11 May 1985
Bono and Adam had been part of Band Aid, but this is the first actual U2 Irish number one single. Not the more obvious ‘I Will Follow’ or ‘New Year’s Day’ or ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ or even ‘Pride (In The Name Of Love)’, but the second single from the album of the same name, a hit that hasn’t lived long in the memory of the general music fan. ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ isn’t even a typical U2 track: it’s synth-driven, without the usual big rousing chorus, and has barely any Edge guitar. Why should this have been the U2 single that finally gets to number one?
One answer may be that very same un-U2-ness. Those harmonics and atmospherics are the trademark of new co-producer Brian Eno, doing for U2 what Nile Rodgers did for one of Eno’s previous production clients on ‘Let’s Dance’: re-tooling their sound for an ’80s stadium-sized pop audience. Ironically, U2’s star-making performance two months later at Live Aid was based on their core values of guitars and preaching, probably pushing those synths into a permanent back seat as a result. The Joshua Tree would still feature plenty of atmospheric shimmer but delivered mostly through guitar effects.
Lyrically, ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ is a lot more, well, lyrical than Bono’s habitual aphorisms and sloganeering. In fact, its conspicuously florid slant has a lot in common with another big ’80s band and their 1985 mega-hit: compare Bono’s “red wine that punctures the skin” to “the lover’s rosy stain” of that summer’s Bond theme, ‘A View To A Kill’. Add the shared bombast, titanium self-belief and lead singer seemingly impervious to ridicule, and suddenly it all makes sense: could it be that ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ got to number one because it sounds like U2 channelling their inner Duran Duran? They don’t succeed on those terms; their innate lack of humour or sexiness still makes this an overbearing chore, and Duran have far better tunes anyway. That said, U2 will rarely sound this interesting or curious again.
Irish Number Ones 