7 February 1997
Desperation: that’s the first thing I remember from ‘Discothèque’, the Pop album and the PopMart tour. How else can you explain U2 (a) dressing up as the Village People, and (b) looking so uncomfortable doing it? Seeing Larry so stiff and self-conscious in this video, you suddenly realise: ah, so that’s who’s been playing those stiff and self-conscious U2 tracks all this time! He is genuinely mortified to be there, though he didn’t seem to have any such qualms with them dressing up as American bluesmen for Rattle And Hum. For their new album-tour cycle U2 needed a new -ism and a new sound, so they went with irony and dance music, two things that just don’t work together. You can’t dance ironically, or at least not without coming across as humourless dad-rockers. On second thoughts, maybe for U2 this was the right combination.
The other thing I remember from that phase of U2 is the utter lack of songs. There just aren’t any strong songs on Pop; yes, they’re as clunky and laboured as all U2 songs are anyway, but with no memorable hooks, no anthemic moments. It doesn’t work as dance music and, crucially, doesn’t work as stadium rock music either. Remember, for all its nightclub-pumping aspirations the Pop material was still intended for a worldwide stadium tour where every song needed to reach the far end of a football pitch. The chorus hook of ‘Discothèque’ is Bono lumpenly intoning the word “discothèque”, a word in foreign to boot, and that’s not going to fire up the Idaho Enormodome. Achtung Baby and Zoo TV stuck the landing because underneath their Situationist aphorisms and industrial textures those songs were still plain old U2 soft rock anthems. I’m not a fan of U2 soft rock anthems but at least it was a thing they were able to do. This isn’t.
‘Discothèque’, then, is a single that fails in theory and fails in practice. The Edge’s guitar playing still sounds like the same chords but just with a different effects pedal. Even on a wannabe dance track, Adam still only gets a plodding bassline. That try-hard pre-chorus (“You know you’re chewing bubble gum / You know what that is but you still want some / You just can’t get enough of that lovey-dovey stuff”) wants us to think U2 are au fait with Ecstasy culture but comes across as a parish priest warning a class of teenagers about injecting pot. They’re that transparently staid and unconvincing.
None of the four other singles from Pop go to number one in Ireland; two of them even fail to crack the Irish top ten, the first time this had happened to any U2 single since ‘A Celebration’ in 1982. Their next chart topper here, the following year, will be a recycled old B-side from their first greatest hits compilation. Oh, the irony.
