Credit: Apple TV+
Sat 1 August 2026 15:00, UK
There aren’t many bands in the world that have been picked apart as much as U2 has over the years.
They definitely deserve to be up there with the greatest bands to come out of the rock and roll world, but when you listen to the way that Bono talks about their music, it can sound like he’s one of the most pretentious frontmen that has ever existed. Some of that might indeed be true, but Bono knew that all it took was a little time for everyone to click with what they were doing all of the time.
Granted, it’s not like those initial listens were terrible, either. A lot of people understood exactly what they were going for when they made albums like The Joshua Tree, but once you get to Rattle and Hum, it does sound like they’re enjoying the smell of their own farts a little too much. They were on top of the world, and it was as if the rest of the world needed to know that every time Bono had a microphone in his hand.
So the fact that they managed to make it out of the early 1990s in one piece is practically a miracle. For a brief second during Achtung Baby, it looked like they had realised what had made them both loved and hated and started to course correct a little bit. They weren’t afraid to poke fun at themselves and make a mockery of what rock stars were meant to be, but when you look at some of their later experiments, it’s not like all of their post-ironic comments worked when they started making tunes like ‘Discotheque’.
They didn’t want to look back by any stretch, but when you look at the way that they entered the 2000s, they definitely needed to remind people why they were one of the greatest bands in the world. ‘Beautiful Day’ was a great way to reboot their classic sound at the start of the decade, but if that was proof that the band could still make great U2 songs, ‘Vertigo’ was the moment where they started to break some new ground outside of their comfort zone.
You have to remember that this was the era of the rock and roll revival happening in America, and there are pieces of this song that wouldn’t have sounded all that out of place on a Strokes record. The chorus sounds like the kind of thing that anyone could sing at the top of their lungs in the middle of a football stadium, but even if it was a bit more boneheaded than usual, Bono knew that there was a lot more going on underneath the surface.
Not many people are going to want to think that hard when listening to a song that could double as a soundtrack to a commercial, but Bono figured that people wouldn’t understand what they were going until they played it over and over again, saying, “Because songs demand to be heard. ‘Vertigo’ is deceptively simple. That riff, you can think, ‘Aw yeah, another rock song.’ It doesn’t become great the first time you hear it. It becomes great the thousandth time you hear it. And that’s true of a lot of rock riffs. So we have to get the density of exposure for that to be a hit. And we knew that.”
Further reading: From The Vault
While yours truly hasn’t taken the plunge and reached his thousandth time quite yet, it’s easy to see what Bono is talking about. There is something genuinely hypnotic about the way that the riff works, and when you hear the song in the context of the rest of the band’s catalogue, it definitely has a lot more feeling in it than what they had been doing on their last album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Most of U2’s material didn’t need to have this much thought put into it, but the way that Bono thought about his songs was about much more than a tune that can go off when played onstage. He wanted to make an epiphany go off in the listener’s head, and ‘Vertigo’ was the kind of tune that was a mission statement for what he wanted the next phase of the band to become.
