‘The pursuit of trivia, the search of soul, looking for Jesus in the trashcan...’[1] was the motto of U2’s recordings as well as their life on and off the stage after 1991. Provocative in its wording, the motto expresses an intention to infuse metaphorical and religious ideas into popular culture, the sphere commonly regarded as shallow, commercial and throwaway. This premise underlies the purpose of my study to explore U2’s treatment of pop as religion.

 

U2 have always been recognised as a group rooted in Christian tradition. ‘Crusading Christians’ or ‘brothers in arms’[2] were the labels which stuck to the group in the 80s following U2’s explicit commentaries on religion, politics, and social issues. On Zooropa and Achtung Baby (two out of three albums recorded in the 90s), however, the group changed their mode of expression from open critique to veiled irony. What is more, their approach to religion exceeds traditional, orthodox frames of Christianity. It is mystical, elusive, implicit, and escapes fixed definitions. This project aims to show that U2’s religiosity in the 90s became even more appealing and powerful than in the preceding decade. Finally, since the evolution of U2’s musical style and ideological agenda was also inspired by the new demands of their audiences and by general social changes, this study may give some insight into the meaning of religion to U2’s fans.

 

Recognising the importance of the visual for the creation of meaning in popular music performances, I shall attempt a semiotic and textual study of the concert tour narratives (ZOO TV tours of 1991 and 1993), stage decorations, the images of the musicians, and videos for the chosen tracks from these two albums. I shall use the semiotic method to analyse the dialogue staged between the group and their audience. The lyrics from Zooropa and Achtung Baby will be studied by means of literary and discourse analyses. These analyses will, finally, be supplemented with the semiotic study of music, sounds and voices to see how  irony is achieved.

 

Discussing U2’s Christianity is hardly possible without referring to the background of the group’s members. Their personal attitude to religion may be the result of the fact that their homeland - Ireland - has always been a country torn apart by religious animosities, where those who refuse to put themselves on either side of the barricade have to find their own way to co-exist with other people without losing their religious identity. Such was the case of the U2’s members: although they all met in Dublin, they come from different religious and national backgrounds: Edge is Welsh, Clayton - English, and Larry Mullen and Bono - Irish. Although all of them are religious, they shun from any church membership. In ‘Acrobat’, one of U2’s most introspective lyrics on Achtung Baby, Bono sings:

And I’d join the movement

If there was one I could believe in

Yeah, I’d break bread and wine

If there was a church I could receive in.

 

The frame of organised religion was rejected by U2 as ‘...the enemy of God, because it denies the spontaneity and almost anarchistic nature of the Spirit’[3]. For it is the Holy Ghost that plays the most prominent role in one’s way to salvation, according to U2.

 

U2 can be said to continue the tradition of Christian mysticism in that they recognise the prominence of the Holy Spirit and believe in the sensual relation of the soul to God, like the one in the Song of Songs. It is interesting to notice that in their lyrics the word ‘spirit’ alternates with ‘woman’, ‘she’ or ‘love’, as in ‘Mysterious Ways’ The video clip for this song was shot in Morocco after the war with Iraq. The underlying idea was to bring the Arabic world closer to the Europeans, who at the time were closing their minds to this part of the world[4]. The title, therefore, may refer to the Arabic culture ruled by its own principles not understandable to Europeans.

The first stanza of this track is introduced by an exotic, rhythmic drum beating, which later is joined by the guitar, and then by Bono with a backing chorus, who begin to sing:

Johnny, take a walk with your sister, the moon

Let her pale light in to fill up your room

You’ve been living underground, eating from the can

You’ve been running away from what you don’t understand

Love

 

Bono’s voice is here high and mild, and the chorus, which is barely audible, adds to the impression of subtlety pervading the song.

 

The concept of the ‘underground’ in ‘Mysterious Ways’ is a place of squalor, where ‘you eat from the can’. Its inhabitant, Johnny, is encouraged to leave it. The guiding light is his ‘sister, the moon’ - mysterious feminine force throwing pale light to help him find the way out of the underground. This stanza alludes to another of U2’s tracks on Achtung Baby, ‘Zooropa’. The place called Zooropa is described in the lyric as an obscure underground. Its inhabitant is encouraged to leave using his imagination or building an imaginary enclave to live in. Here his guiding light is imagination (‘she’s gonna dream out loud’).

 

The reason why the lyrical ‘I’ has been ‘living underground’ is his unwillingness to accept and believe in ‘what you don’t understand’. This line becomes clearer in the context of Bono’s opinion concerning the loss of spirituality in the twentieth century caused by empirical philosophy and reason:

We had a century of being told by intelligentsia, that we’re two-dimensional creatures, that if something can’t be proved it cannot exist. That’s over now. Transcendence is what everybody, in the end, is on their knees for...[5]

 

Denying the existence of things that cannot be proved does not lead to enlightenment, but to living in the dark (underground), according to U2. The opening stanza, on the one hand, forms an encouragement to leave the underground, but at the same time, it is a call to the light to show the way out. It is closed by the word ‘love’, which functions as a full stop and link to the following section:

She’s slippy

You’re sliding down

She’ll be there

When you hit the ground

These words announce the coming of love/the female and the protagonist’s fall (‘you’re sliding down’) cushioned by her. Love may be elusive and unpredictable yet, it/she also secures him from the first shock, like a cushion on which he will fall safely. The music in this part of the song is rhythmical; it gets intensified with each note to reflect that the love is getting closer and closer. Bono’s voice is quiet, as if he were singing with bated breath, impressed by what will happen soon.

 

The next part of the song functions as a refrain and is a repetition of two lines: ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, all right, she moves in mysterious ways’. Here, Johnny is finally comforted because the promise made in the previous lines has been fulfilled - love has arrived and secured his fall. While the previous section anticipated the coming of the woman/spirit, the refrain describes the climactic moment when she is already there. The lyrical ‘I’ does not have to worry anymore (‘It’s all right’) - the light has led him out of the underground and absorbed his first shocking contact with the new environment. Now, she/light/love is like the sea whose waves carry him away (‘she moves in mysterious ways’).

 

The second stanza begins with an invocation: ‘Johnny, take a dive with your sister’, but this time the attribute following the noun ‘sister’ is a prepositional phrase ‘in the rain’. Here the feminine force, which was symbolised by the light/moon in the initial stanza, becomes water and rain. Both are necessary conditions for life on Earth the primeval elements from which life sprang. They are also able to penetrate and infiltrate things, acting slowly, but obstinately and effectively.

 

The name Johnny appears to stand for the lyrical ‘I’ who follows the light/love/woman. In the second stanza he is invited to ‘Let her talk about the things you can’t explain’. Johnny, represented by the pronoun ‘you’, follows reason in his life. However, she/the love knows things which reason cannot embrace. Therefore, to make her action possible, it is necessary to ‘let her pale light in’ or to ‘let her talk about the things’. The following lines of the stanza only reinforce the fact that in order to come closer to divinity one has to stoop and admit one’s limitations: ‘If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel (on your knees, boy!)’.

 

The second stanza has the same structure as the first one. After the invocation, there succeeds a set of lines anticipating the coming of the spirit: ‘She’s the wave, she turns the tide, she sees the man inside the child’. The following section is, similarly, the refrain (‘It’s all right, she moves in mysterious ways’), supported by an extra line in which Bono’s voice beseeches the spirit/love to ‘lift my days, light up my nights, love’.

 

The song abounds in sexual imagery. The final, climactic part of the track is preceded by ecstatic, intense guitar riffs coming in turns. In the background, heavy breathing is heard. Additionally, the repeated refrain suggests this sensual interpretation (‘she moves in mysterious ways’, ‘you’re sliding down’). Therefore, it follows that the relationship with the woman/love has a sexual character as well. Making love to her has a redeeming function for the lyrical ‘I’ - ‘she will be there when he hits the ground’.

 

The lines coming after the musical interval call the lyrical ‘I’ to ‘follow this feeling’, and then, the refrain gets repeated again, but this time the pronoun ‘she’ from the phrase ‘she moves in mysterious ways’ is replaced by the word ‘spirit’. Thus, the ‘spirit’ performs the same function as the feminine light/water. It is omnipresent, its particles penetrate the whole universe, but at the same time, it is elusive and ‘slippy’.

In the videos and on the stage the soul is personified by a belly-dancer.[6] During the concert performance of ‘Mysterious Ways’, the belly-dancer gyrates round Bono inviting him to touch her, symbolising the tension between the flesh and spirit or the human soul and God. In fact, Bono never touches the dancer, but only gets closer to her. In this way, she represents an unreachable ideal.

 

The video for the track is naturalistic. It presents basic elements such as earth, sky, water and space, which may represent the nature of the spirit. The clip also shows a variety of Arab faces (veiled women or the wrinkled face of an old man) symbolising the humanity of the Arabs. Apart from that, the video features the belly-dancer spinning against the background of a bright moon, Bono and Edge, whose faces swell and expand as if merging with the landscape, or are penetrated by minute particles and bloated

 

Paradoxically, the sensual and spiritual elements interpretations do not contradict each other, but are complementary. As the two components of human nature - flesh and spirit - they should work in harmony, according to U2. What is more, their lyrics suggest that the soul’s relation to God is of sexual kind. Robyn Brothers in her article claims that in this respect they continue the tradition of the medieval mystics:

The eroticism of the relationship between the soul and God, that is, between the Bride and Bridegroom,..., pervaded the writings of medieval mystics and some early Christians.[7]

 

This view coincides with the concept invented by Bono to lead U2 through their albums (Achtung Baby, Zooropa and later - Pop). The concept is conveyed by the phrases reappearing in their songs and repeated in many interviews: ‘Looking for Jesus in the trashcan’ or ‘looking for diamonds in the dirt.’[8] They express the idea that spirituality can also be found in the spheres considered as ‘low’ and disreputable.

The new philosophy of U2 is seen well in ‘Ultra Violet (Light My Way)’, another track from Achtung Baby. The song’s title alludes again to the nature of the Holy Spirit - ultra violet rays act but they are invisible. The sub-title is a call to the Holy Spirit for guidance in the moment of disillusionment or weakness. ‘Ultra Violet’ begins with Bono’s lazy, bored, pleading voice reciting the words:

Sometimes I feel like I don’t know

Sometimes I feel like checking out

I wanna get it wrong

Can’t always be strong

And love it won’t be long

 

In this part building the mood of the song, the chorus is humming sadly in the background. Then, the guitar replaces the chorus and Bono begins to intone the first stanza. It is addressed to the woman, as in other lyrics alternately addressed as ‘child’, ‘sugar’, ‘love’, ‘baby.’ Here, the lyrical ‘I’ continues to lament his desperate situation (‘I feel like trash’) depicted by means of words connected with darkness - ‘I’m in the black’, ‘The day is as dark as the night is long’, ‘[I] can’t see or be seen’. His addressee has been brought to tears by this emotional outburst. The lyrical ‘I’ comforts her with ‘don’t you cry’ and ‘wipe the tears from your eyes’, but reveals that it is she who can save him (‘You know I need you to be strong’, ‘[I] feel like trash, you make me feel clean’). In other words, she serves as a springboard for helping him to recover from the state of apathy, signalled in the song’s first stanza. Hence the refrain: ‘Baby, baby, baby, light my way’, in which the woman is called to lighten up his life and lead him out of despair.

 

The subsequent stanza further describes the role of the addressee:

You bury your treasure

Where it can’t be found

But your love is like a secret

That’s been passed around

 

The meaning of ‘treasure’ and ‘secret’ boils down to ‘love’, which is invisible and intangible, but, at the same time, its action is felt by everybody, like the operation of ultra violet rays. Then, in the final stanza the lyrical ego develops the image of love as the light brightening up the dark of his internal confusion:

When I was all messed up

And I heard opera in my head

Your love was like a light bulb

Hanging over my bed

 

While the woman is elevated to the role of the Holy Spirit in many of U2’s songs on Achtung Baby and Zooropa, she ultimately remains in the subjugated and controlled position to serve the man’s purposes. Her presence is needed to save him (‘she’ll be there when you hit the ground’) or to help him improve his own image (‘I feel like trash, you make me feel clean’). The female in U2’s songs is also identified with something which cannot be controlled (‘she is slippy’). Therefore, she appears threatening to the man: she can withdraw something he is dependent on (‘you bury your treasure where it can’t be found’), and her actions cannot be rationally predicted. In other words, to the man she represents the Lacanian category of the Other - the feminine Other, the intimate Other, or the spiritual Other.[9] Thus, he needs to get hold of her and tame her in order to feel safe and retain his power.

 

On the other hand, U2’s songs call for the dissolution of the ego, humiliation and resignation: ‘If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel, (on your knees, boy!)’ The act of stooping is the prerequisite to let the Holy Spirit or the Divine Love bring you closer to God. To stoop means to ‘let yourself go’ by abandoning reason, and to open oneself for the action of the Spirit. The faith, as described in other U2 lyrics, should be blind, spontaneous, and devoid of any limits (‘Love is Blindness’ – ‘Love is blindness, I don’t want to see, won’t you wrap the night around me’). At the same time, Bono’s stage personas - The Fly (the parody of a megalomaniac rock star), The Mirrorball Man (a televangelist/politician/country singer) and MacPhisto (a devilish version of the Fly twenty years older - the old Elvis Presley type) - are caricatures of ego-driven, narcissistic male personalities The notion of masculinity is mocked throughout U2’s 90s albums. According to the group, on the political level it leads to the creation of Nazi regimes, on the religious level - to obstructing the action of the Holy Spirit, and on the sensual/emotional - to trying to control the lover.

 

The elevating function of the Holy Spirit and the concept of masculinity are dealt with in the videoclip of ‘Lemon,’ the song from Zooropa The video presents a surreal, dream studio floor with all the U2 members performing different actions. Each of them is caught in a frame with a caption describing the shot underneath (‘Man pushing himself up the microphone stand’, ‘Man walking up the stairs’, ‘Man playing drums’, ‘Man striking a pose’). The clip is black and white, except for the yellow lemon hanging in the dark sky like a bright moon.

 

The song opens with Bono crooning and a series of reverberating, metallic sounds. Both the musical and the visual side of the video contribute to the surreal impression one has of the song. Bono, with his MacPhisto make-up (white, clownish face and red lips) fiddles with the microphone stand and seduces the camera, pushing his face into it and singing in his echoing falsetto voice:

Lemon, see-through in the sunlight

She wore lemon

Never in the daylight

She’s gonna make you cry

She’s gonna make you whisper and moan

But when you’re dry

She draws water from the stone

 

Again the object of the song is a woman and she is described as wearing lemon - the symbol of the sun, freshness, light and warmth that surrounds her (‘she wore lemon’). As in the songs discussed earlier, these attributes are invisible, ‘see-through’ or transparent. The feminine object exerts power over the lyrical ego: she makes him ‘cry’, ‘whisper’, and ’moan,’ and at the same time she is able to perform miracles to save him (‘when you’re dry, she draws water from the stone’).

The singer or the subject, then, begins to yield to her power over him and lets himself be carried away by it:

I feel like I’m

Slowly, slowly, slowly

Slipping under

I feel like I’m holding onto nothing...

 

Here, the voice acquires another quality: it is strong and loud, expressing the fear of ‘slipping under’ and floating in the void (‘holding onto nothing’). Yet all this fear disappears in the subsequent stanza:

 

She wore lemon

To colour in the cold, grey night

She had heaven

And she held on so tight

 

Here it turns out that she has saved him from the fall (‘she held on so tight’), comforted him and led him through the scary night.

 

Then, a chorus of male voices joins in singing about man’s need to magnify his image, to project it onto the ‘screen’ constituted by the woman. In order to do so he captures the light and colour as if he were making a film about himself:

A man makes a picture

A moving picture

Through light projected

He can see himself up close

A man captures colour

A man likes to stare

He turns his money into light

To look for her

 

In U2’s music both light and colour are associated with the (feminine) spirit, so in this context it follows that in the man’s attempts to magnify himself, the woman is used as a means to an end. He asserts his power through the gaze (‘a man likes to stare’), and through money, the traditional ways of exercising control over women by men.

 

Then, again he ‘lets himself go’ and follows the woman/spirit:

And I feel like I’m

Drifting, drifting, drifting

From the shore

And I feel like I’m

Swimming out to her

 

Here, he begins to feel her presence and her magnetic power. The repetition of the verb ‘drifting’ creates the effect of his floating on the waves produced by her. The appearance of hope is marked by the line: ‘Midnight is where the day begins’. This line constitutes a distant reverberation of the motto in Achtung Baby and Zooropa - ‘looking for diamonds in the dirt’ - by implying that light can be found amidst darkness.

 

The following stanza, performed by the chorus, expands on the topic of the man’s needs:

A man builds a city

With banks and cathedrals

A man melts the sand

So he can see the world outside

A man makes a car

And builds the road to run them on

A man dreams of leaving

But he always stays behind

 

The man builds ‘civilisation’ - ‘a city with banks and cathedrals’ - where he creates a web of oppressive structures (money and organised religion, which are of interest for Bono’s self-loving alter egos). Apart from ‘seeing himself up close’, he also needs to explore the world - he makes some glass to view the world as a set of dissected, microscopic pictures. He constructs a car to enjoy freedom, but finally he gets entangled in what he has created and he ‘stays behind’ the woman in comprehending the world.

 

The choral lines of this stanza are interwoven with Bono’s voice:

You’re gonna meet her

She’s your destination

You’ve got to get to her

She’s imagination

 

Here, the man is encouraged to follow the woman/spirit. In the entire stanza the initiative and action are the attributes of the man. All the verbs accompanying the subject ‘man’ are active (‘builds’, ‘makes’, ‘captures’, ‘turns’, ‘melts’), while the woman is static - she is the destination, an ideal to be attained. She is also ‘imagination’ and functions as a muse for the man/artist.

 

For all his activity, the artist/man lacks imagination and is ultimately unsuccessful, as the following lines, sung by the chorus made up of men’s voices, suggest:

And these are the days

When our work has come asunder

And these are the days

When we look for something other

 

In the moment of despair and inability to create, he resorts to the woman/imagination for help. In the video, the men (represented by U2’s members) are engaged in a series of futile activities supposed to ‘project’ their images. They move and behave like somnambulists. Only they seem to know the purpose of the activities, which looks ridiculous to everybody else.

 

At the same time, the clip shows the clock-like face of a woman with a bar over her eyes and mouth. As opposed to a man, who wants to ‘see the world outside’ through the glass (‘he melts the sand’) and who wants to ‘see himself up close’, she is blind. She rejects the scientific, microscopic or rational exploration of the world and she is deprived of self-interest. Therefore, she is a revitalising force - the imagination, ‘the dreamer’, the desirable Other, or the creative spirit. In other words, she is the ideal (‘destination’), difficult or impossible to attain which makes her desirable and attractive to men.

 

On stage and in the video clip to ‘Mysterious Ways,’ the Holy Ghost/the woman was represented by a belly-dancer. While she was spinning around the stage, Bono, tempted by her, would try to reach her, but as she got closer, he would back off. As long as she was distant from him, she remained attractive. The gigantic stage monitors presented her image, dwarfing the group, with Bono raising arms to her image, as if in worship. The belly-dancer, as a distant object of admiration, was easier to be idealised, which in turn made her more desirable.

 

At other times during the concert, Bono would pick a girl from the audience, bring her onto the stage, dance with her and then, give her a hand-camera to record his image. In this way, he used her as a means to an end, and when he satisfied his need of being admired, he would dispose of her. Also, he would open a champagne bottle and spray the girl with it (phallic connotations), as if enacting his male power over her. Moreover, being recorded with a hand-camera by the fan, he would even push his crotch into the lens, symbolically ‘screwing’ the audience. Like the belly-dancer, the female fan attracted Bono in the same way as the belly-dancer did, but as soon as he managed to ‘capture’ her, and then use or even abuse her, he lost his interest and sent her off the stage.

 

Attempts to control the woman are the result of the man’s fear. In ‘Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World’ (Achtung Baby), Bono sings that ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’, which means that she is autonomous, self-sufficient and does not need the man to validate her existence. The man, however, following from U2’s lyrics, needs the woman to elevate himself. Therefore, he first has to romance and seduce her and later use her as a springboard for self-advancement.

 

The audience performs the same role for the artist as the woman does for the man. First, Bono chooses a fan (it is always a girl) from the crowd gathered near the stage, embraces her in a dance, and then, uses her adulation to project and magnify his own image. Bono’s behaviour on the stage is a deliberate attempt to highlight and criticise the masculine need to glorify and project one’s own image. This self-interest and extreme vanity are obstacles that inhibit the action of the Holy Spirit. They do not allow the man/star to come closer to divinity, but lead to self-worship or self-adulation in which love is directed towards the ego.

 

On the other hand, the duped audience worships the artist as an idol, agreeing to every condition he proposes, even if the price paid means humiliation or self-deprecation to satisfy the star. This is exactly the effect desired by U2, who want to denounce idolatry, or the religion of anything promoted so effectively by the media. According to U2 this is the curse of the 90s and results in the demise of the imagination. The cure to ‘the void without God’, as the group call it in their lyrics, has to be filled with ‘love’ deprived of self-interest. Another quality of the ideal, divine love is creativity (‘love’ is replaceable with ‘inspiration’ in the U2’s lyrics). Thus, love, though blind, does not deprive one of imagination and creative thinking. Both love and inspiration are in fact interchangeable with word ‘spirit’, which points to the fact that U2 consider them as the gifts of the Holy Spirit bringing one closer to God. That reminds us of the Bergsonian idea equating creativity with divinity.[10] U2’s idea of love and inspiration also implies the sensual relationship between the two sides - the woman and the man, and between the soul and God. This suggests that the group believe that one can glimpse God through sex or sin, which exceeds the traditional Christian morality code, considered by U2 as oppressive.

 

In U2’s lyrics ‘the spirit’ is feminine in character: the figure of the woman embraces all the attributes of ‘love’ - she is free of self-interest and functions as a muse and inspiration for the artist. This idea brings to mind the post-modern theological propositions stressing the importance and the feminine character of the Holy Spirit, as opposed to modernist centrality of the masculine God, the Father.[11] U2 try to say that building or dreaming out the world inside ourselves means inventing or implanting the feminine element in one’s soul and reviving one’s imagination with a new, fresh perspective upon things. Thus U2 reject many principles of the orthodox Christian doctrine, such as patriarchy or the nature of the Holy Trinity, while cherishing individual free expression of spirituality.

PRIMARY SOURCES

DISCOGRAPHY

 

1. U2. ‘Lemon’. Zooropa Island, 1993.

2. U2. ‘Mysterious Ways’. Achtung Baby. Island, 1991.

3. U2. ‘Ultraviolet’. Zooropa.

 

Bono: Lyrics, Vocals and Guitar

The Edge: Vocals, Keyboards and Guitar

Adam Clayton: Bass Guitar

Larry Mullen: Drums and Percussion

 

VIDEOGRAPHY

Linnane, Maurice. Achtung Baby: The Videos, the Cameos, and a Whole Lot of Interference from Zoo TV. Island/BMG Video, 70 min.,1992, videocassette.

The video includes the following clips analysed in my project:

            Sedanoui, Stephane. ‘Mysterious Ways’, 1991.

 

Mallet, David. ZOO Tv Live from Sydney. Polygram Video, 1994, 118 min, videocassette.

Neale, Mark. ‘Lemon’. Zooropa.

 

SECONDARY SOURCES

U2 – Teksty/Przekłady. Trans. Katarzyna Malita and Katarzyna Tatarczuch. Kraków: Rock – Serwis, 1997.

Bowler, David and Brian Dray U2 – Sprzysiężenie na rzecz nadziei [U2 – The Conspiracy Of Hope]. Trans. Katarzyna Malita. Kraków: Rock – Serwis,1994.

Breskin, David. ‘Twentieth Anniversary Special: Bono Q & A’. In U2 – The Rolling Stone Files. Ed. by the editors of Rolling Stone. New York: Hyperion, 1994, pp. 98 – 103.

Brothers, Robyn. ‘Time To Heal, Desire Time’. In Reading Rock and Roll Ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999, pp. 237-267.

 Davies, Chris Lawe. ‘Aboriginal Rock Music: Space and Place’. In Rock and Popular Music Ed. Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shephard, and Graeme Turner. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 260-263.

Dolinar, Brian. U2 Ate America: The Postmodren Fable Of Rock’n’Roll Superstardom 2 Oct. 1996. 01 Jan. 2001. <http://wwwpopcultures.com>.

Eno, Brian. ‘Bringing Up Baby’. In U2 – The Rolling Stone Files, pp. 165 – 170.

Fallon, B.P. U2 – Faraway, So Close. New York: Little, Brown, 1994.

Flanagan, Bill. U2 At The End Of The World. London: Bantam Books, 1995.

Fricke, David. ‘U2 Finds What It’s Looking For’. In U2 – The Rolling Stone Files, pp. 178-188.

Gardner, Elysa. ‘Introduction’. In U2 The Roling Stone Files, pp. Xi - xxx.

Griffin, David Ray. ‘Creativity and Postmodern Reigion’. In The Post-Modern Reader, pp. 373 - 382.

Harvey, David. ‘The Condition of Postmodernity’. In The Post-Modern Reader. Ed. Charles Jencks. London: Academy Editions, 1992, pp. 299 - 316.

Light, Alan. ‘Behind The Fly’. In U2 – The Rolling Stone Files, pp. 191 - 199.

Parra, Pim Jal de la. Between 1976-1994 U2 Have Played Almost 1000 Concerts. London, New York, Sydney: Omnibus Press, 1994.

Reynolds, Simon and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995.

Stein, Atara. ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’. In Reading Rock and Roll. pp. 269 - 286.

18. Street, John. Rebel Rock. The Politics of Popular Music Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 72.