'We were in uncharted territory,' Edge tells BBC Culture. Eager to experiment with drum machines, loops and synth pads, they brought to Mullen and bass-player Adam Clayton demos that were little more than grooves. 'We were building our own wall right down the middle of Hansa studios.'īono and Edge were determined to strip back every signifier of 'U2ness' that had accumulated during the 1980s and start again. 'The irony of One's title is the band wasn't very close at the time,' Bono tells BBC Culture. En route to their accommodation, they got swept up in the street celebrations as Germany became one country again after 41 years. U2, their producers and engineer (Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Flood) touched down in Berlin on 3 October 1990: the Day of German Unity. In Bowie's day, the studio had been called 'Hansa by the Wall' but now the wall was gone. Feeling trapped and exhausted by their own success at the close of the 1980s, U2 took a leaf out of David Bowie's book and looked for the future in Berlin, at Hansa Studios. One is a song about disunity written against a backdrop of reunification. 'Every time I hear it or play it, it connects.' 'If I was to pick one song which encapsulates everything about who and what we are, it would have to be One,' drummer Larry Mullen Jr once told me. It remains a touchstone for the band members, too. I put the song on and just broke down crying.' In a 2003 special edition of Q magazine, it was voted the best song of all time. Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses once said he considered One to be 'one of the greatest songs that has ever been written. One's parent album Achtung Baby came out 30 years ago this week. The genre-fluid music ahead of its time 'It's one of those songs that has this incredible flexibility for different occasions.' 'That I found incredibly powerful,' the Edge, U2's guitarist, tells BBC Culture. The next day, the song topped France's digital download charts. At a televised national memorial service five days later, his coffin was carried into the courtyard of the Sorbonne to the sound of one of Paty's favourite songs: U2's 1992 single One. In October 2020, a Parisian schoolteacher named Samuel Paty was murdered by an extremist after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression.

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