ACHTUNG BABY is the RIGHT CHOICE
U2’s 1991 album lifts the Classic Album award at this year’s event
SOMETIMES in this business you have to make hard decisions. So it was when I was asked to take part in this year’s judging panel for the RTÉ Choice Music Prize Classic Irish Album, in association with IMRO and IRMA.
Along with my esteemed colleagues author and journalist Sinéad Crowley, Michael Kealy of RTÉ TV and broadcaster Will Leahy from the RTÉ Gold breakfast show, we slugged it out under the watchful eye of chairman 2FM’s Paul Russell to decide which album of the past deserve to sit as a classic.
Judging these things is never easy and with such a canon of good music in our past it can be difficult to pick a winner. But after a long debate, the frontrunner for this year emerged, with U2’s Achtung Baby getting crowned the winner.
It is only the second year that this category in the Choice Music Prize has been awarded — last year it was given to Sinead O’Connor for her 1990 I Do Not Have What I Haven’t Got, an award she accepted on the night just months before she died suddenly in what was a tragic loss to the world of music.
Our joint statement on why we chose the album reads: ‘The panel is unanimous that you cannot deny the album’s authenticity and significant cultural impact as one classic song after another unfolds over 55 minutes.
‘To this day, it still resonates as a collection of songs that capture the spirit of change at both a personal as well as a societal level, when the Berlin wall came tumbling down, and Ireland sensed a change in the air.
‘The ground-breaking Zoo TV Tour in support of the album helped to re-invent the stadium show and now over 30 years later, Achtung Baby is at the heart of the globally acclaimed ‘U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere’, a string of ground-breaking performances which launched Sphere, the cutting-edge new venue in Las Vegas.’
There are, of course, many other deserving albums who will find their day in the sun but for me personally this year seemed the right time to appreciate what Achtung Baby brought to the world of music, given the Sphere spectacular and how U2 have managed to reinvent the wheel all over again.
Thirty years ago, Bono described Achtung Baby as ‘the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree’ and it was an album that changed the band’s direction, winning a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance and becoming one of the most significant records of the nineties and of
U2’s career. Recorded over six months at Hansa Studio in Berlin and Windmill Lane in Dublin, Achtung Baby was U2’s seventh studio album.
Led by The Fly, four other singles followed: Mysterious Ways, One, Even Better Than The Real Thing and Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses and it was this album the band chose to perform at the groundbreaking Sphere.
Over three decades later, the album sounds as good as it ever did and the performance of each track at the Sphere has been one of the most spectacular concerts that people have ever seen, less like a concert and more like a wild rollercoaster ride through songs that still stand the test of time.
U2 still appear to have a long list of be grudgers, something that we Irish seem to do particularly well. But there are few bands who can create an album with hit after hit from dance floor smashes to ballads that have been covered by countless peers.
Achtung Baby is an album that changed the face of music and so should be celebrated as such, particularly when U2 have managed to do that again so it rightly deserves its Classic Album title.
The main prize — the winning Irish Album of the Year 2023 — will be announced at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize live event in Vicar St on March 7 and will be broadcast on RTÉ 2FM in a special four-hour extended show with Beta Da Silva from 711pm. A special TV show will be broadcast on March 14 at 10.30pm on RTÉ2.
The fabulous Tracy Clifford will announce the Irish Song of the Year on her 2FM show on the day of the live event and present it to the winner in Vicar St that night. Tracy will also host the live event in Vicar Street. The winning Album of the Year act will receive €10,000, a prize fund which has been provided by The Irish Music Rights Organisation and The Irish Recorded Music Association.