To those asking, I've heard from some folks that "Winter" was actually just a tentative name for "White as Snow", while others say it was simply cut along with a couple other tracks. If that's the case, we'd have no way of obtaining it at the moment.

 

Tour dates = Awesome. I'm pretty broke from buying multiple tickets for Coldplay's summer tour, so hopefully I can weasel said friends into possibly mooching off them for U2.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for in the album, still sounds like a load of tosh to me, sorry but in a deal of no line on the horizon against having to listen to crazy frog does crazy hits, the frog will be played.

Hee hee...snuck that one in cleverly, eh? :laugh3:

Brian Eno - interview with the producer of U2's No Line On The Horizon

 

Brian Eno: 'I've been thinking a lot recently about giant umbrellas in space that will stop the sun's rays hitting the earth...'

 

No one in the UK has taken pop music closer to art than Brian Eno. As his new U2 collaboration No Line On The Horizon is released, he talks about working with 'the biggest band in the world' and with Coldplay on Viva La Vida.

 

Have you ever wondered where the burst of music comes from that announces that Windows on your computer is springing into life? It didn't just write itself. It lasts 3.25 seconds and is surely one of the planet's most widely recognised noises. The man who composed it is the same man who defined the sound of the biggest-selling record in the world last year, Coldplay's Viva La Vida. He's the creative technician and visionary whose first collaboration with U2 in 1984 signalled their arrival as The Biggest Band in the World. Whether this is a title they still hold will be decided on Monday next week, when the Irishmen release a new album, the sixth he has produced for them. Right now, however, his creative energies are focused on getting my Dictaphone to work.

 

Brian Eno slides his glasses to the tip of his nose and peers over them at the recalcitrant machine. Through the glass roof of his mews studio in Notting Hill the bloodless light of a February morning bounces off his shiny pate. He is 60 years old, about five foot six, and exudes an aura of almost underwater calm. I'm pretty excited that someone who has done so much to explore and define what's possible in the field of sound technology is casting an eye over my recording equipment. A good deal more than 3.25 seconds passes. I can hear his breath rise and fall, and the low drumming of rain on the glass overhead. "Probably needs new batteries," he says.

 

After art school in the late Sixties at Ipswich and then Winchester, Brian Eno joined Roxy Music as their keyboard player. Even then, amid the eye-shadow and the lamé loon-pants, his hair loss was well under way. But as Roxy frontman Bryan Ferry recalls it: "I did all the work. Brian did all the girls." The son of a Suffolk postman and a Belgian immigrant mother, Eno stayed with Roxy through their innovative early years, as they injected a considered artiness and panache into the monochrome cultural life of early Seventies Britain. Then he had enough and left to do his own thing. This consisted mostly of making abstract and experimental computer music, along the way inventing what he called "ambient" music. This low tolerance of boredom, coupled with the ability consistently to generate new artistic ideas both on his own and as a collaborator with acts such as David Bowie and Talking Heads, has defined his long and prolific career.

 

So how is it that such huge mainstream rock acts seek out the services of a man who in 1975 launched an accurately named label called Obscure Records? "When people reach a certain level of success," he says in soft tones that retain the flavour of East Anglia, "there are a lot of people encouraging them - nearly always to do more of the same. And when you're working in the studio as a band, it is cheering when things come up that you recognise: 'Oh, great! We know how to do this.' But at the same time little shoots keep appearing of stuff you don't recognise. They look promising but pretty clumsy, because new ideas always look clumsy at first. And you don't know what to do with them, how to connect them. And I'm the one cheering for those things. 'Let's not do what we've done before, let's do these new things!' "

 

The dynamic he describes is audible throughout the new U2 record. Across the 11 tracks of No Line on the Horizon there is a strong creative tension between sounds and structures that are recognisably U2 and ones that are new and unusual - and recognisably Eno-ish. "I'm very opinionated," says Eno. "When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it."

 

This unusual ability to have forceful views but to accept their dismissal with equanimity has earned Eno a kind of honorary membership of U2 since he first worked with them on the massive-selling The Unforgettable Fire in 1984. "U2's chemistry relies on their empathy and respect for each other, but also on something intrinsic to Irish society - the attempt to keep everyone included. They just don't let things fall apart. So if somebody starts to feel they're not part of the process they are quickly brought back in. U2 have that tribal attitude: if you get ill it's not just your problem, it's the problem of the entire tribe. They do it not simply out of generosity but because that's how you get a good working community."

 

So is it an extension of this Irish capacity to keep everyone included that has made them The Biggest Band in the World? Is their success rooted in including the whole world in a kind of universal Irishness? "It is fascinating to make records with them because they look at such a range of targets for their work. They are absolutely unsnobbish: they don't think that any forum is unworthy of their attention. So we think of our own interests as artists - what's the best we can do? how can we make this amazing? - but also, how can we get this on Radio 1?"

 

Yet for all the millions who line up to feel that Irish embrace, U2 - and in particular Bono- also attract a lot of vilification. Why does he think this is? "Snobbery, primarily," he says, smiling to reveal a solid gold incisor worthy of a rap star. "It's most pronounced in England. There's a tendency for people who are in the business of art - critics, writers, people who consider themselves insiders - to distrust anything that is easy to like. There's an assumption underlying this that people are quite stupid, and if a lot of them like something then it too must be quite stupid.

 

"Also with Bono people say, what right does he think he has to do the moral and political stuff? It happens to any non-politician in England who does something that fringes over into politics. But what right does any politician have? They're rarely any more expert than you or me. Yet if you look at the questions that Bono is interested in, debt and aid, he is very informed. He got some of the best economists in the world and said, teach me about this, I don't want to be caught out. And so he made himself an expert.

 

"One thing that drives his philanthropy is the idea that someone ought to do something useful with creativity, in particular with the social power and wealth it brings. It seems ridiculous to say: I'm just an artist, I don't know what's going on in the world and it's of no interest to me. But I think in England we really distrust dilettantism. You can't have two jobs!"

 

If having two jobs makes you a dilettante, then lord knows what that makes Eno. He has shown visual art installations in every town from Tokyo to Lanzarote; he has designed programmes that create what he calls "generative" art - music and images that reproduce themselves differently a near-infinite number of times; he has designed an application for the iPhone; he has produced a set of cards called "Oblique Strategies" that offer suggestions for the creatively blocked; he has written A Year, the hugely enjoyable diary of his life in 1996; he works for the charity War Child; in 1998 he even appeared in the final episode of Father Ted.

 

So what happens, I wonder when rivals to The Biggest Band in the World decide they want some of the Eno magic? Was it seen by U2 as a defection when he worked with Coldplay? "I realised it could have been, but there was no friction on either side. First of all they know each other. Bono said he thought it was a good idea. But I felt sensitive that in one computer I had all the work I was doing on Coldplay and all the work I was doing on U2 and I had to mentally keep them apart.

 

"But what I do can work for any artist. In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you're in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people."

 

For all his devotion to creativity, Eno says he may give it all up. He has begun to wonder whether being an artist should be a job for life. "I'm writing a book at the moment that asks, why do people make art? Why should one have stylistic opinions and feel so strongly about them. All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas."

 

All that remains, then, presumably, is to save the planet. "Well, actually I've been thinking a lot recently about giant umbrellas in space that will stop the sun's rays hitting the earth..."

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Wow! Great article

Very goood article!

Will U2 play more than 4 England shows on their new tour this time around I wonder?

 

I would guess Wembley stadium will be played.

we'll find out in a week :D

^yep... we sure will.......

!GO U2!

))))))))))))))))(((((((((((((((((((

))))))))))))))))(((((((((((((((((((

:cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool::cool:

Hey, I've been away for the weekend but I saw a short clip on the nes about this rooftop gig. I'm just not starting to go through it, but I must say it seems like this idea was taken straight off the end of the beatles "Abbey Road" documentary, where they played a bunch of songs from a rooftop to a gathered crowd.

They also played on the rooftop of a liquor store in LA for the Where the Streets Have No Name video.

 

Last album during their promo stuff they played on the back of an 18-wheeler as it drove through NYC.

Oh yeah, forgot about WTSHNN. I remember the 18-wheeler. They used that footage for the All Because Of You music video.

I think us Boston folks are looking at maybe 3 shows in a row, judging from the Elevation Tour and Vertigo Tour, ;)

 

-Jesse-

Rumor on the street is they are doing 25 cities in the US in the fall (that's a LOT LESS than last tour) however they are going to be doing stadiums this time so I don't think there will be 3 shows in boston but 2 for sure at least for the first leg. Just a IMO.

Thats probably where I'll try to see them.

If they decide to go the route of Coldplay and ignore Vancouver I will kill someone. They will be playing some arenas. Well in Vancouver they will be, our only major stadium is currently undergoing major renovations.

 

I hope its not near the start, I do hope they kick it off in Europe. That way we get a U2 in form, like the Milan or U2 3D show. Good well rounded U2.

u2 BETTER GET THEIR BOOTS ON!:P

we'll find out in a week :D

 

Very exciting! :):):):)

you guys should be happy to know that i've been in a u2 phase today... i haven't been in a u2 phase in like 2-3 years

^nice, listening to the new album?

 

p.s. Pitchfork gave NLOTH a 4.2 :(

no... actually the main albums i've been listening to are: how to dismantle an atomic bomb, zooropa, and pop. I still have yet to listen to the new album at all, i actually have only heard their newest single, but that was a live performance from the grammy's.

^nice, listening to the new album?

 

p.s. Pitchfork gave NLOTH a 4.2 :(

 

SRZLY?!!?

 

Wow, that's worse than any of the Coldplay albums I think :thinking:

 

So if today is the official worldwide release, is it now available for download on itunes/amazon//rhapsody/walmart etc.?

Good to know that no matter how bands change, Pitchfork never changes. :lol:

I've got the new album and the guys are still as good as they ever have been. Best since Achtung Baby.

So if today is the official worldwide release, is it now available for download on itunes/amazon//rhapsody/walmart etc.?

 

Well, the North American release is due for tomorrow (right now in Toronto, it's still March 2nd), so I'm still waiting for my album to download on iTunes. Can't wait. :dance:

 

Anyways, I've seen more reviews of NLOTH, and for some reason the classic "Magnificent" really isn't as well-received as I expected. Weird.

NEW ALBUM AT THE END OF THE YEAR

ONSTAGE at the Earl’s Court Exhibition Center here was a glittery dress rehearsal for the annual Brit Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Grammys. Although U2 was not among the nominees, it had the opening slot for the Feb. 19 show: a live performance of the hard-riffing “Get On Your Boots” from its new album, “No Line on the Horizon” (Interscope). U2 had blasted the same song earlier in the month at the Grammy Awards.

 

After the run-through the four band members headed to a grimy loading zone behind the auditorium for a photo session. The photographer had them walk down a ramp; Bono, who often calls himself a “Method actor,” wanted to know what kind of walk. A short discussion settled it. The band started a proud, seasoned swagger as Bono announced, “Last gang in town!”

 

It wasn’t exactly a joke. U2 has entered the fourth decade of a career that began in 1978, when its members were teenage schoolmates in Dublin; they are now in their late 40s. And U2 may well be the last of the megabands: long-running, internationally recognized rockers whose every album, from “Boy” in 1980 to “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” in 2004, has sold millions of copies worldwide. In an era when CD sales have plummeted, Top 40 radio favors hip-hop and teen-pop, albums are fractured by MP3 players’ shuffle mode and the old idea of a rock mainstream seems more and more like a mirage, U2 still, unabashedly, wants to release a blockbuster.

 

“How do you puncture pop consciousness with a tune anymore?” Bono said later over a pint of Guinness in the restaurant of the venerable hotel Claridge’s. “That’s actually your first job as a songwriter.”

 

A conversation with Bono is a free-associative adventure. Between thoughts about the album he dispensed fascinating digressions, casual but carefully placed on and off the record. He gave a full-voiced demonstration of Italian opera vowels and Frank Sinatra style — heads swiveled nearby — and mused on cathedral architecture; he described encounters with presidential candidates and plans for his future columns on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. He spoke fondly about his band mates as characters he’s still trying to figure out, about songs as bursts of serendipity and about what he wants in a performance: “spastic elastic energy.”

 

From its beginnings, in the wake of punk-rock, U2 made music on a grand scale. The band’s early signature sound — Bono’s ardent Irish tenor backed by open, echoing guitar chords from the Edge and the anthemic march beats of Larry Mullen Jr. on drums and Adam Clayton on bass — was suited to resound through the biggest spaces while Bono sang of boundless yearnings: romantic, social, spiritual.

 

Once the band reached the arena and stadium circuit in the 1980s, it stayed there. It has had no lineup changes, no breakups, no reunions and no catering to nostalgia. “People don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Bono said. “Our fans are not sure. Could we embarrass them? Maybe. Could we inspire them? Maybe. They don’t know. That’s very important, because when you become a comfortable, reliable friend, I’m not sure that’s the place for rock ’n’ roll.”

 

Bono added: “It’s very hard to be relevant, so there’s a lot of stake for us on this album. I know the quality of the work is there, but will it be taken? I really don’t know. I’m genuinely curious. I think it might have a bumpy start.”

 

In the United States radio stations gave “Get On Your Boots” a lukewarm reception; its fuzz-toned guitar riff doesn’t suit Top 40 playlists full of Taylor Swift, Britney Spears and Beyoncé. U2 also faces competition from younger bands steeped in its own music. At the Brit Awards other rock bands performing on the show — Coldplay, Kings of Leon, even the grown-up English boy band Take That — couldn’t help sounding like U2 knockoffs.

 

Later that night Coldplay and the Killers shared a bill at the 2,000-capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire, in a benefit for War Child International. For the finale Bono joined Coldplay, Gary Barlow from Take That, and Brandon Flowers from the Killers in the Killers’ song “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Backstage, Mr. Flowers marveled at having Bono sing his song: “I was trying to write ‘Where the Streets Have No Name,’ so it’s a real honor.”

 

Yet even as other bands mine U2’s catalog, the band defies its past. After two albums of comparatively straightforward guitar-driven rock, “No Line on the Horizon,” U2’s head-spinning 12th studio album, takes new experimental tangents and redefines the band yet again. The album, to be released Tuesday, burbles with cross-rhythms, layered guitars and electronic undercurrents in songs the band wrote with its longtime producers, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. It’s not as startling a swerve as 1991’s “Achtung Baby,” on which U2 reinvented itself after the earnest ’80s with irony and electronic beats. But “No Line on the Horizon,” the result of a convoluted two-year process, presents a band that is still restless and impassioned, kicking formulas aside.

 

In songs about true love, worldwide connections, transcendence and technology the music heads for extremes. “Get On Your Boots,” at 149 beats per minute, is U2’s fastest song ever, while “Cedars of Lebanon,” which ends the album, is a somber meditation on war, separation and enmity. The album includes likely arena singalongs in “Magnificent,” “Unknown Caller” and “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” but it also encompasses the ricocheting patterns of “Fez — Being Born” and the stately “White as Snow,” which bases its melody on the Advent hymn “Veni, Veni Emmanuel.” (Mr. Clayton said “White as Snow” was conceived as the last thoughts of an Afghan killed by an improvised explosive device; its four minutes are the time it takes to die.)

 

“Get On Your Boots,” Bono said, is an almost journalistic collection of images of taking his family to a fun fair in southern France on the eve of the war in Iraq, with warplanes zooming overhead. One verse proclaims, “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations/Not right now.”

 

That line, along with hints in “White as Snow” and “Cedars of Lebanon,” provides what Bono described as “peripheral vision”: a recognition of the turbulent world beyond the private thoughts in the lyrics. “That’s the elephant in the room, the absence of this thing, that almost draws attention to it,” he said. “It never takes away from the personal or the psychodramas that are going on, but it’s there.”

 

One theme that runs through the songs, Bono said, “is the ability to surrender, to give yourself, whether in reverie or revelry. And the journey of the artist is surely the journey away from self-consciousness.” He paused and smiled ruefully. “Fame is all about self-consciousness.”

 

Bono has leveraged celebrity into political clout. Part policy wonk, part showman, part charmer, he works on causes like ending extreme poverty in Africa. While he has been mocked as St. Bono, he strives not to be too single-minded. He said: “Edge is always whispering in my ear: ‘You’re an artist. That’s how you’re getting away with this. If you start to behave in a correct fashion and very serious and doing a serious job, it’s awful.’ ”

 

Bono added: “I feel as an artist that my job is to try and understand the forces that are shaping the world that our songs occupy. And maybe, if you get a chance, try to shape it. That’s what the band didn’t understand. They thought the natural flak that we would receive for daring to want to play with the big boys, philosophically and every other way, would frighten our audience away. But actually our audience feels much more powerful.”

 

The Edge suggested that being a rocker is like a vacation from Bono’s political efforts. “I think that’s what he looks forward to,” he said. “There is no end to the other thing. That struggle is ongoing. With U2 it’s like, there’s things you can say, well, we did that. We delivered a record. We delivered a show.”

 

Making the new album was “arduous,” Mr. Mullen said. “There has to be a simpler way,” he continued, “but we don’t understand simple or easy.” At first U2 decided to record with Rick Rubin, who has produced the Dixie Chicks, Johnny Cash and Metallica. Mr. Rubin is renowned for getting bands back to basics, and instead of overseeing U2’s habitual free-form studio sessions, he urged the band to bring finished songs into the studio. Two songs made with Mr. Rubin appeared on “U218 Singles,” a 2006 anthology.

 

But the group shelved the rest of the Rubin sessions and started again with a contrary strategy. Bono had been invited to the annual ecumenical Festival of Sacred Music in Fez, Morocco. He asked the other band members to join him and perhaps do some recording there during a two-week stay. To his surprise they all agreed, as did Mr. Eno and Mr. Lanois

 

They rented a house and set up equipment in a courtyard open to the sky and started making music with no deadline or goal. “This was far from back to basics,” the Edge said. “This was exploring the fringes.” While hints of triple-time trance rhythms and Arabic vocal inflections occasionally surface, U2 avoided what band members call “musical tourism.”

 

The band plunged into recording. The instrumental foundations of three songs — “No Line on the Horizon,” “Moment of Surrender” and “Unknown Caller” — each emerged virtually complete in a few hours. Yet after those two prolific weeks, recording stretched out for two years: in Dublin, in the south of France, in London. Steve Lillywhite, who produced U2’s first albums, and Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas helped shape and finish songs.

 

The deadline that would have allowed U2 to release the album before the lucrative Christmas season came and went, but the band wasn’t satisfied with the music until November. U2 expects to release a companion album, which band members say will have a more meditative and processional tone, before the end of the year.

 

Making the music was determinedly intuitive: a collation of momentary impulses and collaborative sparks. Bono’s lyrics blurt out declarations of love, character sketches and self-mocking admonitions: “Be careful of small men with big ideas.” The Edge, after making a guitar documentary, “It Might Get Loud,” with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Jack White of the White Stripes, decided to try writing the kind of brash guitar riffs he had long shunned. Mr. Eno brought loops and textures that became seeds of songs and pushed the band toward vocal harmonies. Through the album U2’s longtime strengths — hymnlike melodies, guitar superstructures — are preserved but revitalized, bent in new ways as the songs reach for U2’s defining duality: an intimacy that strives to encompass the universe.

 

With the album’s release intuition gives way to calculation. “No Line on the Horizon” sets up a worldwide stadium tour that begins in July. U2 intends to perform in the round, offering affordable seats to fans behind the stage and up front, hoping to attract a new, younger audience.

 

Because U2 can no longer depend on exposure through radio and MTV, it lined up major television moments. Three days after the Brits, the band finished an awards-show trifecta by performing at the Echo Awards in Germany. U2 is to appear all this week on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Those are prerogatives for a brand-name band, but they are also signs that U2 isn’t taking anything for granted.

 

The group also represents one last hope for the increasingly desperate recording business: a bankable act. Last year U2 signed a 12-year deal with the concert promoter Live Nation that covers global rights to the band’s touring, merchandising and branding. Unlike Madonna and Jay-Z, whose deals with Live Nation include future recordings, U2 has kept its recording and publishing with Universal Music, which absorbed U2’s previous labels, Island and Interscope. The band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, said via e-mail that U2 is signed to Universal for “several more albums,” declining to specify a number.

 

The Edge said: “My instinct is to stick with the record guys. They have to sell your records or sell the downloads, whatever it ends up being. To do that, first of all you’ve got to love and understand the music, and right now I’m not seeing any group that rivals the record labels on that front.”

 

Bono put it bluntly. “I’m interested in commerce,” he said. “The excuse for bigness is that songs demand to be heard if they’re any good. And without the kind of momentum of being in a big rock ’n’ roll band, you won’t get your songs heard.”

 

As the Brit Awards rehearsal started, U2 used its sound check to play Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” in full blare, like a classic-rock cover band. “Weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs,” Bono announced afterward. “We’re available for work. U2.”

 

(nytimes)