From the Sky Down Page #4

---

...The Joshua Tree, U2.

We'd arrived.

Suddenly, this was our defining moment.

I'd like to thank Jack Healey and

Amnesty International for all their work,

Desmond Tutu for his courage...

It was a very mad time.

We were guys in our mid 20s

having this amazing experience

Nothing could've prepared you for that

...John the Baptist, George Best,

Gregory Peck, Batman and Robin,

sumo wrestlers throughout the world,

and of course, Ronald Reagan.

They wanna put us on the cover

of Time Magazine.

Um, it's a comedy.

It's a comedy about the tour.

It was a great idea.

It was a really good idea.

Make a small film about the band.

And everyone went,

"Yippee, this is a great idea. "

The next thing it's like,

"We're going to invest

"all the money we made from

The Joshua Tree into this thing,

"Paramount are going to take it

"and it's going to go to cinemas

all over the place. "

I encouraged the idea of a movie.

Remember that

in the course of the tour,

we went from being an arena band

to being a stadium band,

and had to learn how to do that

kind of on the run.

This was in the days

before video reinforcement.

It was hell.

It was literally just us in a stadium.

We were so out of our depth

and not quite proficient enough

to be consistent.

It was a rollercoaster ride.

There was a white knuckle aspect

to just holding on.

We didn't have enough material

to do a stadium show.

Bono felt particularly vulnerable -

he's out there,

sticking his ass out the window,

and he expects

the band are gonna be there.

Every night we would come off the stage,

we would debrief ourselves,

and we would have this over-riding feeling

of doom and gloom,

that we just weren't good enough.

You couldn't just rely on making it up

on the night.

Sh*t happens.

The drum kit would move forward.

The sound I'd have on stage

wouldn't work.

I can't live with this.

Edge would break a guitar string

and it would happen

every night for a week.

For him, he became just wild -

pent up rage, anger, I mean,

the whole gamut of emotions,

so, and you really didn't know

what you were going to get -

it was very intense.

It was particularly difficult for Bono,

because he had to really work as a

physical performer to sell those songs.

Having to steel ourselves almost

to deal with the position

we found ourselves in,

and we'd become overly earnest,

overly intense, overly protective.

In the course of that tour,

they became fascinated,

if you like, by America

That's my wife.

The reason for making

Rattle And Hum

was actually to prove something

to ourselves and to our audience.

It was an experiment in drawing from

the American roots music canon.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes