THE FLY ON THE WALL
Producer STEVE LILLYWHITE SHEDS SOME EXTRA LIGHT on the October and Achtung Baby sessions
STEVE LILLYWHITE HAS a very unique distinction; he’s been witness to the monumental rise of U2. The band initially approached him to record their debut album, 1980’s Boy. After a lengthy tour, U2 was running on fumes and looking for direction. So they turned to Lillywhite to help them craft October.
“My first thought was, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ because in those days, I had this strange, almost moralistic approach that artists should work with as many producers as possible,” Lillywhite says. “As a producer, I could work with as many artists as I wanted, so why would they have to only have one producer when I could go and work with different artists? But they were happy with how I worked with them on
Boy, so when they said, ‘No, we want you to do our next album,’ I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”
U2 became the first band with whom he’d recorded two albums. The band was very unprepared this time around, partly because Bono was starting from scratch after losing a suitcase full of lyrics during the Boy tour. However, Lillywhite notes that the Edge was the glue that held everything together.
“It was definitely more fraught than the first album… not so much musically, although it was a little slower musically,” Lillywhite says. “Edge is one of those incredibly patient people who really only has one speed, and that’s slow and methodical. He’s the scientist of the band, and he really only goes at this one steady speed, whereas Bono is running around like a headless chicken most of the time. Edge just holds it all down and holds it all together. He — dare I say — is the sensible one in the band.
“I’ve been with Edge where he can literally spend days working on the sound,” he continues. “He can just be experimenting with a sound for days, but when it actually comes to recording his part, he will record it in one go. It’s almost like when you paint a wall, you spend all your time on the preparation, and when you actually do the painting, it takes no time at all. That’s what he was so good at.”
Lillywhite also came in to work with the band in the later stages of the Achtung Baby sessions — after they’d worked with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno.
“At that point, they’d become the biggest band in the world — a very, very different thing. And it’s like, ‘Let’s go to Berlin because that’s where David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Lou Reed went to make records,’ so they went to Berlin,” Lillywhite says. “For me, where U2 succeeded best on any of their albums is when they get the big picture of an album. That was the big-picture idea for The Joshua Tree — and that worked.
Achtung Baby, the big picture was Eastern Europe, and that worked so well.
“When they left Berlin, they had sketches; they didn’t really have everything finished. At this point, my job had changed. I’ve gone from being the guy who was the producer, the main leader in the studio... The production team became a bit more like a relay race in the Olympics where the baton was passed to me for the final leg. Basically, Danny Lanois and Brian Eno were pretty tired because the band had really kept pushing them, so it was like they needed some fresh energy. It was like they passed the baton to me, and I took it over the finishing line. I got ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing,’ which works pretty well.
“They’re still the same people, just bigger versions of what they were at the beginning,” he adds. “The Edge has banks of everything, effects. And he’d pretty much gone from one guitar on Boy to having just about everything that was possible that you could have.
ZOO STATION
Lillywhite recalls his favorite moments from both albums:
• “With ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing,’ I think the better versions are the remixes, which boosted the rhythms more. It’s quite a dance-y track, and I think the version we did on the album didn’t quite make the most of all that.”
• “I enjoyed the slide guitar on ‘I Threw a Brick Through a Window’ as well as the guitar halfway through ‘Tomorrow,’ which has an amazing sound — it’s not a sound that I’d ever heard from Edge up until that point on that album.”
• “‘Fire’ [from October] was recorded in the Bahamas. Weirdly, it was done separately
“Edge was always the tempo, the metronome for the band… HE DIDN’T FOLLOW LARRY — LARRY FOLLOWED THE EDGE”
So as we went into the songwriting, I felt this was definitely an area we could move into as a band and develop.
How did you put those sounds into action?
Put very simply, I just felt like U2 had the potential to swing in a way we hadn’t up to that point. And so, I think that was the first time I actually had my own recording studio. The first and only time, since I don’t these days, but that was a great freedom for me as well. I was able to use the studio again on my own as a rising tool, and using drum machines, mostly. I didn’t tend to sample myself because in the end I knew Larry would be playing the drums, so it was more a songwriting and a production tool. But from a guitar point of view, again, it was like I was on the hunt for sounds I’d never heard, that we’re going to be startling to the other members of the band, and our audience, because that, I found over the years, was always the inspiration that got people excited and got people focused.
What were some examples of that?
I had an array of different effects units we brought first to Berlin and then back to Dublin after the first sessions. The album was originally started in demo form in Dublin, in a little studio we always used around that time called STS. It was a wonderful, tiny little space in central Dublin. And the kind of ergonomics of it meant we were on top of each other the whole time. Ideas always seemed to come easily to us there. Surprisingly, we always came out of that little studio with the beginnings of something we knew we could build on.
We did our week or two-week session in STS, and out of it came a bunch of very basic ideas, but nothing finished. And then I did a little more work at home, and then we went to Berlin. In Berlin we kind of would try out this combination of the ideas we’d worked up together at STS, plus some of the stuff I’d worked up at home. We had a little bit of a wobble in Berlin at first. We were there with just Danny Lanois. I think “Flood” [Mark “Flood” Ellis, engineer] would have been there, too. But our songs weren’t really taking flight in the way we had hoped they would. The room was huge at Hansa Studios in Berlin. It wasn’t an intimate space, so we didn’t have the benefit of that close proximity that we had in Dublin. We floundered for a while.
How’d you overcome that challenge?
I remember there was a clear division — Bono and Edge were pushing forward with these new thoughts and ideas, musically. Adam and Larry were, I guess, early on open, and then as things didn’t start to fall into place, started to get very skeptical. So it was this kind of sense of, “Have we bitten off more than we can chew as a band? Are we trying to kind of make up a huge adjustment in a very short space of time, maybe beyond our capability to really reinvent ourselves and make such a hard turn where we are actually in danger of coming off on the bend?”
We persevered through difficult few weeks, and the breakthrough track, which sort of got us back on track was actually “Mysterious Ways.” I’d come up with this amazing guitar sound, which I laid on top of a very rhythmic track we’d worked up. I think it was, at that point, called “Sick Puppy” because it was such a rhythm thing. It initially was a drum machine, a bass and then this crazy guitar sound, but it wasn’t really a song. To be fair to Adam and Larry, it was kind of an idea for a song. So I was fighting very hard for it to make the record. They were looking at me like, what is this? It’s just a very funky verse, but that’s all it is. And so, I’m trying to come up with parts we could add to that verse to turn it into a full-fledged song.
There’s a couple of ideas that were tried [but] really didn’t work. And then I go off to another room and I work up a few different options, come back in the room, and I’m like, “Okay, here’s option A.” And I play, I think, it was A minor, D, F, G, which is slightly strange sequence, but everyone, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then I said, “Option B is C, A minor, F, C. That’s my second.” And Danny just went, “Hey, play those one after the other. Forget the other song, just play those two chord progressions.” So, I played one into the next. And he had heard something, and he was totally on it, which is why it’s very important to work with great producers. And everyone just went, “Yeah, that’s interesting.” So, I think I just took the acoustic guitar in the room, and we started playing around with these two chord sequences, and everyone just went, “Whoa, this is really, this has got gravitas. This has got — whatever it is we’re looking for — this has got that quality.”
We played for about 10 or 15 minutes, and Bono started singing in the room with us, and effectively, almost in real time, the song “One” came together, compositionally. Lyrically it took a little while, but pretty quickly the idea of “One” emerged. It seemed almost like that song was written on a universal basis but was almost our own story. It was the song we needed as a band to keep us sort of together and on track and unified. It was a little autobiographical as much as it was an attempt to tap into some sort of universal truth.
How did “One” develop into its final version?
That song was acoustic guitar for a very long time because that was the sort of jumping-off point. But when Brian [Eno] came along a few weeks later to Berlin, he loved it. He loved so much of what we were