Credit: Far Out / Album Cover
October 24th, 2026 · 4:30pm BST
At the end of 1985, grouped together in a house to revisit material for their next album, U2 recorded a demo that The Edge would dismiss as “awful”.
The band had just wrapped up the Unforgettable Fire Tour: 111 dates across major arenas, including an appearance at Live Aid in July 1985, that saw them consistently climb to wider, more prevalent acclaim – but their true moment of sensation was still ahead of them. That would come with their next album, what would become 1987’s The Joshua Tree, but as the band retreated to a house together in their post-tour haze, the early sessions suggested otherwise.
The demo composed was for ‘With or Without You’, which had then been written with a chord sequence composed by Bono. Its story was one of an inescapable relationship, whether that be an actual romantic connection, a comment on a relationship with fame or something in between. Bono would later describe the lyric as “pure torment”.
“One of the things that was happening at that time was the collision in my own mind between being faithful to your art or being faithful to your lover,” he explained in the 2006 autobiography U2 by U2. “What if the two are at odds? Your gift versus domestic responsibility?”
The intensity behind ‘With or Without You’ carried over into the studio, as U2 began to workshop numerous versions of it at STS Studios in Temple Bar, Dublin, all to no avail. By then, The Edge seemed to foretell the song’s “awful” nature, while bassist Adam Clayton seconded the disappointment in its composition: the early versions, he later explained, were “very traditional because the chords just went round and round and round”.
Finally prepared to begin work on The Joshua Tree in 1986, U2 retreated to Danesmoate House in Rathfarnham, Dublin, a Georgian mansion that was later purchased by Clayton in 1988, and ‘With or Without You’ came along with them, despite Bono’s hesitations.
Even while each member tried out new techniques for the song – The Edge making his guitar more ambient, Clayton making his bass louder, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr utilising an electronically enhanced drum kit – the song was stubbornly unsatisfying for the band, and was very nearly abandoned completely, with their producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois even declining to continue work on it.
Bono enlisted his friend, The Virgin Prunes’ Gavin Friday, to revisit ‘With or Without You,’ with the singer still harbouring hope that somewhere within the song, there lay a potential hit. Its salvation came in the form of a guitar prototype sent to The Edge: the Infinite Guitar, made by Canadian musician Michael Brook. The Infinite Guitar allowed for sustained notes to be played, similar to the E-Bow device with a wider range – though, its assembly was temperamental, at times: The Edge recalled that “one wrongly placed wire and you could get a nasty belt of electricity”.
Experimenting in the studio, The Edge wielded the sustained notes with the Infinite Guitar as Bono and Friday listened to the backing track to ‘With or Without You’ in the control room, and this chance layering of sound between rooms presented them with the solution to the song’s persistent problems. The Edge quickly recorded an Infinite Guitar part in just two takes, crafting the innovative tone that the song needed, all along. Eno would later describe the Infinite Guitar to Songfacts as their “little secret weapon”.
Eno then used a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser to sequence the song’s electronic drumbeat, plugging it into a guitar amplifier to enhance the sound and make it feel, as Lanois described, “more like people playing in a room”. Once producer Steve Lillywhite was brought into The Joshua Tree’s sessions in December 1986, ‘With or Without You’ was given its final helping hand, mixed by Lillywhite and engineer Mark Wallis. After much debate among the three producers, the song finally found its home in a more minimal, refined approach to its sound.
Thankfully, U2 never truly gave up on ‘With or Without You,’ as it would become one of their most beloved songs, reflected in its massive success on the charts – including reaching number one in the United States, a first for the band. According to Chart Masters, the song was established as the eighth-best-selling song of the 1980s, a huge feat after the many lives it led.
The eight best-selling songs of the 1980s:Michael Jackson, ‘Billie Jean’ (1983)The Police, ‘Every Breath You Take’ (1983)Michael Jackson, ‘Beat It’ (1983)Journey, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ (1981)Bon Jovi, ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ (1986)Phil Collins, ‘In the Air Tonight’ (1981)Michael Jackson, ‘Thriller’ (1982)U2, ‘With or Without You’ (1987) ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
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