The art of U2

I love U2, and there's no doubt in my mind that they are one of the biggest and best bands of the last 30 years. But in my eyes, sometimes their visual image has let them down. In the 80's they always looked gloomy on their sleeves, the archetypal student band, looking angst ridden and serious in the middle of a desert or next to a ruined castle. Don't get me wrong, I loved the music but I wouldn't have wanted a poster or t-shirt from around that era. When it came to "The Joshua Tree" and "Rattle & Hum" campaigns, yes the imagery was striking and well coordinated but by God you can have too many black and white moody poses. Something had to change. It was time to lighten up...

In 1991, U2 discovered COLOUR.


In a remarkable about turn, the band threw out everything you'd expect from old U2, and released possibly one of their most bleakest subject matter albums but dressed it up with a new sound and new imagery, and fooled us all. "Achtung Baby" is in their words "the sound of four men cutting down the Joshua Tree " and is a tremendous album which I can't do justice to here in a few words so I'm going to concentrate on paying due respect to the imagery.

Whereas once we'd get Anton Corbijn's gorgeous single group portraits ala "Unforgettable Fire" or "Tree", here we got 16 (36 on the vinyl version!) different images from him, plus those on the back cover, any one of which would sum up the album suitable and would look stunning as the cover image alone (well perhaps not the cow image). Also, it's not as if they employed a different designer as Steve Averill has overseen the design of all their artwork over the years, yet here he gives the band the new look which instantly demands attention.

Four of the singles from "Achtung Baby" had covers (below) which when put together formed one main image of the group sitting in one of their trademark Trabants, a car from pre-Berlin Wall fall East Germany appropriated by the group as an icon for the album. Didn't make sense at first but by the third single you (literally) got the picture.


The accompanying "Zoo TV" tour saw the band experimenting with visual imagery in a way they'd never before explored (or had any other group to be honest) and when they surprisingly released the "Zooropa" album during the tour, this used many of the images and design work which they'd made use of during the worldwide trek, mainly the graffitti'd Russian cosmonaut against the circular stars motif, their "flag emblem of Zooropa", which forced it's way onto most of the sleeves, as you can see below:

A variation of this image features on the "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" limited CD single, incorporating the Victory Column from Berlin, which was an important part of the video for the single and the Wim Wenders film from which it was taken:

The videosingle for "Numb":
and the promo CD for "Numb":

Above is the reverse of the "Zooropa" album sleeve, again featuring this multi image design, somehow giving nothing away about the content of the album, yet telling you everything you need to know at the same time. This is carried forward to the promo sleeve for "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)", where a variation on this theme is introduced in this repeated four image design, with each image coloured digitally Warhol style. Again, the motif is the Victory Column:The "Lemon" remixes sleeve is similar:


This became something of a U2 design trademark, and was something which Averill used heavily during the next album campaign, as 1997's underrated "Pop" depicts the group in the same way, using Anton Corbijn band portraits. It is admittedly a pretty dreadful cover.


Again, the multi imaging of Adam Clayton on the "Staring at the Sun" single and the Irish Leaders for "Please":


I personally think this promo sleeve for "Mofo" would have made a better album cover for "Pop":

It's ironic that most of the promo covers were actually better than the real thing (no pun intended), as I rather like this one below, but it never got used on any commercial release:

After the colour and brashness of the "Pop" era, it was back to basics for their next release. Maybe it was down to the release of their "Best Of 1980 -1990" which made the group hark back to their early days, as the "All That You Can't Leave Behind" album and associated releases reverted back to the single band image, in black and white, but this time it was all a bit more stylish, retaining the traditional U2 imagery but bringing it up to date, much like the music had harked back to the old U2 sound, but was actually still very modern. Nice font and graphics throughout. 9 out of 10. Very good.

And so then in 2005, we come full circle and get this abomination. What on earth were they thinking?

Ok, nice font for the logo and title granted, but really, is that the best they could come up with? It looks like a bootleg. Dull isn't in it. Maybe in this day of downloading MP3's, good design on a album sleeve isn't important, especially when you've got into bed with Apple advertising iPods. It does sum up for me an album which isn't quite right, there's something missing, and it's not one of my favourites. Some good tracks but doesn't make me want to go back to it. However, they've redeemed themselves on the limited edition version, which is lovely:

Still, it's interesting to see what design was used for the online digital only release of their entire back catalogue. A nice mix of old and new. They just couldn't let that multi image design go!

So what have we learned here? Not a lot, apart from that the 90's saw U2 at their most experimental and most interesting, pushing the idea of what U2 was all about as far as it could go, and this is my favourite era, both musically and visually. Now go back and rediscover those records.