(Credits: Far Out / Daniel Hazard)
Tue 2 September 2025 4:00, UK
By the end of the 1980s, Ireland’s world-conquering cultural export, U2, was the biggest band on the planet.
But they weren’t the coolest. Burnished during post-punk’s white hot flame a decade before, The Edge’s shimmering guitar chimes and Bono’s earnest frontman duties had carved a unique presence amid a new wave crowd of otherwise mordant belligerents or artful iconoclasts. After 1983’s War, a formula began to emerge, one of unerring and unabashed, wide-eyed affirmation rock charged with anthemic stir and masked by a wafer-thin secular veneer that only just disguised their bone-deep Christian faith—aside from their perennially agnostic bassist, Adam Clayton.
After striking gold with 1987’s The Joshua Tree, U2 saw their desert wandering stadium blues as warranting a quasi-sequel with the following year’s Rattle and Hum. Part studio album and live document, their supposed ‘sixth’ record marked a band lost in their own lofty hype, placing themselves in the US musical canon along with old blues pioneers and 1960s countercultural titans with a staggering lapse of self-awareness only U2 could befall.
U2 knew they had suffered King Midas’ touch. Telling the Dublin crowd they had to “go away and dream it all up again” late 1989, the liberatory shock of dance music, German reunification, and some sorely needed irreverence pulled the band to Berlin’s famed Hansa studio to cut their infinitely sexier and acerbic Achtung Baby. Before long, Bono was donned in leather and wrap-around shades, had committed to including “baby” in their lyrics for the first time, and splashed kaleidoscopic Trabants all over their Zoo TV multi-media touring spectacle. U2 had truly “chopped down the Joshua Tree” for the 1990s.
One Aussie band had beaten them to the punch in bedroom wall cool. Similarly, Sydney’s INXS was born from the new wave that struck the world, 1980’s eponymous debut packed with youthful, power pop cheer. Yet, global chart stardom was nailed with 1987’s Kick, a blustering, swaggering rock attack with bold pop sheen that dripped with a level of strut and attitude U2 could only dream of as they were playing the Mojave nomad.
Led by the skulky ‘Need You Tonight’, Kick thrust INXS to a strata of mainstream glow and alternative pedigree that provided a template of creative renewal and critical standing U2 would hone even sharper for their razor-sarcastic Zoo TV and PopMart tours.
While the press were eager to paint the two as rivals, Bono always downplayed such impressions, albeit never above confessing a jealousy of their distinct tunes. “They were so great,” he told Australia’s 60 Minutes in 2014, going on to speak fondly of their late singer Michael Hutchence. “I mean, we were envious of some of their grooves and this beautiful baritone…and this guy who’d be flirting with your girlfriend the moment you turned your back. He was so bold and mischievous, and we miss him… he was always around, and even now, all these years later, there’s a seat at the table that isn’t there, you know?”
In November 1997, Hutchence was found dead in Sydney’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, having hung himself with his snakeskin belt from the automatic door. While there was never concrete clarity as to his motives, possible anguish surrounding the legal wrangling his daughter Tiger had been caught up in, a possibility, Hutchence’s loss was a shock to the music world, no less than Bono, who penned 2001’s ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ in honour of INXS’ charismatic frontman and old friend.
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