U2’S THIRD ALBUM, WAR, is generally regarded as the band’s first truly great record. Although not officially a concept album per se — it doesn’t follow a dedicated storyline — the record has a prevailing theme centered around worldwide strife and the ravages of armed conflict, whether it was close to the band’s home base of Dublin or halfway across the globe. An impassioned and confrontational work, War was a critical and commercial triumph, and its rapid succession of smash singles — “New Year’s Day,” Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Two Hearts Beat as One” — pushed it to Gold and Platinum status on both side of the Atlantic.
But in the months before U2 — singer-guitarist Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. — began recording the album, there was little to indicate that they were on the verge of a breakthrough. There was doubt among them that they would make the record at all. “Going into the album, we’d gone through a bit of a crisis as a band because of our uncertainty about whether this was right for us,” The Edge says. “I mean, fundamentally, was it right for us to be in a band?” Those concerns faded once the new songs took shape and demonstrated to them that their music could be a platform to address larger and weightier matters. “We came out of that after we’d written some songs that were really reassuring and confirmed that we could be involved in music and make some sort of positive difference,” The Edge says. “It was on War where we cut our teeth on activism and social justice issues.”
The band had worked with producer Steve Lillywhite on their 1980 debut album, . At the time, Lillywhite was a rising star thanks to his collaborations with XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Peter Gabriel. He had established something of a golden rule of not working with. Afterward, he figured the group would move on to work with somebody else. “ was seen as a big, successful first album, but didn’t do as well as everybody hoped,” Lillywhite says. “I thought, Of course they’re going to want somebody else to produce the next record. Why wouldn’t they? And even though the second album underperformed, U2 were seen as a very hot band. Who wouldn’t want to produce them?”
