The definitive U2 song

On March 27, 1987, U2 and their team took over the first-floor roof of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles to make a video for the song “Where The Streets Have No Name”the album’s third single “The Joshua Tree” (read the review here). The video had a sense of drama and urgency, due to the LAPD’s threat to block the filming. And it closely resembled another rooftop concert that took place in January 1969, a fact also recognized by Good who jokingly said: “It’s not the first time we’ve copied the Beatles.”

The video of
“Where The Streets Have No Name”
it was not an improvised event, but an operation planned in every detail. According to reports, the video crew had spent the previous week shoring up the roof of the liquor store and the police had only moved in after
U2
had informed the media of the event, which had prompted tens of thousands of people to flock to the filming site, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Main Street, in downtown Los Angeles.

In an interview with Classic Rock from March 2022, the video’s director,
Meiert Avis
stated that the band’s intention had always been to “be disruptive”, adding that the filming had been planned with the aim of “creating a spontaneous media event that you couldn’t help but notice”.

It should come as no surprise that the
U2
they chose exactly
“Where The Streets Have No Name”
as the album’s opening track
“The Joshua Tree”
and opened their tour which began six days later at the ASU Activity Center in Tempe, Arizona. The first traces of the song that would later become
“Where The Streets Have No Name”
emerged from a demo that
The Edge
recorded in 1986, before the band resumed recording sessions
“The Joshua Tree”
at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin.

In the band’s official autobiography,
‘U2 By U2’
from 2006, signed by the Irish band together with the music journalist
Neil McCormick
,
The Edge
he recalled wanting to “create the definitive U2 live song”. When he finished a rough mix and listened to it again, he realized he had created “the most incredible guitar part and song of his life”. There was no one else in the house to share his euphoria, so he simply danced to the song. The band, listening to it, was equally enthusiastic.

The group, their producers and engineers spent weeks working on that one song. Eventually, according to the 1998 television documentary
‘Classic Albums: U2: The Joshua Tree’
the album’s producer
Brian Eno
he had decided that the best solution would be to completely erase the tapes of the song and start from scratch with a new performance. According to what was always stated in the documentary
‘Classic Albums: U2: The Joshua Tree’
by the sound engineer
Mark “Flood” Ellis
the colleague
Pat McCarthy
he had left the room to make some tea, returned to the control room, saw what Eno was planning, and dropped the tray full of tea to physically immobilize the producer. “He was completely freaked out, the youngest member of the team attacked the oldest member saying: ‘Brian, maybe it’s not a good idea to delete the whole song’.”

In the same documentary,
Brian Eno
tells his version of events. “What we kept doing was spending hours and days and weeks, in fact, probably half the time spent on the whole album, on that song, trying to fix this version on tape. It was a nightmare of screwdriver work. My feeling was… I’m sure we could get there quicker if we started over. So my idea was to stage an accident, to erase the tape so we had to start over. But I never did that.”

The song was eventually composed in several takes and was one of many songs mixed by
Steve Lillywhite
in the last months of recording of
“The Joshua Tree”
. The drummer of the group
Larry Mullen
in the autobiography
‘U2 by U2’
he recalled, “It took a really long time to get that song down that it was hard for us to make sense of it. It became a really great song just by playing it live. On the record, musically, it’s not even half the song, which is live.”

The song’s initial inspiration appears to come from a story told to
Good
from someone in Belfast about how the street you live on reveals so much about a person. In
‘U2 by U2’
,
Good
he says he wrote the lyrics on an airsickness bag during a stay in a village in Ethiopia where he and his wife
Ali Hewson
they had gone as volunteers. In December 1987, he told a
Robert Hilburn
of the Chicago Sun-Times for contrasting Belfast’s story with the anonymity he felt in Ethiopia. “The boy in the song recognizes this contrast and thinks of a world where there are no such divisions, a place where the streets have no name. To me, this is what a great rock’n’roll concert should be: a place where everyone comes together… Perhaps this is the dream of every art form: to break down barriers and divisions between people and touch the things that matter most to us all.”

In a 2017 interview with
Rachel West
by Entertainment Tonight Canada,
Good
he stated that he still believes the lyrics of the song are incomplete. “Lyrically it’s just a sketch and I was going to rewrite it.” But in the same interview
The Edge
He disagreed with his bandmate: “I personally love the song. I don’t agree with Bono. He’s very hard on himself.”

“Where The Streets Have No Name”
was released as the album’s third single
“The Joshua Tree”
in August 1987. In 2002, Q magazine nominated
“Where The Streets Have No Name”
the sixteenth most emotional song ever. In 2020, the Guardian ranked it first in its list of the 40 best songs by
U2
while in 2022, New York Magazine’s Vulture website placed it first in its list of all 234 U2 songs.

In the book of
Visnja Cogan
of 2008,
‘U2: An Irish Phenomenon’
,
Good
of the song he went so far as to say, “We may be in the middle of the worst concert of our lives, but when we start singing that song, everything changes. The audience is on their feet and belting out every word. It’s like God suddenly walks into the room.”