Bono has admitted that U2 made “mistakes” on their last two albums, and said he wants to make a “noisy, uncompromising, unreasonable guitar album” for the band’s next release.
The Irish singer-songwriter told New York Times that he believes U2 need to collaborate with -or use inspiration from – musicians like AC/DC to reignite the fire in their music that they once had.
“We all make mistakes,” Bono told the publication. “The progressive rock virus gets in, and we needed a vaccine. The discipline of our songwriting, the thing that made U2 — top-line melody, clear thoughts — had gone. With the band, I was like, this is not what we do, and we can only do that experimental stuff if we have the songwriting chops. So we went to songwriting school, and we’re back and we’re good!”
He added, “Right now I want to write the most unforgiving, obnoxious, defiant, fuck-off-to-the-pop-charts rock n’ roll song that we’ve ever made. I spoke to Edge about it this week. He’s going, ‘Is it that call again?’ ‘What call?’ ‘The one about we’re going to write the big fuck-off rock song?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it’s our job!’ We can make songs famous now, but I don’t think U2 can make them hits.”
“I don’t know who is going to make our fuck-off rock n’ roll album. You almost want an AC/DC, you want Mutt Lange [producer]. The approach. The discipline. The songwriting discipline. That’s what we want.”
Though very famous in their own right, U2 largely became known to a younger crowd when they gave their album away for free to iTunes in 2014. Songs of Innocence was automatically uploaded to the iTunes library of users all around the world – with many unhappy about the invasion of privacy.
In his new memoir Bono has offered an apology for the incident. “I take full responsibility,” he insists in Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, an excerpt of which was published in The Guardian over the weekend.
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“I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, ‘Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.’ Or, less kind, ‘The free U2 album is overpriced.’ Mea culpa.”
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