U2’s The Edge Speaks

With the album U2: The Best of 1980-1990 hitting shelves soon (a limited edition containing a bonus CD quietly hit shelves Tuesday, with the official version coming out Nov. 10), U2 guitarist The Edge granted an interview to the Los Angeles Times, discussing the new album the band currently has in the works with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, as well as the tour that will likely follow its release.

When queried about U2’s new work, the guitarist was reticent to give too much away for fear of starting a rumor mill. “I’m [nervous] about that—after what happened with Pop…the way people started making judgments even before they ever heard it.” The Edge projected a wrap date of sometime in the summer of 1999, but “we don’t want to set a firm deadline because we don’t want to get into the same trap that we did last time. We made a mistake of establishing a deadline too far in advance with Pop. The last month turned out to be a real scramble to get it out before the PopMart tour.” He continued, “We might have wanted another week to just sit back and relax with it…so that we wouldn’t have had to deliver it to the record company the day it was finished, which is what we ended up doing.”

Speaking of tours, don’t expect to see a repeat of the gargantuan undertakings following the release of PopMart and Zooropa. “The mood at the moment would be to do something small, having done Zoo TV and PopMart, it’s like we’ve done that.” He went on to say, “The truth is it takes such an incredible amount of energy and time and money to do stadiums. It’s not that we want an easy life, but having done it twice now, we are going to wait awhile before we think about it, before making another commitment.

“We are in a constant state of development and evolution, and that’s one thing I’ve enjoyed about the band,” he added. “Right now, it’s hard for me to say we are at the beginning of something or at the end. We are waiting for the music to tell us just where we are going.”