Since, as I write this, there are just about two hours left in Adam’s birthday (at least in my time zone), I thought that I should write a little something about all of our favorite bass player. I already wrote about “New Year’s Day”, the first song that came to mind, (see here for that article) and while I could try to write an article focusing on some of Mr. Clayton’s other greatest bass parts, I thought that it might be fun to talk about something a little different. That’s when I hit on the idea that it might be time to cover Adam’s first foray into the vocal booth.

Back in 1982, the band entered the studio with Jimmy Destri from Blondie producing, and the collaboration produced some very rough demos, mostly with piano. Fast-forward to 1983, while the band was rehearsing for the War Tour. While Bono and Adam were out of town, Edge and Larry revisited one of these rough tracks and laid down another demo. When Adam and Bono returned, the band returned once more to the studio and recorded the final version of the track, featuring two lines of vocals and some scat singing by one Adam Charles Clayton. I’m not sure why or how the decision was made to have Adam sing the vocal on this track, but I expect that maybe he just wanted to try something outside of his normal comfort zone. As far as I can tell, this is one of the rare U2 tracks to not feature any input at all from Bono – the track consists of just Edge on piano, Adam playing a funky bass line, and Larry pounding out a complicated, propulsive drum beat. There are also very occasional stabs of keyboard, which I assume are from Brian Eno. The lonesome, echoey piano motif is haunting and eerie but the rhythm section supplies enough action to keep the dancers moving.

“Endless Deep” was first released as a B-side to the second single from the album War – in most of the world, that was “Two Hearts Beat As One”, but in a handful of countries, it was “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. The song next appeared on the second disc of the band’s 1998 Best of 1980-1990 set. Finally, “Endless Deep” was released on the 2008 remastered edition of the War album, along with most of the rest of that album’s B-sides.

U2 haven’t played an instrumental song live since “Things to Make and Do” got its last live airing back in 1981 (and “Endless Deep” is mostly an instrumental after all) so I kinda doubt that they’ll be playing “Endless Deep” any time soon. It would be weird to see a microphone stand on Adam’s side of the stage, anyway. To be perfectly honest, I’d rather hear Bono singing (that’s what he’s there for, after all) and allow Adam to focus on what he does best: holding the band down and moving it forward all at the same time.