100 Best Albums of the Eighties

40. U2, ‘War’

“Punk had died,” says the Edge. “we couldn’t believe it had been swept to the side as if it had never happened, and War was designed as a knuckle buster in the face of the new pop.”

Indeed, at the time of the album’s release in 1983, the anger and anarchy of the late-Seventies punk movement had been replaced by the new romanticism best typified by Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Into such tepid waters, U2 dropped its bomb: War is a powerful fusion of politics and militant rock & roll, an album that anticipated the political awareness that would come back into vogue as the decade progressed.

With two of U2’s best sing-along anthems, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day,” War became something of a Who’s Next for the Eighties. The album’s aggressive sound is highlighted by what bassist Adam Clayton calls “all those helicopter guitars.”

Following U2’s first two albums, the delicate and ethereal Boy and the moodier and disjointed October, War arrived with the force of a jackhammer ripping into concrete. Rough, hard and metallic, it remains U2’s most overt rock album.

“We loved the Clash’s attitude early on,” the Edge says. “And Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Pistols. Guitar bands that didn’t use blues clichés. I was listening to Tom Verlaine to figure out how to make tough music.”

The title itself was arresting, as were its politically inspired songs. “We wanted a record people couldn’t just write off,” says Clayton. “It was an unsettled time, a year of conflict. Poland was on the news at the time. You looked around and there were conflicts everywhere. We saw a lot of unrest on TV and in the media. We focused on that.”

Still, U2 wanted to leave listeners with a feeling of hope. “We wanted love and anger,” says the Edge. “We wanted a protest record, but a positive protest record.”

War was recorded in about six weeks at Windmill Lane Studios, in Dublin, with most of the songs written in the studio. Vocalist Bono improvised lyrics to completed tracks, then refined them. “Bono would sing, and whatever came out would be the starting point,” says producer Steve Lillywhite.

Completing the songs was difficult. “It’s always hard to finish them,” says Clayton. “It takes Bono a long time to commit to a lyric. ‘New Year’s Day’ was a tough one. We had arguments over the vocals. At one stage it wasn’t even on the record.”

The album’s final track, “40,” which takes its title and lyrics from the Fortieth Psalm, was literally finished at the last moment, even as the next band scheduled to use the studio cooled its heels. “We were trying to get lyrics down and mix it with people pounding on the door,” says Clayton.