Edge: "How big a deal do we make of an anniversary when we're in the middle of what we're doing now? We had a hard time figuring that out. We're not a heritage act. We're still very active. But this record was so pivotal that we felt it was OK to revisit it."
"We had become very earnest by the late '80s," says Bono. "We were carrying quite heavy moral baggage, and the strain was showing. When you write a song about Martin Luther King, people think you must have aspirations to be like him. You can never live up to these songs. So the '80s put us in this situation where the songs and our actual selves were very different. We finally owned up to the shallow people we are in Achtung Baby."
"Early on, clearly there was disharmony," Edge says. "There was a lot at stake. Things almost did go horribly wrong. Somehow we managed to scrape through and, in the process, maybe made our best album."
They went to Berlin in 1990 on the eve of Germany's reunification. After crafting soundtrack A Clockwork Orange for London's Royal Shakespeare Company, Bono and Edge were eager to mine club culture. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton were leery.
"Larry and Adam were portrayed as (whining) rock stars," Bono says. "Actually, they were pointing out the solid fact that we had no songs. Edge and myself were tuned into dramatic sonic landscapes. They were probably right to protest. Perhaps we would have liked them to be a little more encouraging."
Rather than rushing to Berlin, U2 "should have done an arrangement workshop in Dublin, where there was no pressure," Edge says. "It was a little frustrating. We would come out after a few days with so little to show for it."
The band recoiled under the obnoxious gaze of Hansa Studios' red recording light.
"We don't respond well to the red light," Edge says. "It's great if you absolutely know what you're doing. But it can be debilitating. When the light comes on, we clam up. We do our best work when everybody is in a state of relaxation and natural creativity bubbles up."
Reinvention was a struggle
The Achtung saga unfolds in From the Sky Down, a 90-minute documentary that opened the Toronto Film Festival.
"I find it impossible to watch," Bono says. "It's a little solipsistic. There are wars going on, a famine in East Africa. And here are these four men working like their lives depended on it, which they do. I shouldn't be embarrassed by our creative process. I don't think people thought we were the Waltons, but I'm not sure I wanted them to know how dysfunctional a family we are."
Edge grins. "Bono, I think it's out."
'I probed too deeply'
Expecting a less personal treatment, U2 granted Guggenheim final say and access to its vaults. The filmmaker dug deep.
"They call it mission creep," Edge says. "We felt uncomfortable with where Davis went, but it's all there on the album. He just did a bit of delving."
Bono adds, "Davis put together a forensic team. He goes right to the bone and wants to know every angle. You don't realize he's robbing your life savings while he's talking to your sister. If he wasn't such a gentleman and fine intellect, you'd have some thugs work him over. We have never, ever had as little to do with a U2 project," he says, noting that no changes were requested by the band, though Guggenheim agreed to cut the length. "We begged him to make it shorter. There may be a lesson in that, which I'm not sure I like!"
Guggenheim laughs at Bono's tough talk and says, "From their point of view, I probed too deeply. Bono told me, 'You made us look uncool during our only cool period.' I tell the story that's in front of me, warts and all. In the rock 'n' roll business, it's about adding layers. My process strips layers away. Rock stars are more comfortable creating an aura and mystique."
Yet U2 has defied rock physics by remaining productive and interesting instead of self-destructing, he says.
"They could have become the cliché," Guggenheim says of U2's Achtung gridlock. He insisted the band return to Berlin, "the scene of the crime. That's where it all fell apart. It was a raw, exposed, traumatic time for them. They're underplaying it in the movie. They were sitting in that studio and nothing was working. There was a moment: Maybe it's over."
Examining buried footage from the Joshua/Rattle era, Guggenheim discovered "four Irish guys frozen in the headlights of success."
Achtung's critical and commercial success sprang from sweat and commitment.
"I'm obsessed with the magic of songwriting," says Guggenheim, 47. "That happened with One, when they were completely despondent and almost breaking up. You think rock stars are godlike. These guys are devoted to the creative collective beyond everything else."
Edge cherishes Achtung as a painful but enriching rebirth.
"My natural inclination is to make something coherent," he says. "With Achtung, we started so far outside of our comfort zone, and in the process of making those things coherent for us, we didn't lose the groundbreaking quality of the work. If you start out traditional, organized, it's very difficult to make it sound intriguing and different. It's better to start somewhere much weirder." ----------------------- Small (edited) article posted by USA Today to get us back on track. Followed by more of Bono's words.
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"Watching From the Sky Down the first time made for painful viewing. I hated it," says Bono. "U2 never look back. It's never been what this band is about. Edge will tell you that when we put together our best-of collections he forced me - actually had to physically force me - to listen to them before they went out. I've never been interested in what we have done. I'm interested only in what we're about to do. But I think there comes a time when it actually becomes dysfunctional not to look into the past, and for the Achtung Baby album we made an exception.
"The film is not about us per se. It's about how bands function - or, in this case, don't function. But when I saw it first I just saw these four people talking intensely about their music, and, really, does the world need that at this time? Davis didn't tell us he was going into our past to put a context on what really happened to the band after the success of The Joshua Tree and how bad things were in Berlin when we started to make Achtung Baby . He didn't tell us because we wouldn't have agreed. Now that I've seen it a few times I realise it is actually about the creative process. Let's face it, the era of rock music is going to end soon, and if you are interested in rock music and rock bands you'll be interested in their internal dynamics: what makes a rock band tick, the tribal aspect, the idea of the clan. The irony for me now is that we made Achtung Baby to set fire to our earnestness and now here's this very earnest film about the making of the album.
"We held back nothing from Davis. We opened up our archives to him and he really had carte blanche. The first time I saw it I was going, 'Oh no, no, no,' and I went to him and made a few suggestions as to the changes I wanted. There was no battle of wills. He just didn't even get into a discussion with me. He didn't change anything. But I was looking at it, going, 'Why is this film talking about Cedarwood Road [where he grew up], the Baggot Inn and my grandmother? I thought we were making a film about the Achtung Baby album. What is going on here?' "
Originally posted by yeahFun Trivia: Anyone else laughing on Bono trying to pronounce the address of the Hansa Studios in "Oh Berlin"?
Haha, yes. I really like the song. Great outtake, I'm wondering why these (and Down all the Days) were never released in stead of pretty crappy ones like WHere did it all go Wrong and Salome...
Tomorrow ,Tomorrow i love you tomorrow it's only one day ....Till i get my Achtung baby Superdeluxe edition that i get by post ....just read it's send ....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaHHH !!!
on amazon.it it's out of stock since many days (where it was the "cheapest" ) .. it seems to me there are still copies on other sites (amazon.de for example)
