Current mood: THE SUNDAY PAPERS....
Category: THE SUNDAY PAPERS.... Music
Well, it’s a great title and a great sleeve, but I can’t get into this record at all - at least as a whole...
Thing is, I’ve always found U2 to be far better at singles than LPs. In other words, I can enjoy a little with cream, but not a lot, and this is most certainly the case with this LP..
It starts well, Sunday Bloody Sunday is a decent track
and there are one or two others that make me tap the foot in a kind of middle aged Dad kinda way. But on the whole I find myself wondering how and why this kind of easy guitar rock does so well time and time again.....
I think it’s the ordinariness...
Yes boss, we all might think of ourselves as being freaks and some of you might even be proper guesome ones, but most people aren’t and there are fucking millions upon millions of these non freaks everywhere and such folk like easy going guitar music with a man wailing over the top in the kind of way that allows a bit of foot tapping in the car...
Which reminds me of a time I was hitchiking from Ambleside in the Lake District to Manchester.
As far as I can remember, I’d been for a few days hill walking, during which time I’d almost frozen my bollocks off in some late unexpected winter snow.
Anyway, I was done with all that, and was on the second or third lift to Manchester from where I had a train ticket, and some guy had picked me up in a rattly old car that felt inherently unsafe.
Yes boss, there are very few times I’ve ever felt unsafe in a car, but then was definately one of them.
The feeling of danger was something to do with Mr Driver having the volume cranked right up, and that he was pushing 100mph in the kind of car that wasn’t ideally suited to such a speed. He was a jerky driver ’n all - all these last minute swerves in and out of position and the occasional ’SHIT!!!’ (me jamming my foot onto the floor etc)
Mr Driver was a soldier who’d been up to the Catterick Garrison for a check up on his broken leg.
He informed me that he’d broken the leg on an exercise and had been out of active service for ten months due to complications in his recovery.
From what I could work out, he wanted OUT, and was trying to spin his injury onwards until he could legally leave..
Basically, there was a war on and I had the definite idea he didn’t much fancy it.
Anyway, he was playing a few tapes at FULL VOLUME and he put this LP on and on the car stereo it sounded alright - which is why I eventually bought it on vinyl.
As it was playing, he was commentating on the songs.
’Of course the other lads don’t much like it when I play this song’ he said as Sunday Bloody Sunday rattled around the speakers ’Being about Ireland and that, a lot of the boys at the barracks fucking hate U2...’
Which, now I think about it, makes me realise I do at least have something in common with your average English Soldier....
Anyway, each to their own...
But this one ain’t for me.
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