Adam Clayton has just had his breakfast and is preparing to hit the gym. "I'm full of beans!" he tells me via Zoom from his house in south Dublin.
Clayton, the man who has been U2’s bass ace for nearly fifty years, is gearing back into action following the end of the band’s forty-night residency in Las Vegas venue The Sphere and he, The Edge, Bono and, yes, Larry Mullen are currently back in studio working on a new album.
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How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, U2’s eleventh studio album, was wildly successful even by their standards. Led by the career-high single Vertigo, it sold nine million copies (including 150,000 in Ireland), won eight Grammys, and spawned further hits with Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own and City of Blinding Lights.
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb came out twenty years ago and as is often the case with U2, it had a difficult birth. Bono and Edge wanted to release it but you and Larry Mullen didn't. Larry said it "lacked magic" . . .
"I think we reached a point where we thought we hadn’t made the album we thought we’d get out of the recording sessions. We were very excited about going in with Chris Thomas (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Sex :Pistols) because he has an amazing history of making great sounding records and not getting too much in the way of the songs and recording everything fairly straight.
"That was our theory going into this record and that’s why there is a lot of material that ended up on the shadow record. But when we were reassessing the album back in 2004, we just didn’t feel it had the kind of magic we like to have on a U2 record sonically. So, we said `call a halt and let’s regroup’ so that was what we did. It was really an opportunity to reassess. We have a kind of council of members who we run stuff past, and Steve Lillywhite is on that council, and so is Brian Eno, and so is Daniel Lanois and Jackknife Lee, and a few other people who know what we're capable of."
Listening to the songs that Edge has taken from those abandoned sessions, it sounds like you were copping an ear to a lot of new acts like The Hives, The Strokes and The White Stripes back then. Were you looking to get that rawness back into your sound?
"Yeah. We were coming off All That You Can’t Leave Behind and we felt up-tempo three-minute rock songs was where we wanted to be. And so, there are a few different versions of that goal. And obviously Vertigo is by far and away the most successful of those, but also I think All Because of You carries that same energy. City of Blinding Lights at the time felt a little bit more European and possibly even synth-y but that's probably the way I interpret it. But it was a great song that had the live band feel."
Vertigo was a particularly impressive moment. It’s rare that a band of U2’s vintage can pull something as strong as that out of the bag so far along in their career . . .
"It's got a little bit of everything in there. In the middle eight, which `is all of this. all of this can be yours,’ we really did say to Edge to try and channel a guitar sound that he might have used on Boy. So, in the roots of that song we were going back to our very, very early days of starting out. Vertigo was a song that we would have liked to have had on our first album if we'd been accomplished enough, but it took us about 20 years to come up with it."
Thematically, the title may refer to Bono addressing personal issues after the death of his dad. But 2004 was a particularly febrile year, and the album does engage with what was going on globally, doesn't it?
"There was talk at the time that that there was such a thing as a dirty bomb which was left-over nuclear waste, which in the wrong hands could be assembled into a suitcase and detonated in any major city. So, it's interesting that a lot has changed in the 20 years since this record was made, I mean the Middle East is so unstable now, and we are in in the midst of an awful war in Europe.
"And even, dare I say it, the way records are made and the way music is consumed in those 20 years has changed dramatically. It's all streaming now and I think that's affected the type of music that's been made. There are very few rock bands out there that make any impression on whatever particular chart. Rock music seems to have been denigrated over those 20 years.
"So, what was refreshing for us was when we were looking at this record and Edge found the demos of these old songs, they were pretty much crystallized as live takes of a band playing together, which is not any particular skill, but it's something that is not really done in recorded music anymore, where the sound of the room, and the chemistry of the people playing has an impact and has a value.
"Of the new old songs, The Luckiest Man in the World is tremendous - it’s the sound of a band listening to each other. We all gathered around Picture of You and said, that's one of the great leftover tracks that we should have put it out at the time. But you make decisions for whatever reasons, and you move on."
U2 have lived through many ages of music, from punk to post-punk to the dance crossover in the nineties. Do you think it's beholden upon you to reclaim the rock band as an actual thing?
"I think we were right over the years to pursue the changes in music and to seek those other sounds, because that's what we were interested in. I think we've had 20 years of people not playing instruments, not making music together, but programming on their laptops in bedrooms or offices or backrooms of some sort or another, and it makes for a different kind of music. And now we need to come together as a community. There's a lot that we need each other for to get through right now at this moment."
U2 are still a political band but is it harder to be a political band in the current culture?
"Yes, I mean I think we came out of a period of history where we suddenly were able to get our hands on the media and we were able to use that to get out a message. Bob Geldof did it with Live Aid and Do They Know it's Christmas. Ever since then, there has been this notion that pop stars and celebrities in general could step into any situation and change the outcome. And I think that's naive. But it was certainly appropriate back in the eighties and nineties. But I think nowadays you can't step into what is effectively a war and change the outcome. I wish it was different. But if seeing conflict on television every night in your front room doesn't motivate people to rise up and march against whatever the particular tyranny being represented is . . . Then I don't think a pop star is going to be able to do that, or indeed a rock musician."
The Sphere gigs in Vegas looked like you were playing underneath an animated version of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In terms of your own personal input, did you just bask in the whole experience or was everybody in U2 involved in the concept?
"Well, we were given the heads up on it a year, maybe 18 months, before we actually started playing. So, we started to look at the tech and look at the possibilities. We have a creative team of people that come in and advise us on these things. So generally, I would say we were involved. I mean, we certainly went to enough meetings about what was going to happen and what the tech was like and what the building was like, and we certainly viewed enough mock-ups and that sort of thing. It is a collaborative and cooperative process to bring these sorts of shows to fruition. I think in the case of U2, we were uniquely able to do it because of our history of the way we work. Two tracks working to time code, working to tempos and that goes back to things like the Pop album and Achtung Baby! That was where we started to know how to visualize and sync images in a way that hadn't been done before."
It's a question you're often asked but how did it feel when you turned around and Larry wasn't there behind the drum kit in Vegas?
"You know, it's a sobering moment. You never really want to face the fact that there's an empty space in your band, someone who has been there since you were 16. But, obviously, when a band has a long history as ours now has, which was totally unexpected . . . we are fragile human beings and health issues do arise. And, of course, we all like to operate way beyond our physical capacity these days."
Larry is back in the studio, I believe . . .
"Yeah. Larry's taken a lot of advice. He's gone through a lot of physical re-education and all those sorts of things to get him into the sort of condition he'd like to be in to be able to perform again. We're taking it one step at a time. He has done some studio work with us, and he's going to do more studio work with us, and we hope that leads to a completed album with Larry playing drums on it."
Finally, can you tell us anything about the sessions for the album you are working on now? There was talk that U2 might have something out next year and then do a European tour. Is that currently the plan?
"It's currently the plan but I hate to jump the gun because it raises expectations. I am excited about going into the studio with the other three members of U2 because I think, yet again, that none of us would be in the studio if we didn't think we had something to offer. I think we're ready. I think we know a lot more about what we do and a lot more about ourselves to make a record that we think represents where we are and what our view is on the way things are. That's why we make records. And we think we're in a pretty good position to do that right now."
The remastered re-issue of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and How to Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb are out now
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