U2 in Their Own Words

Bono: The film PopMart Live From Mexico City is the best thing, audio/visually that U2 has done. Eclipsed only by U2 3D, in my view. It's better than Zoo TV, it's better than all of them. It's really, quite shocking. It's unfortunate that we weren't able to play that well at the start of the tour as we did by the end of it, by the time we got to Mexico.

As regard to the album, yeah, I have some regrets and I think we fell in between two stools on that album — we neither made a dance or a combo album. And we also lacked editing and the hooks weren't good enough, but I think I really liked the subject there and I really liked, what I attempted for. Can you imagine, the best way of looking at that album is: if "Discotheque" had been to U2 what "Sledgehammer" was to Peter Gabriel then you'd understand where we were coming form.

So after that, we did two back-to-basics albums. With No Line on the Horizon, we wanted to really push the combo format. But what we actually said is "OK, if we are going to go polyrhythmic, if we are going to go into that mode, let's do hand-made digital, you know, let's do hand-made electronica." That is, actually, what the music is, it's not on a grid, it's not tightly formatted the way dance music is. The emphasis was on playing live in the room but using some electronic instruments. But we got those sounds, those extraordinary sounds, without losing the thing that a band can do when it is playing live. We got both. That is what we didn't manage to do on Pop.

Bono: I stepped into this character, like ... I think it was a little bit influenced by The Music Man. You know that musical? The scene on the train? It's a way to use words in a percussive way but not have it be hip-hop. It's somewhere between, you know, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and I did a kind of character a bit like that at the end of "Bullet the Blue Sky." I just wanted to get to a new place as a lyricist, and, I just thought making these short jabbing things made really great sense over those chords. Edge just came up with a chord sequence there and I just liked the bracing tone. I was thinking about it in a very physical way. I was improvising it — the lines were coming out like that.

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