(Credits: Far Out / EMI America / Steve Kalinsky / YouTube Still)
Sun 5 April 2026 19:30, UK
Both U2 and David Bowie found themselves in creative ruts in the late 1980s.
Bowie had entered the decade off the back of an untouchable purple patch. Swanning into the new wave climate he’d helped forge, 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) had never seen the Cracked Actor marry commercial appeal with leftfield cred still intact, scoring an album number one batting aside all New Romantic imitators. As ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was topping the singles chart, an earnest Irish post-punk outfit was gunning for stadium fame, standing as one of the biggest bands on the planet in a few short years.
Yet, it went to pot for both of them. Bowie’s jump to MTV stardom off the back of ‘Let’s Dance’ sparked a grim grab at mainstream pap pandering to his new audience, execrable records like Tonight and Never Let Me Down making the career highs of Low or “Heroes” seem like ancient history as he was lost in his turgid Glass Spider Tour. U2 hit a thud, too. The Joshua Tree’s winning mine of Americana’s bluesy sediments soon curdled to 1988’s quasi-live album and documentary feature, which reeked of self-indulgent mythmaking.
A reinvention was sorely needed on both parts. Such transformations were nothing new to Bowie, able to shake off his late 1980s nadir and soak up the Pixies’ alternative wave simmering in the US underground for his Tin Machine project. Yet, U2’s creative stodge demanded a bolder U-turn. Ditching the Mojave Desert clobber bluegrass twang, Ireland’s most successful band jumped into the new decade, embracing dance music, irony, and multi-media spectacle for Achtung Baby and its Zoo TV Tour.
Artistic renewal and a greater critical standing were lavished on the two for the first half of the 1990s. Yet, the creative freedom enjoyed by Bowie’s rejection of pop grab and U2’s divebomb into irreverent humour expressed themselves with one crucial difference: selection. U2 were up for anything, eager to “chop down the Joshua Tree” that had stifled possibilities, whereas Bowie was eager to claw back his esteemed status as a stalwart of the arts world.
Such a clash occurred at Berlin’s Hansa studios while U2 were mixing Achtung Baby, an old haunt and site of Bowie’s famed namesake album trilogy.
“We had a playful sort of banter – he would really go there in conversations, and we would even occasionally hurt each other’s feelings,” Bono revealed to Rolling Stone in 2016, weeks after Bowie’s death. Jumping forward a decade, the ‘Starman’ also didn’t mince his words regarding Bono and The Edge’s foray into the rock musical. “He took his daughter to a matinee to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and he sent me the reasons he didn’t like it. And everything he said was really helpful, because it was in the early days of the show.”
What goes up must come down. After a fruitful 1990s, U2 had enjoyed the last of the subversive hurrah with 1997’s Pop, to then stumble into the corporate arena as rock behemoths that’d define their 21st century. Bowie would bookend his life and career immaculately after his decade away from the studio, but the 2000s were a period of diminishing returns, flashing occasional pearls of brilliance amid a mush of half-memorable LPs.
Bowie’s naysaying list would be fascinating to see, one for how he would have even begun to approach a Spider-Man musical for a start, and how such a red-marked notepad may have revealed the world of difference between the two bands, who, while running similar career peaks and troughs, was marked by the old Jean Genie tethered to an artistic literacy and authority U2 could never quite glean in the same way.
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