An unreleased song composed by U2 around 30 years ago is to be revealed in the new film Killing Bono. The song, Secret Mission, was recorded by the band shortly after they formed but it has never been heard by the public before.
Despite being three decades old, the song is only coming to light now because of the film’s music producer, Ciaran Gribbin, who was given the thumbs- up by the band to rework some of their earliest material for the actors to perform. The Derry singer said he was brought in as a music supervisor and producer for the highly anticipated film and found it a “dream come true” to work with the raw song.
“Hopefully everyone will be really happy with it,” he said. “It’s an absolute dream come true. I’ve been writing music for a long, long time - I did eight songs for the movie - but it remains to be seen how it came out in the end. I hope the public will get it. I’m confident with what I’ve got though. “It was written before U2 ever existed. They never officially released it, they recorded it when they were teenagers and called themselves The Hype.
“They were probably 16 or 17, it’s one of their first ever songs. You can hear where they were going with it though. It has that early punk angst that you would find in a teen band - but there are hints of where they were going with October in there also.
Gribbin said the majority of people involved in the film have close ties to the legendary band. “There’s a strong U2 connection with the team actually making the film. One of the producers was U2’s agent when they first got signed, so they obviously know and trust him,” he added. He approached them saying they needed an early song for that first school gig scene, and they were happy to oblige.
The singer, who performs under the stage name Joe Echo, said that he hopes his version does U2 justice. Killing Bono just been picked up by Paramount Pictures and is set for release in the UK by the end of the year.
Alan Cumming has left the production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a Broadway musica with a score co-written by U2’s the Edge and Bono. Cumming, who was set to play Spider-Man’s nemesis, the Green Goblin, has dropped out of the play due to scheduling conflicts.
Cumming claims that with the production delays on the musical, his CBS show The Good Wife will conflict with his role in Spider-Man.
The Scottish actor said in a statement, “Obviously, having waited over a year for Spider-Manto be greenlit, I am very disappointed that I will not have the chance to collaborate with Bono and the Edge, and to work with [director] Julie Taymor on the stage.”
The Spider-Man project has been beset with problems from the beginning. Production delays, cast turnovers (Evan Rachel Wood, who was set to play Mary Jane, left the production last month), and money problems have plagued the production.
U2 welcomes Drew along
WHEN rock band U2 embarks on its five-month world tour in June, Bono and the gang will be accompanied by Melbourne security company boss Andrew Wolveridge. A regular and trusty face guarding red carpets across town, Wolveridge worked with U2 during the Australian leg of its 2006 Vertigo tour and was approached by the group’s head of security to co-ordinate the 2010 shows. Wolveridge will oversee logistics at stadiums in the US, Helsinki, Moscow, Istanbul, Paris, Rome and many more stops in between. What to pack for the northern hemisphere summer? Definitely Bono-style sunnies.
BBC Tops U2 on Money List
U2 and their manager Paul McGuinness top the Irish Sunday Times Music Millionaires Rich List.
Their combined wealth is estimated at £429m, a rise of 1% on 2009. In second place is Lord of the Dance star Michael Flatley, with his total wealth calculated at £241m. The paper said his fortunes have dipped by 2% in the past year because of a fall in the value of the Lord of the Dance brand. Dublin-based singer Enya is third in the list, with a fortune believed to be £85m. All three retain the same top three positions from the 2009 list. Northern Irish singer and songwriter Van Morrison is fourth with his wealth listed at £50m.
Achtung Baby is the seventh studio album by rock band U2. Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it was released on 19 November 1991 on Island Records. Stung by the criticism of their previous album, Rattle and Hum (1988), U2 shifted their musical direction and incorporated alternative rock, industrial, and electronic dance music influences into their sound.
Thematically, the album was darker, more introspective, and at times more flippant than the band’s previous work. The album and the subsequent multimedia-intensive Zoo TV Tour were central to the group’s 1990s reinvention, as U2 replaced their earnest public image with a more lighthearted and self-deprecating one.
Seeking inspiration on the eve of German reunification, U2 began recording Achtung Baby in Berlin’s Hansa Studios in October 1990.
Conflict arose over their musical direction and the quality of their material. After weeks of tension, arguments, and slow progress, the group made a breakthrough with the improvised writing of the song “One”. They returned to Dublin in 1991, where the majority of recordings were completed. The album title and colourful multi-image sleeve were chosen to confound expectations of the album and the group.
Achtung Baby is one of U2’s most successful albums. It earned favourable reviews and produced the hit singles “One”, “Mysterious Ways”, and “The Fly”. The album has sold 18 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy Award in 1993 for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. One of the most acclaimed albums of the 1990s, Achtung Baby is regularly featured on rankings of the greatest albums of all-time.
To produce the album, U2 employed Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, producers of the band’s albums The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree Lanois was principal producer, with Mark “Flood” Ellis as engineer. Eno took on an assisting producer role, working with the group in the studio for a week at a time to review their work before leaving for a month or two. By distancing himself from the work, he believes he provided the band with a fresh perspective on their material each time he rejoined them. As he explained, “I would deliberately not listen to the stuff in between visits, so I could go in cold [… ]”. The “oblique” strategies of the Lanois-Eno team contrasted with Rattle and Hum producer Jimmy Iovine’s direct and retro style.
Berlin sessions
The band believed that “domesticity [w]as the enemy of rock ‘n’ roll” and that to work on the album, they needed to remove themselves from their normal family-oriented routines. With a “New Europe” emerging at the end of the Cold War, they chose Berlin, in the centre of the reuniting continent, as a source of inspiration for a more European musical aesthetic. They recorded at Hansa Studios in West Berlin, near the recently opened Berlin Wall. Several acclaimed records were made at Hansa, including two from David Bowie and Eno’s “Berlin Trilogy”, and Bowie’s and Iggy Pop’s collaboration, The Idiot. U2 arrived on 3 October 1990 on the last flight into East Berlin on the eve of German reunification. Expecting to be inspired, they instead found Berlin to be “depressing”, “dark and gloomy”. The collapse of the Berlin Wall had resulted in a state of malaise in Germany. The band found their East Berlin hotel “bleak” and the winter “inhospitable”, while the run-down condition of Hansa Studios and its location in a SS ballroom added to the “bad vibe”.
Morale worsened once the sessions commenced, as the band worked long days, but could not agree on a musical direction. The Edge had been listening to electronic dance music and to industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails, the Young Gods, and KMFDM. He and Bono advocated new musical directions along these lines. In contrast, Mullen was listening to classic rock acts such as Blind Faith, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix, and learning how to “play around the beat”.He and Clayton were more comfortable with a sound similar to U2’s previous work and did not understand the proposed new direction. The Edge’s interest in dance club mixes and drum machines made Mullen feel that his contributions as a drummer were being diminished. Lanois was expecting the “textural, emotional, and cinematic”
U2 of the The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and he did not understand the “throwaway and trashy things” on which Bono and The Edge were working. Compounding the divisions between the two camps was a change in the band’s long-standing songwriting relationship. Bono and The Edge were working more closely together writing material at the exclusion of the rest of the group.
U2 found that they were “under-rehearsed and under-prepared” and that their ideas were not evolving. For the first time, the group could not find consensus during their disagreements and felt that they were not making progress. Bono and Lanois, in particular, had an argument that almost came to blows during the writing of “Mysterious Ways”. Mullen thought it “might be the end” of U2. Eno visited for a few days, and understanding their attempts to “deconstruct” the band, he assured them that their progress was better than they thought. By adding unusual effects and sounds, he showed that The Edge’s desire for new sonic territory was not incompatible with Mullen’s and Lanois’ desire to retain solid song structures. In December, a breakthrough was achieved with the writing of the song, “One”. The Edge combined two guitar chord progressions, and finding inspiration, the group quickly improvised most of the song. It provided much-needed reassurance for the band and re-validated their long-standing “blank page” approach to writing and recording together.
U2 returned to Dublin for Christmas, where they discussed their future together and all recommitted to the group. They briefly returned to Berlin in January 1991 to finish their Hansa work. Although just two songs were delivered during their two months in Berlin, The Edge said that in retrospect, working there had been more productive and inspirational than the output had suggested. The band had been removed from a familiar environment, providing a certain “texture and cinematic location”, and many of their incomplete ideas would be successfully revisited.
Spin Magazine Article
With the middling reaction to last year’s better-than-you’ll-admit No Line on the Horizon, U2’s chest-heaving big-box spectacle seems to be fatiguing more of pop’s body politic than it’s inspiring. Weirdly, this was exactly the case more than 20 years ago.
After the critical and commercial sweep of Joshua Tree, the Irish conglomerate followed its bombastic muse with the ponderous 1988 docu-fiasco Rattle and Hum, which featured a Bono mot that would haunt many of us for years to come: “Okay, Edge, play the blues!” Flailing and directionless, the band retreated and reconsidered whether it was time to fold up their flag for good.
Instead, three years later they emerged with the album — Achtung Baby, cheekily titled as a nod to German reunification — that would energize their career and genetically engineer rock music into the hybridized mutant we know today. Initially recorded at Hansa Studios, a former SS ballroom near the reopened Berlin Wall (and later completed back home in Dublin), Achtung was an effort, stoked primarily by Bono and the Edge, to “deconstruct” the band and rewire it with jolts of beat-generated clutter and collage, nicked from industrial music, hip-hop, dance remixes, and the Madchester scene. That method almost collapsed the band — bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., as well as coproducer Daniel Lanois, were left bewildered and cranky.
But the frisson found expression in U2’s most immediately dynamic music since 1982’s War, and its most emotionally frank songs to date, capturing that particular early-’90s rub of boundless possibility and worn-down despair. Bono’s lyrical flights had a battered grit, like a defrocked cleric stirred to regain his flock without the usual trick bag of bullshit. “One” became an indelible anthem because it admitted “we’re not the same” but urged that we’ve gotta “carry each other” nonetheless. The squalling swagger of “The Fly” resonated due to the rock star at its center confessing he’s a liar and a thief. And for “Mysterious Ways,” the Edge somehow concocted a jubilantly snarling riff that transformed Bono’s gospel come-on so it didn’t feel gross the morning after.
Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend. Their confessions of frailty and blindness amid murky atmospherics (no doubt egged on by coproducer Brian Eno) had an air of cleansing rather than whining. That the album trails off introspectively is brave in its own quiet way.
Though they continued to bumble through periods of bloat and self-delusion and irrelevance, U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby. Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational. — Charles Aaron
Achtung Baby has sold 18 million copies,including eight million copies in the US. It is the group’s second-highest selling album after The Joshua Tree, which has sold 25 million copies. The success of Achtung Baby prefigured the group’s continued musical experimentation during the 1990s. Zooropa, released in 1993, was a further departure for the band, incorporating additional dance music influences and electronic effects into their sound.
In 1995, U2 and Brian Eno collaborated on the experimental/ambient album Original Soundtracks 1 under the pseudonym “Passengers”. For Pop in 1997, the group’s experiences with dance club culture and their usage of tape loops, programming, rhythm sequencing, and sampling resulted in their most dance-oriented album.
Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. It was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. Earth Day is celebrated in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Many communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues. The first Earth Week originated in Philadelphia in 1970 (starting April 16 and culminating on Earth Day, April 22.) Earth Day Network, a group that wishes to become the coordinator of Earth Day globally, asserts that Earth Day is now observed on April 22 on virtually every country on Earth. World Environment Day, celebrated on June 5 in a different nation every year, is the principal United Nations environmental observance.
Here is a sample of whats our play list today -
Beautiful Day: A celebration of the beauty of the world from All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Desire: A call for action in a world of lies and greed from Rattle and Hum
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: A yearning plea to find meaning in life from The Joshua Tree
Lemon: Is the world we have been given a lemon? From Zooropa
Moment of Surrender: In a hectic world, there still exists a brief moment of peace with God, from No Line on the Horizon
One: Among pain comes the realization of need, from Achtung Baby
Staring at the Sun: Sometimes we’re caught dumbstruck and confused by events around us, from Zooropa
The Ground Beneath Her Feet: This little known song was co-written by Salman Rushdie. Trying to bring a love back who had deceived, from The Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack
Until the End of the World: This classic from Judas’s perspective tests our understanding of fate, from Achtung Baby
Where the Streets Have No Names: Bringing heaven to Earth, or Earth to heaven from The Joshua Tree
If you remember back 4/19 we posted the anouncement of U2 and Soweto Choir teaming up for the World Cup and also posted the “Robben Island” ad. That commercial is one of five commercials that will be rolling out between now and June 11th. U2 has a presence in each ad, and in the ad that premiered this morning at 6AM on ESPN called “United,” Bono himself narrates the 60 second spot. We have been asked to ask you to please share your feedback. Lets tell them what we think ! Great !
2010 FIFA WORLD CUP ON ESPN / ”United”
EVENT: 2010 FIFA WORLD CUP ON ESPN (JUNE 11-JULY 11, SOUTH AFRICA)
AD AGENCY: Wieden + Kennedy NY DIRECTOR: Lance Acord AD CAMPAIGN: “One Game Changes Everything” WHERE AIRING: Across the ABC/ESPN family of networks TIME FRAME: April 21, 2010 through June 11, 2010
Produced by ESPN in conjunction with Wieden + Kennedy and directed by cinematographer Lance Acord (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Lost in Translation), “United” conveys the passion for the FIFA World Cup that unites disparate cultures (set to U2’s “Magnificent”). This is the latest spot in ESPN’s “One Game Changes Everything” campaign, which consists of a total of five spots. The first spot, “Robben Island,” debuted on April 7 and focuses on the historic impact of the 2010 World Cup being held in South Africa. Future spots focus on the passion, traditions, rivalries and glory that are unique to the World Cup.
U2 Fan Alert:Super Delux 360 Tour DVD is on its way. Reports claimed it was removed from Amazon. Has been just been proven wrong. ‘U2360° At The Rose Bowl’ will be released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray by Mercury Records on June 7, and in the US on June 3, 2010. #U2 We will posta link to where you can purchase as soon as we know.
Lenny Kravitz, Interpol, Snow Patrol, Kasabian, Razorlight, The Fray, One Republic: depending on where you’re seeing U2 this year, you’ll also get to see one of the above. Last year you might have caught Kaiser Chiefs, Glasvegas, The Hours, Elbow or Muse.
And over the years some pretty fine bands have rocked the house just a few minutes before the main attraction took the stage - sometimes long before they became household names themselves.
Anyone see The Kings of Leon or The Killers on the Vertigo Tour ? Or Garbage or Stereophonics on the Elevation Tour? Public Enemy on ZOO TV ? BB King on Lovetown ? How about The Pretenders or Los Lobos or Lou Reed on The Joshua Tree Tour in the 1980’s? Or Lone Justice when the band were touring The Unforgettable Fire. And, come to think of it, what about The Pixies, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith…
Was there an act you first discovered when they came out on stage before U2? Who was the best act you ever saw with them… and why? (Don’t forget to include the tour or year of the show.)
Two-time Grammy winning group Soweto Gospel Choir has collaborated with international group U2 on a world cup project. The artists have created music for a series of inserts about South Africa that will be featured on sports channel ESPN during the big tournament. From June 11, ESPN will use music that has been specially recorded by Soweto Gospel Choir and U2. “This is something very exciting for the choir considering U2 is such a big rock band,” said the choir’s Lucas Bok.The collaboration will appear in every program throughout ESPN’s presentation of the 2010 Fifa World Cup. The choir first sang with U2 on stage at the inaugural 46664 concert.
African Well Fund’s
U2 live photo auction, with all proceeds going toward the AWF’s “Build A Well For Bono’s Birthday” fund raiser. There are 30+ photos available, ranging in size from 5x7 to 16x20 and covering U2’s career from the War tour until today. You can preview of the photos here or go to eBay to start bidding. All auctions end next Sunday, April 25th 2010
Scams
We had to spend a few minutes this morning to alert you of this latest scam. If your on Facebook and Twitter your aware of the thousands of Fan sites that have appeared over night. The new scam is simply to be able to get your agree to some kind of application game from facebook, which is not endorsed by them to be loaded on your page. Warning this is the first step of gaining your personal information. Next item we noticed is tickets. You can either purchase from Ticketmaster or choose purchase from a reseller. We have checked into TicketsNow they are an official company of TicketMaster so the scalping ticket prices you have seen are not available from them. In full disclosure yes they do have a adveristment on the main U2TOURFANS site. We comfirmed their practices and we believe that they are a good secondary choice for ticket purchases. As we get closer to the tour start you will see all types of U2 stuff appear just check carefully and if your still concerned pass on it and save your money.
