19 February 2009
‘Get On Your Boots’ is U2’s 21st Irish number one single – and their last. (Those 21 U2 Irish number ones fall neatly: seven in the ’80s, seven in the ’90s, and seven in the ’00s.) What’s more, 2009 is also the last time U2 had an Irish top ten single, with ‘Magnificent’ and ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’, and it’s 2013 since they last had an Irish top twenty single, with ‘Ordinary Love’. None of those four songs have made much of a dent in the cushion of popular consciousness. What’s more, no track from their subsequent two studio albums, 2014’s Songs Of Innocence—free to grateful iTunes users!—and 2018’s Songs Of Experience, even entered the Irish top fifty. That’s a remarkable turnaround. What happened?
As I mentioned a few posts ago when considering U2’s fellow elderly Irish rock band The Saw Doctors, trad-form rock music just isn’t as relevant any more. Yes, there are new young rock bands, but there are also new young blacksmiths. Then there’s the red-herring shoal of falling sales, streaming, SnapTok and whatever else the kids are doing wrong in their eyes. However, Måneskin are a new rock band who’ve adapted to the real world—they entered and won Eurovision! Which is now cool!—to find arenafuls of fans, Niall Horan is an Irish guitar act who’s selling truckloads of good new material as old-school vinyl LPs, and last time I saw Coldplay in the charts was on a clingy BTS collab. It seems there’s always something ‘killing’ music—home taping, file sharing, taste—when yours is the music dying on its arse.
In truth, the biggest factor in ‘Get On Your Boots’ being U2’s final Irish number one single is that it was so badly received it destroyed their status of supremacy forever. Turns out that Irish number one spot was our charitable act of anti-begrudgery: ‘Get On Your Boots’ didn’t get into the UK top ten, the Australian top twenty or the US Billboard top thirty. As the heavily-promoted lead single off their new album No Line On The Horizon, it absolutely sank.
On my first re-listen since those heady days of 2009, I find it actually starts promisingly: a slightly funkier Larry drum fill, Adam bassline and Edge riff than usual, perhaps pitching this as a looser, groovier take on the likeable ‘Vertigo’. But we’re missing one person; sure enough, in comes Bono with the latter-day U2 bug/feature of sub-‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ rambling lyric-heavy verses with no tune and a halting mid-section with no momentum. Then there’s its icky chorus. Middle-aged men singing “Hey, sexy boots!” as their big new hook tells me no-one in the band had any self-awareness and no-one in the U2 organisation was willing or able to shout stop. An interesting Maghreb-tinted post-chorus, a nod to the Morocco location of their recording sessions, is thrown in like a lifebuoy but just floats and bobs on top of that sea of ick. By this stage there’s no saving ‘Get On Your Boots’ anyway.
In the story of U2, ‘Get On Your Boots’ is a pox. God knows other U2 singles have been poor and charmless before, some are worse than this, and they were never cool anyway. Maybe that added ick was the tipping point. But ‘Get On Your Boots’ is the single that killed their career. The world just had no patience or indulgence for it, the band never recovered from its flop, and between their tax-arrangement and iTunes blunders they lost all goodwill from the general public. Since then, U2 have been just another guitar rock heritage act, still releasing new albums but essentially touring off the back of classic-album anniversaries for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. At the time of writing they’re soon to follow the likes of Garth Brooks and Maroon 5 in starting a Las Vegas residency. However, on this occasion they may actually have the right idea but just the wrong kitsch location, plus they could follow the proven success of an actual new young rock band. In other words, have U2 considered Eurovision?
