MAKING MUSIC
Inside the U2 Disney+ special
FROM “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” to “Beautiful Day,” U2 has made a legendary career out of its super earnest and passionate anthems. And their fearless leader Bono doesn’t care if his band’s unforgettable fire comes off as corny. “Brian Eno … said to us, ‘You know, you should not be concerned with things like being cool. That would be uncool for you. Just be yourselves,’ ” the 62-year-old Irishman says in “Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman ,”a docu-special premiering on Disney+ on March 17 — appropriately, St. Patrick’s Day. “You know, and I look back now, and I realize that’s U2’s thing: ecstatic music. Because [when] you’re in that studio, you have to have the courage to jump off the building and believe you can fly.” In the special — set in the group’s hometown of Dublin, which “His Daveness” visits for the first time along with his ever-wry wit — Bono also tells Letterman how one of U2’s signature anthems, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” changed for him after 9/11.
“I recall grappling with the concept of America and what it meant to me, and what it might mean around the world,” he says.
So when U2 performed the song at the Super Bowl just five months after the attacks, he knew that “this is a fragile moment” that required something even more moving than their usual rock heroics at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
“I wanted to use some exhortation, taking away normal spectacle and turning it into a monument of rolling names,” says Bono.
“The Super Bowl halftimes are a spectacle. But the greatest spectacles are emotions.”
And Bono explains the powerful meaning — or make that, feeling — behind the “unusual brew of a song” that is “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
“The lyric is not very fleshed out,” he says. “But the suggestion contained in the lyric is gigantic.
“And what it seems to suggest is, there’s a transcendent place we can go to together. Do you want to come?”
The 85-minute special arrives on the same day as U2’s “Songs of Surrender” album reimagining their classics. And stripped-down makeunders of titanic tunes such as “Vertigo,” “One” and the religion-inspired “Sunday Bloody Sunday” are performed live in concert with local musicians making up for the absence of injured drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and moonlighting bassist Adam Clayton — whose own nicknames we find out used to be The Jam Jar and Mrs. Burns, respectively. “In the isolation of the pandemic, it was almost like the question became, ‘What is left when everything is stripped away? Where do you take it?’ ” says guitarist The Edge. “And we asked ourselves the nervous question, ‘Is there any merit to these songs if you take away the firepower of a rock band like U2?’” And in a moment of raw vulnerability, Bono admits that even a rock god like him has his insecurities. “I’m rarely in my comfort zone,” he says. “And I think that’s been difficult for the band because I don’t let them be in it either. “For me, music and songwriting is just, you know, heart surgery.”