mind no marathon summit meetings. Gradually U2 have started to break their vows of media silence. Instead co-producer, Brian Eno, volunteered to fill the breach with a lengthy feature in Rolling Stone to flag the album. This time, no post-match talks from U2 and Bono, normally the most voluble of interviewees. More pertinently, U2's publicity approach to Achtung Baby was out of character. We were in a group of partying friends so it was neither the time nor the place for more than a brief chat. Well, he said, or words to that effect, I suppose you've earned the right to be wrong. As usual, he's fast enough to sense my reservations about Achtung Baby. Just before Christmas, it's early morning in Lillie's Bordello in downtown Dublin, and I'm not entirely lucidly explaining some of these feelings to Bono. Furthermore, U2's determination to mine the more traditional sources of rock and southern music set them apart from the new generation of bands and fans that would lead to the rise of Nirvana. Scattered around the album they got lost among the more controversial live material while the film set them up for charges of vainglory which again overwhelmed the songs. Against the tide, I still champion that album whose new songs may have been overpowered by their context. And if Edge and especially Adam and Larry were in stunning form, outside the ballads and "The Fly", I wasn't always focussing on Bono.īesides, I disliked all those favourable reviews that couldn't refuse the temptation to damn Rattle And Hum yet again.
The clockwork orange rhythms of "The Fly" flung down the gauntlet and "One", "So Cruel" and " Love Is Blindness" were all enthralling ballads but otherwise, I wondered if people were being seduced by the surface of the music with both "Better Than The Real Thing" and "Acrobat" especially weak tracks. Just as The Unforgettable Fire marked a necessary new departure after War, any follow-up to Rattle And Hum was destined to scuttle off elsewhere. Moreover, I wasn't completely convinced by Achtung Baby, of course it was inevitable this restless band would change. Whereas I see continuities, this latest conventional line on the band seems to me to create gaping and false discontinuities. I'm wary of some of the easy recent praise given U2 since it involves a dualism an amputation of their past that separates them from the Good U2 of Achtung Baby and the Bad U2 of Rattle And Hum. I confess I flew to Zurich in some trepidation. (OR) NOT EVERYTHING YOU KNOW MAY STILL BE WRONG And so, dear friends, the fairytale concludes, with one transatlantic leap, our four Irish heroes are here. Sun Studios in Memphis is replaced by Hansa near the Berlin Wall as backdrop, the vacant desert gives way to the urban hive, and right-on rock is reversed for a cacophonous futurist pop with all the glaring colours of lurid confusion. The band are off, shattering preconceptions again.