You want Heaven, Heaven in Your Heart . . .

Rethinking Pop

Irish Voice

October 10, 2007 - October 16, 2007

IT goes against the grain for a music reviewer to say the next three words.

I was wrong.

Allow me to paint a picture. I was in the backyard of a musician friend of mine. We love impressing one another during monthly listening nights with our encyclopedic knowledge of music as we create mixes of old and new music on our hard drives.

Did Pop Suck?

Let's get one thing straight here before we go any further: I don't hate U2.

There was once a time, in fact, when the Irish quartet ranked up there with my favourite bands. I was fully obsessed as a kid. Practically wore out my cassette copies of War and The Unforgettable Fire, loved The Joshua Tree as much as everyone else, was still right there along with the band through the spellbinding experimentation of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. And then, suddenly, U2 lost its way.

The Blind Leading the Blonde

U2 Talks Pop

March 1, 1997

THE four members of U2 are caught between two worlds at the moment, and it's not a place they particularly like to be. The first world was the private, inward-looking process of making their 11th album, Pop, which was finished, several months late, last November, and goes into the shops on Monday. The second will be the public, fiercely exposed world of Popmart, the global tour of that album, which begins in just seven weeks' time in Las Vegas.