“Experimental”: the U2 album Larry Mullen thought had the best music they ever made
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/u2-album-larry-mullen-thought-had-the-best-music-they-ever-made/If you were to ask most people what their favourite U2 song was, most people would say something like ‘Sweetest Thing’, ‘Beautiful Day’ or ‘With or Without You’. If you asked them for a favourite album, they would most likely give The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby as an answer.
One song that you’d be surprised to hear name-checked would be 2009’s ‘FEZ / Being Born’ from the album No Line on the Horizon, but that is the track that U2 drummer Larry Mullen singled out as containing “some of the best music we’ve ever written”.
Recorded in an open-air studio in the ancient North African city of Fez, Morocco, the song opens with a sonic landscape directly inspired by their surroundings. Speaking to The Sun in 2009, The Edge explained that “the idea was to jump out of Western culture for a second and see music as a broader concept. We went to this spiritual music festival and saw people of all different religious backgrounds. The location itself started to infuse our music.”
The first minute of the song consists of lilting synth lines circling around a faintly Middle Eastern pattern, undercut by Mullen’s percussion. After 60 seconds, the song redirects, and The Edge comes in, combining those worldlier elements with a classic driving U2 guitar line. The track builds in intensity from there, with huge drums from Larry Mullen and Bono wailing through the middle section of the song.
Speaking to Q around the time of the release, Bono said that the song is written about “this guy on a motorcycle, a Moroccan French cop, who’s going Awol. He drives through France and Spain down to this village outside of Cadiz where you can actually see the fires of Africa burning”.
Producer Daniel Lanois – who had previously worked with the group on their albums The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle a Bomb – went into more technical detail about the genesis of the song when speaking to The National Post, “The Edge had a kind of symphonic guitar little moment that was free time. And I always liked the sound of it, so I took that and chopped it into a tempo and presented that back to the band.”
Adding, “I used one of Eno’s beats, and I kind of created an arrangement out of what was a freewheel, but it always had a great sound. On the strength of that sonic, I persisted with that piece. Bono thought that it had this feeling like it was almost something coming to life. Like a flower opening or coming into the world and then into the ‘Being Born’ section. That’s the high-speed rhythmic part.”
Whatever it is about, and however it came into being, Mullen likes that it’s “not quite what people would expect a U2 experimental thing would be. I mean if you think of ‘Zooropa’, or ‘Passengers’, this is not that. This has got a lot of weight”.
Perhaps the next time someone asks you what your favourite U2 song is, your answer, like Larry Mullen’s, will be ‘FEZ / Being Born‘.