U2 – ‘With Or Without You’

4 April 1987

‘With Or Without You’, the lead single for the new U2 album The Joshua Tree, was number one in Ireland for two weeks, just like ‘The Unforgettable Fire’, before being knocked off the top spot by another Irish record. It only got to number four in the UK charts, on a par with previous singles, behind Mel and Kim’s ‘Respectable’ and a charity single for victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. On that basis, there was no sign on this side of the Atlantic of any U2 breakthrough.

Their racing form in America was even less promising. Prior to ‘With Or Without You’, U2 had never had a top 10 US album; both War and The Unforgettable Fire had stalled at number 12. ‘Pride (In The Name Of Love)’ had been their only single to get into the Billboard top fifty. Suddenly, ‘With Or Without You’ goes to number one in the US singles charts, and everything else follows from that. What explains this?

The answer partly lies in that previous lack of mainstream US success. Here in Europe, U2 were successful from the off, and we saw them as another upwardly-mobile post-punk band, fans of The Clash and peers of Simple Minds and Echo and the Bunnymen. This influences how we see The Joshua Tree: we still think of them as rooted in alternative rock, so we pick up the more left-field elements like the serious lyrics and Brian Eno’s wash of atmospheric production.

On the other hand, outside of Live Aid, mainstream chart-populating America hadn’t much awareness of U2 or their back-story, so they hear in them things they are familiar with. And what appealed to the mainstream US record-buying public in the mid-’80s? Power ballads like Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, arena-sized fist-of-pure-emotion soft rock like Chicago’s ‘Hard To Say I’m Sorry’ and Foreigner’s ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, and glossily-produced adult contemporary rock like The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’. This is what makes ‘With Or Without You’ a surprise and massive US number one hit single; US audiences recognise it as a glossily-produced soft rock power ballad. Bono’s lyrics (“Sleight of hand and twist of fate / On a bed of nails she makes me wait”) are as blustery and vague as anything in ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, and the title is almost performatively meaningless.

I’d also throw in a lesson possibly learned from their fellow Live Aid alumni Queen and ‘Radio Ga Ga’: dumb it down. ‘With Or Without You’ is almost laughably basic; the infinite guitar—a dumbed-down ‘Heroes’ guitar part—is literally a single note stretched out, the bassline is just four notes, and the jangling guitar at the end is just the simple D chord that any guitar newbie learns on day one. Listening attentively to this song is the aural equivalent of having your food cut up for you.

So, ‘With Or Without You’ is a dumbed-down glossily-produced soft rock power ballad. And wait until you hear their next single: Christian rock. Lucky America, eh?