Trivia / U2

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• Banned in Myanmar: The Burmese government didn't take well that "Walk On" was an homage to dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and banned its album.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: Arguably, the aforementioned "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me". Depends on how well you (want to) remember Batman Forever.
• Breakthrough Hit: War (U2 Album) as an album. "I Will Follow" was their first charting single, but it was a low-charting one, while War's first single "New Year's Day" cemented them as stars (and "Sunday Bloody Sunday", the third single from the same album, is even more popular).
• Corpsing: In the "Numb" video when the two women are kissing him, The Edge is doing a terrible job of trying not to smile.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Larry has been vocal in his dislike for Original Soundtracks 1, having said "There's a thin line between interesting music and self-indulgence. We crossed it on the Passengers record.", and added in 2002, "It hasn't grown on me. However, 'Miss Sarajevo' is a classic." Bono seems to have a better opinion, since in response to the last statement, he joked that the only reason Larry dislikes the album is "because we didn't let him play the drums!".
  • Bizarrely given the acclaim it was greeted with, some of the band members seem to have soured on Zooropa since its release. (Adam seems to be the lone holdout, describing it as "a favorite record of mine".)
    Bono: I thought of Zooropa at the time as a work of genius. I really thought our pop discipline was matching our experimentation and this was our Sgt. Pepper. I was a little wrong about that. The truth is our pop disciplines were letting us down. We didn't create hits. We didn't quite deliver the songs. And what would Sgt. Pepper be without the pop songs?
    The Edge: The songs are not classics but they are more experimental and interesting than classic pop songs. This is something we don't necessarily care to do anymore. We don't go down the road with a piece of music just because it's unusual. That's not enough for us now. We want something that's potent and some of these songs are not particularly potent.
  • The band members are essentially unanimous that their worst mistake about Pop was to allow their manager to schedule the tour ahead of schedule, and have consistently expressed frustration that the resulting deadline and time-crunch that plagued the sessions meant some songs were not recorded satisfactorily. They later re-recorded or remixed songs from the album for the compilation The Best of 1990-2000.
    Bono: Pop wasn't a party. It was the hangover after the party
  • The band was a bit iffy with No Line on the Horizon due to the low sales of the record, however the 360 World Tour made up for it.
  • In his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono stated that the Surprise Release of Songs of Innocence — specifically, into every iTunes account on the planet for free, without asking people first — was a terrible idea.
    Bono: I take full responsibility... I'd thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite.
• Chart Displacement: One of the band's top 10 hits is "Discotheque", out of the derided Pop and sidelined even by the band itself (the tour following that album still featured the song, but its only full appearances ever since have been in two 2005 concerts). It's also easily one of their lesser-known singles all in all.
  • While better-known than "Discotheque", "The Fly" is also not one of the band's best-known songs, despite technically being one of their biggest hits.
  • Downplayed but still present in the case of the hits from War. "New Year's Day" is, technically, the band's international Breakthrough Hit and is still a well-received and popular song, but not to the extent of "Sunday Bloody Sunday", which, instead, was not released as a single in many countries (though it was a top 10 hit in the US and Netherlands).
• Creator Breakdown: "One" was written when the band was on the verge of breakup.
• Cut Song: Tons, most notably a song called "Mercy" cut from the How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb sessions. Hasn't stopped it from becoming (in)famous throughout the fandom when a low-quality version leaked, however. And now they're playing it live!
  • One such live performance received an official release on the limited edition vinyl Wide Awake in Europe in 2010.
• Inspiration for the Work: Once U2 were honored by the city of Dublin alongside Aung San Suu Kyi, who was absent, Bono learned that was because said activist was in a house arrest that by then was a decade long (and would extend for another), and decided to write something based on her story in "Walk On". She later told him she likes the song.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: U2 3D, originally released in 2008, has never been released on home video and hasn't been seen theatrically since a 2015 re-release in Spain. The band has gone on record saying it won't be issued on Blu-ray or elsewhere until home video technology can reach the same 3D standards as movie theaters... and a decade and a half later, it seems this is still the case.
• Named Like My Name: The Edge's real name, David Evans, also happens to be the name of the very first lead singer for AC/DC.
• Old Shame
  • During an interview with Jonathan Ross, he plays a video of the band on one of their amateur concerts. Bono's reaction is priceless.
  • Both the band themselves and director Phil Joanou are ashamed of how pretentious the Rattle and Hum documentary made them look.
  • Bono has considered his poorly-received spoken word Cover Version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", which was recorded for a Cohen tribute album in 1995 to be this and publicly apologised for it in a December 2012 interview with Mojo.
• The Other Darrin: Two consecutive concerts were scheduled for Sydney on 26-27 November 1993, but Adam Clayton missed the first one because of an alcoholic blackout, and had to be replaced by the tour's bass technician, Stuart Morgan. This was the first (and for many years, only) time a member of U2 missed one of their shows - Clayton recovered sufficiently to play at the next day's concert, which was filmed and released as Zoo TV: Live from Sydney.
  • Larry Mullen's ongoing recovery from surgery in late 2023 forced him to sit out the U2:UV concert residency in Las Vegas, with Bram van den Berg of the Dutch band Krezip filling in on drums.
• The Pete Best: The Edge's brother, Dik Evans, was a member of the band in their early years, when they were known as "Feedback" and, later, "The Hype". Dik, who was older and had begun attending college, was gradually phased out of the band after they began to prefer a four-piece lineup. This culminated in a farewell show, where the band performed a set as The Hype, allowed Dik to leave the stage midway through the show, and continued the show as U2.
• Rarely Performed Song: The band has a fair share of songs that never had a life performance or barely a few, and certain albums (Zooropa, Pop, and the ones from No Line on the Horizon onward) have many which were played during the associated tour but vanished in later ones. One that the band deliberately took off the setlist was "Exit", after Robert John Bardo (murderer of actress Rebecca Shaeffer) claimed that the song influenced his actions, only giving it another shot during the tour where The Joshua Tree was played in its entirety.
• Real-Life Relative: Bono's father Bob Hewson appears in the "One" video directed by Anton Corbijn, and Bono's wife Ali Hewson is the woman who gets into the car in the video for "The Sweetest Thing".
• Release Date Change: Pop was set for a November 1996 release but due to the production overruns of the album, the band had to delay it until March 1997 to finish the postproduction.
  • Songs of Experience was originally planned for a late 2016 release but due to recent events happening at the time, the band decided to postpone it to work on more new songs for the album.
• Throw It In!: The Edge's guitar solo on the live version of "Party Girl" from Under A Blood Red Sky is...less than fluent.
• Troubled Production: October (Bono lost his notebooks and thus the songs were made from scratch in a rush), Achtung Baby (the band was threatening to split amidst many Creative Differences) and Pop (time constraints due to Larry undergoing surgery and creative snags forced the band to work at a hectic pace) are their most notable examples.
• What Could Have Been: The band's debut album Boy was meant to be produced by Martin Hannett, who had already produced their debut single "11 O'Clock Tick Tock". However, he ended up backing out of the project after the suicide of Joy Division's frontman Ian Curtis, as Hannett had spent the past two years working closely with them as their producer and was left too emotionally shaken by Curtis's death to work.
  • Zooropa was originally planned to be an EP, however Bono felt the songs written for it and were not planned to be such were too good not to be included, so it ultimately became a full-length album.
  • "Your Blue Room" was planned to be the second single from Original Soundtracks 1 but the poor performance of the Passengers album nixed it though it would be released as a B-side for "Staring at the Sun" less than two years later.
  • The original ideas for No Line on the Horizon:
    • It was originally going to be produced by Rick Rubin but despite recording an album's worth of songs, the band felt the material didn't feel right for them, so it was ultimately scrapped with two songs from said sessions (their Cover Version of Skids' "The Saints Are Coming" with Green Day and "Window in the Skies") being released as new material for their Greatest Hits Album U218 Singles.
    • It was going to be a two-part EP titled Daylight and Darkness but during the sessions, it was decided to turn it into a full-length album instead.
  • Songs of Ascent was going to be the sequel to No Line on the Horizon and would've been set for a 2010 release with "Every Breaking Wave" being the lead single, but the band decided retool the project into Songs of Innocence. Not only that, but they were also working on a dance-centric album produced by David Guetta, RedOne and will.i.am at the same time, which was ultimately discarded by the band to focus on working on Songs of Innocence.
  • They were supposed to perform on Saturday Night Live for the season 13 (1987-88) finale on May 14, 1988, which would have been hosted by Gilda Radner. However that episode got scrapped due to the 1988 Writers Guild strike. They wouldn't perform on SNL till season 26 (2000-01) on December 9, 2000.
  • As part of an ongoing urban renewal program in Dublin's Docklands, the city of Dublin cut a deal with the band that would've given them their very own skyscraper, U2 Tower. Yes, an entire skyscraper just for a rock band. Had it been built, the massive luxury apartment/condo complex would've been Ireland's tallest building, with a penthouse suit for the band to live and record music in. But the Great Recession, which hit Ireland particularly hard, led to those plans being cancelled. The site where U2 Tower would've been built was later used to build Capital Dock Tower.
• Working Title:
  • Achtung Baby had several proposed titles, including Man (a response to their first album, Boy), Cruise Down Main Street (a Shout-Out to Exile on Main St. by The Rolling Stones), Fear of Women, 69, Adam (which would have featured a nude photo of Adam Clayton on the front cover; said photo ultimately appeared as part of the back cover's collage), and Zoo Station (a reference to the opening track).
  • Squeaky for Zooropa.
  • Discola, Miami, Mi@mi, Novelty Act, Super City Mania, YOU2, Godzilla, Pop for Men and Pop Pour Hommes for Pop.
  • Songs of Ascent and 10 Reasons to Exist for Songs of Innocence.

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