Achtung Baby

“You’re using a 30-foot voice for an 18-inch conversation,” says a character in Len Deighton’s Horse Under Water. On Achtung Baby, U2’s first album since 1988’s Rattle and Hum, Bono conducts a series of 18-inch conversations in a 30-foot voice, while the band perform stadium-size rock behind songs on one-room topics.

After years of self-consciously shouldering the burden of being rock’s most prominent incarnation of youthful idealism, he now appears in the role of a faintly disillusioned early-middle-aged man enmeshed in a collapsing relationship.

Recorded in Berlin and Dublin with all three of their past producers — Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite — participating, this album swings U2’s attention away from the global to the domestic. Bruce Springsteen was able — just — to negotiate that tricky shift from the general to the particular because the narrative, character-based approach which is his principal — if not only — songwriting technique has always depicted “ishoos” as they affect individuals, particularising the general as a matter of course.

Bono, on the other hand, has always generalised the particular. His humourless, heavyhanded delivery crushes the life out of what are occasionally quite pointed lyrics. “I was drowning my sorrows/but my sorrows they learned how to swim” (from “Until the End of the World”) is but one of several half-buried zingers.

The band sound great, by the way: their response to the ever-increasing hegemony of dance music and rock has been an increase in focus and urgency, a forward movement from both the ambient cloudiness of their Brian Eno period and the studied raucousness of their back-to-the roots phase. Fortunately, U2 are more than equal to the task of consolidating their position among the leaders of what American radio still thinks of as “New Music.” Unfortunately, Bono is still a prat.

© Daily Telegraph, 1991. All rights reserved.