As you’d expect of someone who’s rated all of U2’s UK number one singles as good or better, I once again contradicted the usual chorus of U2/Bono hate in this thread (which at least wasn’t as much of a chorus as it was in some). I can’t see Bono in the same dismissive light as so many at Popular do; to quote Gag Halfrunt, he’s just this guy, you know? (Blinding revelation: Bono is Zaphod Beeblebrox, in all his good and bad aspects.)

U2, “Beautiful Day”, 21 October 2000

What fascinated me after re-listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind was that my 2015 response was the opposite of my 2014 response to Pop: instead of sounding so much worse than I’d remembered, it sounded much better. At the time it came out I saw it as a backwards step, a treading of water, a loss of nerve—the usual objections. Now, I see Passengers and Pop as the projects where they truly dropped the ball, a fact masked at the time by my admiration for a few specific tracks; they glimpsed a possible future but didn’t embrace it. All That You Can’t Leave Behind wasn’t the moment they wussed out, it was their moment of taking stock, of looking at what they couldn’t bring themselves to discard [oh, all right] leave behind—at what they hadn’t been able to leave behind in the Pop process, which had ended up messing up that project so thoroughly—and saying, okay, let’s build on that, and see where it leads. It led to a classic-sounding U2 album which actually didn’t sound like their ’80s classics, but was instead something new.

That “something new”, unfortunately for U2’s popular reputation, was the sound of contented middle-age. Where their earlier work was the sound of their querulous youth, questing twenties and questioning thirties, this was a band hitting forty (as Bono and Clayton did in 2000, and the Edge and Mullen were about to) and coming to terms with themselves.

I was eight years behind them, and didn’t want all that: I was still questing in 2000, still questioning. Would I have heard the album differently had I been 40 at the time? Quite possibly. But then, it depends what kind of 40 you’ve had. There’s the 40 of successful rock-stars who’ve achieved all that anyone could reasonably expect... and there’s the 40 where you wake up and realise that you still haven’t got there, that you’ve lost your sense of where “there” even is, and that the last thing you want to hear is a millionaire singing about how beautiful everything is. Not so much singing a new song; more “how long to sing this song”.

It’s no surprise, then, that a song called “Beautiful Day” would come off as smug and complacent to a listener who isn’t in the right mood. The surprise is that its lyrics are actually all about that struggle between middle-aged contentment and mid-life crisis, and are surprisingly tentative; there’s still a sense in them that pessimism might prevail. The music, though, indicates where the band hope the struggle will end; this is no “Wake Up Deadman”.

I’m not sure I’m quite at the point where I believe them, but I’d like to, and I like the track enough to give it 7.

And I like the album even more. Unlike Pop, there’s no tailing off here: the songs are consistently strong, with only “When I Look at the World” less essential than the rest. I rather wish my copy of the CD didn’t end with the bonus track of “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, which is fine but belongs on the Greatest Hits rather than here; “New York” and “Grace” make a better conclusion. But All That You Can’t Leave Behind has gone up in my estimation, which wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

12 August 2015 · Music