Credit: Album Cover
October 25th, 2026 · 10:49am GMT
The sophomore slump is usually the album that can make or break any great act. Even if you come out of the gate with a stone-cold classic, there are always bands like The Clash and The Jam who have tried to recapture the magic on that second release and end up with something completely lacklustre. No band can manage to be perfect on every release, but coming out of October, even The Edge admitted that no one in U2 wanted to return to the song ‘Fire’.
When looking at the makings of the Irish icons’ second release, though, it should come as a surprise to absolutely no one why it failed. There are still great moments on the project, to be sure, but the idea of making a conceptual piece about Bono’s struggles with his faith was going to turn off any non-religious listener the minute that ‘Gloria’ started.
There were also rather more practical problems than deciding how much religion to put on the record. Bono had lost a briefcase containing lyrics and ideas during the American tour, leaving the band scrambling when they returned to the studio. Producer Steve Lillywhite later recalled that nothing was ready despite the recording time already being booked.
‘Fire’ had been recorded separately in the Bahamas during an April 1981 break from touring, before the main Dublin sessions. So while it belongs to October, it also captures a band trying to keep new material coming while the demands of their first album were still eating up their time.
This wasn’t the same group that made Boy, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If anything, seeing them grow up by that much in such a short amount of time should have been a welcome change of pace, but listening to ‘Fire’, this should have been the record that pulled all of the listeners right back in.
Credit: Alamy
It’s far from the most innovative tune in the world, but for anyone who started with ‘I Will Follow’, this was the next best thing, complete with a chorus that sounded like it should be belted from the rafters in a stadium. We saw a cultural juggernaut, but all the band saw was a half-sketch of a tune that never got fleshed out.
Even when recalling the October sessions years later, The Edge remarked that the song was one of the group’s least favourite moments, saying, “The problem was it was high in potential but actually not very high on content.” Then again, so what if it didn’t work as a studio cut? U2 always did their greatest damage onstage, and the best versions of this song has been when they brought it to the stadiums.
Listening back to the version they played in 1982 in Werchter, Bono sounds absolutely electric. The pretentious version of ‘The Fly’ had quite seeped into the mix just yet, so all fans got to see was a frontman slowly turning into a legend before our eyes. The Edge is also in fine form, even playing around with the melody every once in a while with his guitar fills.
That performance also had a life beyond the festival footage. The Werchter recording appeared on editions of the ‘New Year’s Day’ single, giving listeners a chance to hear the older song alongside the sound of U2 moving forward. Decades later, it was included again on the 2021 40th-anniversary edition of ‘Fire’, together with another live recording from London’s Hammersmith Palais.
For a song the band supposedly wanted to forget, its concert versions have proved surprisingly durable. They offer something the studio cut can’t quite supply: a sense of the musicians pushing at the edges of the tune rather than simply presenting it as a finished product.
Then again, maybe ‘Fire’ was the right song at the wrong time. It was cut out for the arenas of the world, but if you look at the crowds they are playing to in the clip, they are still relatively new to the festival and were going to spend a few years finding their feet before reaching classics like ‘New Years Day’.
Once they did eventually find their groove, ‘Fire’ was all but removed from the setlist, with none of them thinking that it was worth including amongst the classics that were to come from The Joshua Tree. But if they had the idea of neutering their classics on Songs of Surrender, they could at least put a bit more gusto into ‘Fire’ for the modern age.
