“20” – U2 TRACKS POLL (voting closes midday, Thursday 4 August)

Dunphy's UNFORGETTABLE FIRE says that Bono grew up in Stoney Batter.

oh right... i thought he was from Glasnevin

My mistake, I haven't read that book in over 2 decades:

he mentions Stoney Batter but says B's parents lived in Stillorgan then Ballymun, 'only a few minutes' drive from Stoneybatter'. I think he went to school in Glasnevin.

Bono grew up at 10 Cedarwood Road: Ballymun to the east, Glasnevin further south it appears.

'running to stand still' was supposed to be about a Ballymun estate I always thought.

It's all further out of Dublin than I imagined.

The father took early retirement and moved to Howth - funded by rock music I suppose.

anglo shares, cushy pension, sure they were all doing it matt

oh plz

Well it's true I refuse to bother with U2 post Passengers, but dude would have to have fallen off a lot. Taylor Swift outside a studio is like, anti-singing.

Hi all. I'd cleared the decks for a single-day countdown tomorrow but that's just been scuppered. Am now working tomorrow, at least the morning, so things will be slightly delayed. There was a bit of scepticism about the single-day thing anyway.

On the plus side we're now past 40 ballots, so how long / to count down these songs?

Still got 2 hours plus to vote no? Am on it.

Single-day countdowns are no fun. Spread it out a bit if you have time.

Deadline's in three-and-a-half hours, yes. Voting closes at high noon over Joshua Tree.

I'm going to stick to that, get the abacus out tonight.

How many you planning to reveal? 2-day rollout seems right. 10 per day for five days (Prince) seemed a bit too drawn out.

Depends what the hierarchy looks like - I honestly haven't started on it yet so I don't know. I'm guessing 40 ballots means a top 40 will work - there'll be no trawling through days of ties.

40 ballots is a good turnout

If it's 40 I'll probably do 20 on Monday and 20 on Tuesday.

hmm i'll try v hard to get one in just to shore up the middle

Twenty years ago, Bono described Achtung Baby as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree” while Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that “stripped-down and defying its old formulas, U2 has given itself a fighting chance for the 1990's.” The album won a Grammy® Award for Best Rock Performance and became one of the most significant records of the nineties and of U2’s career.

To mark twenty years since its 1991 release, an anniversary edition of U2’s Achtung Baby is due on November 1, 2011, in the United States (internationally, October 31, 2011).

Recorded over six months at Hansa Studio in Berlin and Windmill Lane in Dublin, Achtung Baby is U2’s seventh studio album. Produced by longtime U2 collaborators, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno with Steve Lillywhite, Achtung Baby was engineered by Flood and led by “The Fly.” The album spawned four other singles: “Mysterious Ways,” “One,” “Even Better Than The Real Thing” and “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses.”

The Achtung Baby archives have unearthed some previously unreleased songs from the recording sessions. With a raft of unreleased material, video, remixes, b-sides and documentary footage discovered, a full album of demo and early versions of the final 1991 tracklisting has also been revealed. Five physical editions including vinyl, CD, DVD and digital options will be made available. Full details of all formats are at achtungbaby.u2.com.

Earlier this year U2 returned to Hansa Studio in Berlin to discuss Achtung Baby in From The Sky Down, directed by Academy Award®-winning director Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth). The film has been selected to open the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8 and will be included in the anniversary edition.

Voted!

80s: 13
90s: 7
00s: 0
10s: 0

AB 4
JT 3
R&H 3
ATYCLB 3
POP 3
Various 4

Two hours left, 43 ballots received.

http://monsterrebellion.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/bono_zoom.jpg

Now I too have done my part for democracy.

The sun is over the meridian. Thanks to all 44 of you who voted. Will get to counting.

Unnnhhh ... why oh why did I decide to attempt to use the .xls after all? I am not competent. In fairness it does get easier as you go along.

^ my way of saying that no way am I going to have this ready to go tomorrow. It'll be a Monday/Tuesday countdown by the looks. I'll try to think of some nice feature for the rundown in the meantime.

PS I am halfway through and eight points cover the top three.

hmm, not sure i'd want to predict what somgs those might be

with or without you
When love comes to town
Dancing queen

lol

looking thru my ballot it seems I like TUF and Boy exactly the same amount, TJT easily outstrips them both tho.

!!
http://achtungbaby.u2.com/?utm_source=Publicaster&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EMLU2COS_201100803_AchtungBaby&utm_term=http%3a%2f%2fachtungbaby.u2.com%2f&AID=1613

dan. try that again
http://achtungbaby.u2.com/images/top_image.jpg

i like the sound of this new doc/ DVD.

That looks like a Sears catalogue from 1981.

Without the bra section, surely.

It looks like a disassembled Transformer.

I hate that all these acts keep releasing awesome looking boxed sets years after I've more or less sworn off paying for expensive, awesome looking boxed sets. I'm looking at you, too, Smiths Pink Floyd, etc.

I do want these Achtung Baby extras -- but I bought the CD singles as they came out, and I have the LP on the original vinyl, still pretty pristine. It is funny that those things are now 'de luxe'.

The dvd would mean most to me because my really fantastic Achtung Baby video cassette won't seem to play on my video player.

not sure I can justify this one at all:
http://www.rhino.co.uk/store/products,the-smiths-complete-deluxe-collectors-boxset_39767.htm

again, some of us had the vinyl first time round!

pf i have it in my head that just about everything you possess is an antique, I can quite easily imagine a mahogany ipad

It looks like a disassembled Transformer.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, August 5, 2011 4:36 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

LOL!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cSIJd5KIL._SL500_AA300_.jpg http://www.u2rockband.com/postcards/images/bono/bono_makeup.jpg

I just had another thought re: U2 and Irishness and the USA.

Major detour here, but humor me:

I know "Oh, I just LOVE his accent, it's so SEXY" has been around since the dawn of time. And that it applies for nearly every discernible variant of world Englishes.
However.

There is a certain kind of American woman -- you may know the type or maybe not -- of a certain age, usually, who will just flip the fuck out for any old run of the mill dude with an Irish accent. I blame U2 for that. Colin Farrell, for instance, has benefited substantially from this.

Example: My old roommate, who was not a good judge of character by anyone's measure, once fell for this Irish guy who worked as a bartender in the college town where we lived. He was kind of coarse, nasty, and stupid - not someone I would want to socialize with much less date. Months she dated this guy, he came over, was a complete tool, and mostly just mooched off of us. Later, she found out that he was smoking crack while she was sleeping. THEN she found out that he *wasn't even Irish* and that he had been faking the accent. That's when she broke it off.

i don't think u2 has all that much to do with american chicks going nuts for any accent from the british isles

Another example: Lisa Simpson's Irish boyfriend!
Colin: I'm Colin.
Lisa Simpson: I haven't seen you at school
Colin: Just moved from Ireland. My dad's a musician.
Lisa Simpson: Is he...?
Colin: He's not Bono.
Lisa Simpson: I just thought because you're Irish and you care about...
Colin: He's NOT Bono.

(please note - i don't really "blame" U2 for this, nor do i think they or actual irish people have/had anything to do with my ex-roomie's super degenerate ex-boyfriend)

have been listening to ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND again
and to be honest I've been underwhelmed
though I still think a couple of good tracks turn up late on.

ATOMIC BOMB probably the reverse
it has at least 3 good ones in the first half (miracle drug, sometimes, blinding lights)
but the second half might be the worst half U2 have ever done, save 'a man and a woman'
I don't like how they strain for big choruses that just don't come off -
'original of the species'
and 'all because of you', so mystifyingly a 45.

we still haven't addressed NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
I wonder if I actually like that more?

'Hallelujah here she comes' underwhelmed me in 1989
maybe more to my taste now
though Desire Hollywood Remix is surely better!!

we still haven't addressed NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
I wonder if I actually like that more?

― the pinefox, Saturday, August 6, 2011 4:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i voted for "breathe"

There's good stuff on all the later albums, but they haven't really bedded down as a whole for me. Pop's the last one that feels like a project, rather than a bunch of songs (nothing wrong with that, but it's hard to get a handle on in the context of doing this).

I've finished the counting, incidentally. There's only one tie in the top fifty, so I'll probably go for that. There's also some stuff at 51-60 which I'd like to include, but you've got to draw a line somewhere.

Yeah "Breathe" is very good, and one of the best to hear in concert last year. "Magnificent" was also a good cut from that album. Otherwise, Horizon is probably their worst album, that or R&H. So many go nowhere songs. Sad too, because I felt like they wanted to do something different on that album, there are small moments where you feel like they are trying for new sounds or approaches. It quickly falls back on old habits, and doesn't have the tunes to boot.

"Your Blue Room" was one of the last cuts from my ballot. I've never really taken to the Passengers album apart from "Your Blue Room" and "Always Forever Now", but man, those two tracks are some of the best U2 has done. The latter would have fit like a glove on Zooropa (except maybe lyrically). And seeing "Your Blue Room" in concert was a genuine shock. I thought they themselves had forgotten that album.

yeah it was pretty goofy how No Line was preceded with a bunch of talk of an Achtung-style reinvention, and then when it came out it basically sounded like the last two albums minus the hits.

also lol @ just now learning that "I'll Go Crazy" was co-produced by will.i.am

This is super helpful to me, to get an idea of how to listen to the post-Pop albums (this is why *I* like to read critics!). I voted for two of the most obvious songs from this era, but the albums don't cohere to me either. I think it's largely their sound, the production etc.---I have the same problem with latter-day REM & I think it's that my ears don't hear enough modern rock for what's special about these sounds to stick; so even if there are hooks, they wash over me. Aging, I guess, but I don't hold my own perspective to be particularly important & would like to hear them differently, as I care enough about these artists to try to get what they're after (I trust them, in other words, for better or for worse).