And I Have No Compass
On both counts – the running and the falling down – movement is essentially improvisatory.
“”There’s a line in, I think, the New Testament,” Bono told Joe Jackson of Hot Press before Zooropa was released, “which says that the spirit moves and no one knows where it comes from or where it's going. It's like a wind. I’ve always felt that way about my faith. That’s why on Zooropa I say I’ve got no religion. Because I believe that religion is the enemy of God. Because it denies the spontaneity of the spirit and the almost anarchistic nature of the spirit.”” This embodies itself in lines such as “And I have no compass/And I have no map” from Zooropa and in U2’s improvisatory approach to creating music and writing lyrics:
“On the road, U2 are constantly working informally on new ideas. As a matter of course, rehearsals and sound-checks are recorded. Frequently the germ of something new will emerge as the band improvise their way through a series of rhythm patterns and chord changes … U2 songs often proceed along parallel tracks. On the one side, a set of musical ideas is taking shape. On the other, Bono and The Edge are developing bits of titles, lyrics, choruses and whatever other scraps of ideas have suggested themselves. The real heartache starts when they begin the process of bringing these different elements together.”
A Sort of Homecoming
Improvisation leads to two further characteristics of their spirituality, allusiveness and reconciliation. U2 have been vociferously criticised at times for didactic preaching and yet this has always been an approach they have tried to avoid. There can, of course, be a big gap between what people say and what people do. U2 did not always stick to their good intentions but, they did have good intentions, did generally acknowledge when they had fallen down and did get up, dust themselves down and try again.
There were also times when they did succeed, both in their songs and in performance. The best U2 songs are either impressionist sketches or aphoristic paradoxes. ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is an example of the former while ‘The Fly’ is an example of the latter. Niall Stokes has described ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ as an “impressionistic reverie … written in a dreamy, cinematic style” but with a “constant sense of movement propelling the song” through the intermingling of sex, spirituality, death and resurrection. There is, he says, “a sense in the lyrics that things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold" but also a sense of reassurance from the control that the writer has over the poetry and ideas.
Conversely, ‘The Fly’ has a specific sense of place – Hell – and a much sharper and wittier, but ultimately no less enigmatic, turn of phrase:
“I became very interested in these single-line aphorisms,” Bono states. “I’d been writing them. So I got this character [The Fly] to say them all, from ‘A liar won’t believe anybody else’ to ‘A friend is someone who lets you down’. And that’s where ‘The Fly’ was coming from … It was written like a phone call from hell, but the guy liked it there,” Bono told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. “It was this guy running away – ‘Hi honey, it’s hot but I like it here’.”
This same allusiveness can also be seen in performance through a use of symbolic gesture. For part of their ZooTV tour U2 included live broadcasts from war engulfed Sarajevo in the show. This brought accusations of bad taste from some critics but for others it was a means of realisation:
"The fact that it felt so awkward, that the thing sat so badly in the show, is a way of saying to this huge audience, 'There are things that can't be accommodated easily, and that are painful and awkward and you can't homogenise them into the rest of the world'. I thought exactly the awkwardness of it, the ill-fittingness, was what made it memorable. I've never been made in a rock and roll show, to feel the pain of the world before".
This allusive language both lyrically and in performance has resonances with the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s suggestion that society needs to develop a language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. It may be that U2 have moved from proclaiming truth to testing the style, substance and patterning of truth. That they may be, in however limited a fashion, exploring the message of standing back, coincidence and growing tenderness from the acceptance of complexities.
That this is so, may also be seen in their reconciliatory intent and practice. ‘New Years Day’, for example, contains the line, “Though torn in two we can be one”. This is reconciliation in a lyric that - through images of separated lovers returning home and of a united crowd at a Solidarity rally - links public and private in the injunction to be one. War, the album from which ‘New Years Day’ comes, is, paradoxically, about surrender.
War was the outcome of internal conflicts between individual members of the band and the demands of their Christian faith, as they understood it at the time. Their reconciliation of these conflicts came, in part, from the understanding that Christianity did not divide body from spirit or sacred from secular. Instead these were, at best, reconciled and, at least, held together in tension.
Reconciliation is also embodied in their activism and working methods. U2 do not simply sing about the world’s woes they also take practical actions to address them, whether this is contributing to concerts/records to raise charitable funds, symbolic actions such as their Sellafield protest for Greenpeace, or, most significantly, Bono’s campaigning for debt relief through Jubilee 2000.
In their working method, scraps or fragments of music and lyrics are combined to create something that is larger than the sum of the parts. Adam Clayton describes this as being "not just a playing thing - it's a whole supportive role within the commune". John Waters has identified this sense of unity as a key feature in the impact of U2:
"As in no other band that I am aware of it, the music of U2 is a unity of all its parts. There is no sense that the music can be divided into its constituent elements - into voice, guitar, rhythm section, backing, accompaniment. It comes to you whole, maybe because that is the way it is imagined. The Edge plays the guitar, as Bono sings, Larry hits the drums or Adam plays the bass, not as an end in itself, but in order to serve the song. Voice and instruments are united in a single purpose: they tell the story".
U2’s spirituality, their language of reconciliation is not just about words - the lyrics are allusive containing hints and glimpses - but is also about the friendship between the four band members, their approach to composition and performance, the relationships and approach of their organisation. Their spirituality then, is a combination of words and actions and of on-stage and off-stage, characterised by movement, allusion, symbolism and action, aiming to express honesty, integrity and wholeness.
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U2 - Zoo Station.
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