FROM their status as a new wave band who, as born-again-Christians, used to pray before gigs, to po-faced stadium rockers who did a neat line in contemporary third world politics, and on to being ironically correct, post-modern icons who discovered the joys of the dance-floor, U2 have been there, done that and recorded the re-mix. But it has now been three-and-a-half years since their last album - consider the career-ending, five-year space between Stone Roses albums - and they're soon to re-surface into the choppy waters of a changing and changed music industry.
Forget the red guitar and those three chords for a moment, back to business: the giant multinational Polygram, which owns U2's record company Island, hasn't had the best of years on the music front - they allegedly issued a "profit warning" to their shareholders - and it wasn't a bunch of happy investors who gathered in Hong Kong recently for a Polygram sales meeting. Fielding questions from the floor about the progress of the band who always bring a smile to the accountants' faces, a Polygram suit informed the audience that when it comes to the new U2 album, they should "expect nothing but the best".
The cheeky chappies in U2 are using the above phrase as a working title for their name album, but while they tweak and twiddle the knobs in a recording studio in Dublin getting ready for the album's release, the people in Polygram are drumming their fingers on expensive pieces of office furniture. With good reason: the new U2 album was scheduled for release this month. The company was especially keen on a November release date because almost the same amount of "product" (albums) are "shifted" (sold) in the last "quarter" (three-month period) of the year as in the other "nine months put together. "The non-release of the U2 album in November will have a significant effect on our 1996 figures," says a corporate spokesperson for Polygram. Too right: that's an estimated £30 million which won't show up on their end of year returns.
It's all a long way from the good of feudal days of the 1960s when the music industry demanded product and demanded it now. Even if your surname was McCartney or Jagger, back then you were supposed to churn out the albums at regular intervals. Now that the "creatives" have taken over the boardroom, armed with managers, consultants and lawyers, the biggest and the best, like U2 and REM, are refusing to record on demand and refusing to spend years on the road touring their product. The more audacious ones are even seeking to control their copyright, which is something The Beatles never asked for or got.
But now the money-men are fighting back amid much hyperama, REM recently signed a $80 million, five-album deal with their record company, Warners. The figure of $80 million is illusory, contrived for newspaper headline purposes. REM's deal only had the potential to earn them that amount and it was based on all five of their albums selling several million copies. Executives at Time-Warner (Warner's parent company) are now openly questioning the wisdom of the deal in the light of the performance of REM's current album. New Adventures In Hi-Fi, which was the last REM album under their own deal, has only sold 500,000 copies to date, which is far from impressive for a band who sold about eight million copies of their previous albums. Time-Warner is also wondering if it is altogether wise to sign a band who are in their mid to late-30s for a five-album deal.
U2, whose average age is slightly younger than REM, face a different proposition when they return to the marketplace next March with their new album. Unlike REM, who have persisted with a fairly orthodox guitar, bass and drums sound over the years, U2 have always embraced change. Up until Rattle And Hum (1988) they employed an orthodox rock music sound that threatened to calcify as they stadium-hopped around the world (the Simple Minds syndrome). There was a vertical change in their direction with the release of Acktung Baby (1991) with the band embracing dance culture, introducing hip-hop rhythms, sequencers and synthesisers. This new, and for many improved, sound introduced them to a younger audience and brought the previously undanceable band onto the dancefloor courtesy of some nifty Paul Oakenfold re-mixes.
According to insiders, the delay on the new album is because "they have always been musically ambitious and they like to change their sound. When you have been the biggest band in the world and you want to change your sound, a very fraught business, there is pressure on. It is believed the band are going after a "trip-hop" sound on the new album - trip-hop being the slowed down hip-hop (or hip-hop played underwater) that acts like Tricky and Portishead brought to prominence last year and which has far more artistic worth than any amount of re-cycled Britpop.
The band have recorded about 38 songs for the album, with the first single, Discotheque, being released in February. It is not thought that the recent "theft" of two songs on the Internet will change the album's final running order. With no shortage of songs, the album's delay, apart from the switch in musical styles, is being attributed to what one source close to the band calls "their fantastically indecisive nature - they're quite capable of sitting around for days wondering about it all . . . they really went for it over the summer trying to make the November release date but when exhaustion set in, they settled for the March date".
The band are committed to touring the new album, and according to their manager Paul McGuinness, the tour will begin in the US in May. Despite U2's huge personal wealth (about £75 million each, thanks to an equal cut on all royalties) money is and issue on this tour. Their last tour, the Zooropa extravaganza, may have sold out everywhere it went, but because of the huge production costs it only broke even. The band and management have just secured the services of the controversial Canadian Michael Cohl to promote the tour - Cohl has previously promoted the highest grossing rock tour ever, the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour in 1994.
The touchy subject of sponsorship had now raised its alluring head: in the past Paul McGuinness has publicly criticised acts like Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney for accepting corporate sponsorship on their tours. "People know my feelings about bands using inappropriate sponsorship, the sort of sponsorship that demeans the artist and is without any sense of dignity," he says. "We are currently being approached by a number of information technology companies and considering our options. In the past we've never had any problems with instrument manufacturers like Yamaha, our problem is with branded consumer goods." It is believed that U2 would need something like $100 million in sponsorship revenue for the tour, and names that have been mentioned, but not confirmed, include AT&T and Apple Computers.
Before that is the album and the band don't need reminding that nothing less than a consolidation of their pre-eminent position will be acceptable to all concerned. As the album's provisional title suggests, nothing but the best is expected by the fans, and the record company accountants.
