Bono on the huge U2 hit that they saved from the scrapheap

(Image credit: Anton Corbijn)

Last month, U2 released How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, a collection of ten outtakes from their 2004 record How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. U2’s 11^th studio album, …Atomic Bomb was described by Bono at the time of release as the Irish quartet’s “first rock album” and was heralded as such with the cascading rock grooves of lead single Vertigo. Writing about the period in a recent edition of music magazine Record Collector, Bono said the song, which became such a huge anthem for the accompanying live show that the band not only named the whole jaunt the Vertigo Tour but also often started and ended their gigs with it.

“Vertigo ended up out of a song that we recorded with Chris Thomas called Native Son,” Bono writes in the magazine. “In that case, we were right not to trust our first instincts. Chris is great with guitar sounds, as well as singers and bands, heh got it as far as he could but it wasn’t the combustible, unstable chemistry we needed for our show.”

The band re-wrote and re-recorded it, Bono explains, with new producer Steve Lillywhite encouraging them to strip it down to its bare bones. “Steve wanted us to play it live with no overdubs,” he continues. “The lyric is – you’re on a night out with the singer. It’s the most present tense song I’ve written about the pure joy of just being out and about… The losing and finding of yourself that can happen in a club.”

Bono says it was Lillywhite’s idea to have them perform it live fed into this idea, as if the listener is there in the room with the band playing it. “That’s the thing when you have little or no overdubs,” he writes. “You start to sense the shape of the room… The sense of place, the mood of the band is built into the recording. Steve Lillywhite deserves credit for forcing our hand on that one. If you’re in a corner, he’s usually the right man to call.”

Vertigo was released in November 2004, going on to hit the top spot in the UK single charts. Watch the video below:

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