Bullet the blue sky live rattle and hum3/17/2023 ![]() ![]() With the assistance of timpani and percussion, Larry Mullen's drumming is elementally studio-shaking, as Bono amplifies the themes of love's possession and compulsiveness first aired in "Desire", on a performance where producer, Jimmy Iovine, once a John Lennon collaborator, seems to be urging U2 on, to outsmart and outreach Phil Spector's muffled Plastic Ono Band productions.įor "Rattle And Hum" also concerns idols. ![]() "Helter Skelter", never performed live by The Beatles, can be heard as a metaphor for the re-creation of personality on the concert stage but it's also the first clue that among this album's themes will be ecstasy, and its attendant hangovers and tristesse "Van Diemen's Land", sung by Edge as a sparse folk ballad, sets up a separate theme of travel, displacement and emigration and "Desire", grounded on a Bo Diddley/Rolling Stones' "Not Fade Away" riff, and smeared by a cheesy organ that could have been sampled from any Tommy James And The Shondells' record, further widens the stylistic terms.īut, after these foothills, " Hawkmoon 269" is the first assault on the summit. The first three tracks are the introductions, to ease the listener into "Rattle And Hum"s challenging diversity of moods and styles. Double-albums are always unwieldy affairs but U2 dare further hazards of misinterpretation by segmenting the live tracks with new material that not only takes up 60% of the running time but also exposes an entirely new re-orientation, breaking up – and making up – the band again but, this time in full and potentially unforgiving public glare. Because, since "Rattle And Hum" is one of the kaleidoscopically self-referential album of the tour of the book of the film species (Consumer warning: this review probably will be subject to revision once I see the movie), it's all too easy to stumble down blind alleys or be trapped into false conclusions on first acquaintance. Including the humour behind Adam Clayton's chuckle when film director, Phil Joanou, pretends to be a long-winded interviewer, inquiring about the gestation and birth of this rough beast. ![]() So how do you start pinning down this often angry, always argumentative, absolutely restless, sometimes sprawling and curiously contradictory hybrid of an album that – it should go without saying – is the most ambitious record U2 have yet released?Ĭould I suggest it concerns George Bush's – no, sorry – his handlers' opinions of Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" and Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock pledge of allegiance Jimmy Swaggart and the broadcasting "Towers Of Steel" where "Belief goes on and on" U2's allergy to Levi's commercials and every record executive guilty of stonewashing spontaneous human imperfection out of the recording process Heaven and the art of rock'n'roll motor-cycle maintenance the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of the ailing body of rock history that even they sometimes nightmarishly fear may revive as Frankenstein with a Fender their own special American edition of The Crane Bag, Christ at Harlem's Apollo Theatre or The Confessions Of a Cedarwood Road Soul Singer a desperate attempt to ward off the touring hazards of delinquency, boredom and the redecoration of hotel bedrooms their own Irish emigrant's letter from America – a post-graduate thesis a collective two fingers to Albert Goldman the absolutely vital distinction between a blindman's cane and a sheet-stain and finally, the moment in which U2 don't so much just trust their instincts as recover, exercise and learn from them – as if they feared those faculties could be emasculated by disuse – by exploring beyond "Bullet The Blue Sky" to fall into (and sometimes recoil from) the arms of America, an embrace that finds them simultaneously blinded, liberated and fixated by the myths they wrestle with?Īmong other things. ![]() Originally published in Hot Press in October 1988. ![]()
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