From the Sky Down Page #4

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"Make a few adjustments.

Yeah, it's sort of...

"Is it me? Yeah, it's kinda me. "

You can hear like

Bono's trying to find himself in this.

If you had that kind of genius

that you could just sit on the groove,

it's actually a great groove.

It's just...

There's just no song there.

This is not Larry.

This is the drum machine,

so it's got no personality.

It's just...

It's not all right, in fact.

In Dublin,

I had a little studio in the house.

The two of us worked together,

just going through

possible melodic ideas.

It just didn't... go anywhere.

The idea of going away

to a remote location,

and recording away from home,

was kind of already in the air,

and I think Hansa must have been

the number one candidate.

It was, I think,

the feeling of being somewhere where

there was a culture collision going on.

There was a tension.

Just a natural tension there.

If drama is conflicts,

you're going to end up

in these kinds of places.

Hansa?

Yeah, it's a great rock and roll room -

a lot of good records were made there.

We'd heard about it from Brian Eno.

He'd been here

with David Bowie, obviously.

The engineer that we got very close to

and was also a co-producer, Flood,

had worked in Berlin before.

From about '84/'83

there were a variety of different artists.

Bono said,

"We want to go to Hansa. "

"We want to soak up that atmosphere. "

It was like, "OK, brilliant. "

You took Iggy Pop to Berlin

to make his records.

I think it's a very good therapeutic city

for an artist to go to,

to come back to,

not the punk street level,

but a real street level,

where you have to do things

for yourself,

where nobody

will take any notice of you.

I was totally anonymous in Berlin.

Suddenly you're creating

a kind of crucible -

it's like a focussed capsule,

where it's just the group of you.

Eno was always a bit frustrated

by the domesticity

of the rock band, if you like.

It makes sense to break away

for a little while

and let the thing go

kind of out of control.

We just felt we wanted to get away

to a place

where we were much more focussed

on making the record.

We didn't have to, you know,

deal with all the other paraphernalia

that surrounds us in Dublin.

Plumbers to talk to

and interior decorators.

Interior decorators

are the death of recording, actually.

The idea was to do something

that had its roots

partly in club culture...

something very rhythmic.

So, we started out

by using a drum machine in Dublin,

programming this very intricate

polyrhythmic beat with a lot of swing -

a place that U2

would never go to normally.

We were trying to find our way

into dance,

a kind of groove music,

that wasn't cliched.

We were very much reacting to

that shift away from Americana.

Behind the workings

of all of those songs,

was this awareness of the rhythmic

sophistication had to kind of come up.

So we were the last flight in

to the old divided Berlin.

It was British Airways'

last one in the sky.

Therefore,

the pilot could just circle Berlin.

And he had a very plummy accent...

"We are just going down

over the Brandenburg Gate.

"As you know, we have the skies

to ourselves tonight,

"and we're just going to take

a little tour over here.

"This is the wall. "

And we're like...

And there was a little bit of 'bombs away'

about it, no doubt about it.

More than a million Germans are out

on the streets of Berlin tonight...

...celebrating the birth

of a united Germany

in what is once again its official capital.

We went looking

for the celebrations,

because we're Irish

and we like to go out.

And we ended up

at a huge mass rally.

But people didn't really look like

they were having a very good time.

It was like grim. Very grim.

until we discovered that we weren't at

the celebration for the wall coming down,

we were at a protest meeting

to put the wall back up.

I can't recall this exact spot,

but I can recall it was behind

the houses that I'm looking at now.

The wall was here, somewhere.

The wall was here, I think.

And you had Hansa Studios,

then a lot of waste land

because nobody built near the wall.

It was just, you know, visually...

It was really interesting.

It's hard to beat a good wall

as a background for photographs,

so I was always

a very happy person here.

We ended up in this hotel

called the Palace Hotel,

which was a festival of brown,

meaning everything

in the f***ing hotel was brown.

Brown carpet,

brown...

I mean, East Berlin was brown -

brown knobs on the stereo,

brown, brown!

I was looking at a beautiful cathedral

that was nice, from the brown room,

in the brown hotel.

Every morning,

we'd drive into the studio,

and there'd be a new burnt-out Trabbi

on the side of the road.

This car had just made it from some

obscure part of East Germany,

and he just had to leave it

on the side of the road.

These were cars that people were driving

from the east side.

They were made from papier-mache,

they had two stroke engines

in them.

Potsdamer Platz,

the centre of the old Berlin,

has got a wall

built right through the middle of it.

There's a load of gypsies living there.

Crusty people,

beautiful souls, I'm sure.

In the great hippie tradition

of that city,

they'd been given rights

to live there.

When the wall was knocked down,

they owned the most prime real estate

in Germany.

Then there was Hansa Studios.

We're coming here

believing in improvisation.

We started out doing the same thing

that we'd always done,

which was look for the magic moments

when we played together.

So it allows the four of us

to be in the song writing process.

Even before we went there,

there was a sense

of something not quite right...

...and then when we got there,

we were on

completely different pages.

We would go into the room

and we would just bash it out,

hour after hour.

Listen back and not like anything

that we were doing.

This is unexpected.

We've got these great ideas,

sounded great in Dublin,

and now, we've hit Berlin

and, what's wrong here?

His marriage is breaking up.

It has broken up.

We're a really tight community.

This is not like

somebody's girlfriend's left,

we've grown up with these people -

this is our family, our community.

This was really hard for us,

and very difficult for my wife.

It was like the first cracks

on the beautiful porcelain jug,

with those beautiful flowers in it,

that was our music and our community

starting to go.

Leaving Dublin for Berlin was actually

in a weird way was a distraction,

a way to escape.

I was disappearing into the music

for a different reason, you know.

It was a refuge in a way.

That approach didn't completely work,

you know.

I wasn't really

in a good positive head space.

I was...

I was running away, I suppose.

I remember being in the studio

playing a guitar solo over

Love Is Blindness.

I've put everything into it.

All the feeling,

all the hurt, all the angst -

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