Even by the usual drug-drenched rock-autobiography standards, Julian Cope’s Head On has an exotic supporting cast. We meet rock managers who believe the Beatles’s success was down to ley-lines, Scouse mystics theorising that humanity is controlled by an all-powerful duck, and an adolescent Courtney Love, dealing LSD provided by her father.
But perhaps the most surprising cameo comes from U2, struggling post-punkers in the brief period when Cope’s Teardrop Explodes were Britain’s hippest band. Their sense of purpose was so at odds with the Teardrop’s drug-addled nihilism that they become a running joke. Cope dubs them the Hope Brothers, ”because they’ve got two hopes of making it: Bob Hope and no hope”.
How wrong, you might wonder, can a man be? Yet it is worth noting that Head On provides a salutary reminder of how uncool U2 once were. Even in the late 1980s, when they had become the world’s biggest band, their lethal combination of painful sincerity and pomp and circumstance often drew mocking laughter from critics.
Twenty years on, no one thinks U2 are uncool, largely because of their 1990s volte-face, where they demonstrated a self-awareness previously unknown at their level of fame. They revamped their sound with three albums that — by superstar standards, at least — counted as brave experiments, and developed a new image that recognised their own absurdity and mocked their old earnestness.
It was unprecedented and it didn’t last. Their 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind marked an artistic u-turn, a return to old-fashioned U2. Its follow-up is aimed squarely at fans who prefer Rattle and Hum to Achtung Baby! and honestly believe that 1996’s Pop was a bewildering, alienating piece of envelope-pushing in the tradition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, rather than a U2 album with some dance beats on it and not enough big choruses.
Virtually everything that once made U2 the kind of band that the Teardrop Explodes or the Pet Shop Boys sniggered at, is back on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
The lyrics address social issues with brushstrokes so broad they make undoubted sincerity sound suspiciously like cliché: in those high-powered meetings he has with Blair and Bush, you can only hope Bono comes up with something a bit more convincing than ”we need love and peace, lay down your guns”.
The Edge’s trademark guitar sound is filled with portentously echoing harmonics. And one song, Yahweh, features an introduction of pattering drums and distant synthesisers that, were it by anyone else, would be roundly castigated for being a transparent imitation of the introduction to U2’s With or Without You.
And yet — as anyone who has been dragged along to a ghastly sports arena protesting that they hate everything U2 stand for, then unaccountably ended up punching the air to Pride, will tell you — there is something undeniable about U2.
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb may be unadventurous and melodramatic, but it is packed with disarming moments.
City of Blinding Lights is shameless stuff, building from a howl of feedback through a majestic, booming piano line to a chant-along chorus designed to reach the back rows of some ghastly sports arena. But you would have to be pretty churlish to remain unmoved by it, as you would by the brash current single Vertigo or the super-charged Motown stomp of All Because of You.
Driven by a ferociously powerful rhythm section, U2 sound pleasingly raw, particularly next to the current wave of stadium rock pretenders, with their good causes and pained expressions and elegiac piano ballads. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb leaves Keane sounding like Supertramp (not that difficult, as Keane actually do sound like Supertramp) and makes Coldplay — the band most regularly tipped to take on U2’s mantle — appear callow and one-dimensional in their approach. You can’t imagine them ever coming up with something that roars into life with the swagger of Love and Peace or Else. This, U2 seem to be saying, is how you get them pulling out the lighters in South America and Eastern Europe: listen and learn.
But there is more to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb than the guilty pleasure of well-turned stadium bombast. The chilling thing about 1980s U2 was their pomposity, but the real legacy of Achtung Baby! appears to be self-awareness. Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own affectingly hymns the singer’s late father, pulling back from mawkishness. ”You’re the reason I sing,” it offers, before adding, wittily, ”You’re the reason why opera is in me.”
Original of the Species, meanwhile, is about as close to a clear-eyed warts-and-all self-portrait as you are ever going to get from a multi-millionaire rock superstar. ”Some things you shouldn’t get too good at, like smiling, crying and celebrity,” Bono sings. ”Some people got way too much confidence, baby.”
The 1990s experimentation may have disappointingly vanished, but it seems highly unlikely anyone will laugh at U2 again. — Â