Ireland in 50 Albums, No 12: Achtung Baby, by U2 

Achtung Baby's electronic flourishes marked a departure in terms of sound for the band, spawning singles such as Mysterious Ways and Even Better Than the Real Thing 

U2, around the time of Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV tour. 

U2 bossed the 1980s. They wowed the world with The Joshua Tree. According to the cover of Time Magazine, they were “rock’s hottest ticket”. Their latest album, Rattle and Hum – a love letter to Americana that came with a cinema-release movie – got a mixed reception, however. As the decade drew to a close, they had been a long time on the road – 14 years, longer than most great bands like, say, the Beatles (10) and Led Zeppelin (12) lasted. They were at a crossroads as they set about making their next album.

“U2 played a New Year's Eve concert in 1989 back home in Dublin at the Point Theatre,” says Stephen Catanzarite, author of U2’s Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall. “It was the end of the '80s. From the stage, Bono said, ‘We gotta go away and dream it all up again.’ They took the longest break they’d taken in their career from touring and making albums, and they came back with this album, Achtung Baby. It was certainly a difficult album for them to make. They really were dreaming it all back up again, building the airplane as they were flying it.”