24 October 1991
Deep down, did U2 really change all that much on Achtung Baby? Where they had gone west for The Joshua Tree and Rattle And Hum to chase their idea of US blues and gospel, now they went east to chase the spirit of Bowie’s Berlin albums. On ‘The Fly’, our entrée to Achtung Baby, we still have Adam plodding out one-note bass chords, Edge heavily dependent on pedals and effects to mask basic guitar playing, and Bono trotting out tired rockisms like the “child” he tags to the end of every verse.
Most of the transformation here is superficial: dance beats, industrial treatments, shiny trousers. Bono’s stage whisper on ‘The Fly’, not too far removed from Right Said Fred’s come-hither vocal fry on ‘I’m Too Sexy’, is still stagey and contrived; other Achtung Baby tracks will show that the earnest shouty Bono hadn’t gone away. Lyrically, his taste for showy aphorisms was now less Biblical (though that hadn’t gone away for Achtung Baby either) and more Wildean, but that was just a different way of being showy. I’ll give him some credit, though: cool shades.
I remember being underwhelmed by the sombre flatness of ‘The Fly’ when I first heard it on the radio in 1991. I see now, though, how it was the obvious choice as lead single for Achtung Baby; it’s the track that has the most of ‘new’ U2 upfront, including Bono’s Fly persona. As a song, though, the clever aphoristic lyrics and flashy modern effects are really all you get, plus its titanium self-belief that we’d be so agog with marvel at hearing this radical new U2 that we wouldn’t mind that ‘The Fly’ doesn’t have a hook or even a tune. The rest of the album, including its singles, sounds pretty much like the old U2 but with those cosmetic changes painted on like ironic go-faster stripes. Take away the post-modernism and Situationism of the Zoo TV hullabaloo and you still have a stiff, humourless stadium rock band, just with better marketing. That said, give me ‘The Fly’ over any of the big-hat songs from The Joshua Tree or Rattle And Hum any day.
