U2.Com hooked up with Brian Eno, Danny Lanois and U2 in Morocco earlier in the summer, to bring you the inside track on the Fez songwriting sessions. In Part 1 Larry explained that ‘Sometimes you just have to get away in order to write the songs.’ In our second Fez story, the band check out a headline act at the Festival of Sacred Music. In our third story Adam discussed the ‘looser rhythmic structures’ the band have been working with and in our latest update from Fez Edge muses on everything from why they went to Morocco to working with Bono on ‘Spiderman’ and the ‘shock’ of the third dimension at the Cannes film festival. Read on!
So how would you describe what you’re doing here in Morocco with Brian and Danny?
We’re following our instincts which has inspired us to work with the two of them without any clear ambition for where the music is going to go. And for the first time we’re writing together which is totally new and the idea is that we’ll make music and decide later what’s going to happen to it. Everyone’s been quite liberated by this proposition so the music has been coming really easily - the few things we have reviewed we’ve really enjoyed but at the moment we just keep coming up with new ideas.
Why Morroco?
It’s partly about getting out of our comfort zone, giving us the ability to concentrate intensely on the music which can’t be done in Dublin so easily because everyone’s lives are there. But it’s also because we’d had a good time here once before, because the Festival of Sacred Music was taking place and because Brian has been interested in Arabic music for years. And then we also felt we might meet some interesting musicians and we certainly have, some great percussionists, some violin players and it’s exciting for us if we can find new territory.
Compared with All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb this feels quite left-field.
We’re always up for that, for trying something different. It was an early decision of ours that whatever we were going to do next, we didn’t want to go into it with the same set of ideas about what it would be and what we were trying to achieve. We’ve tried to free ourselves of the constraints of thinking ahead, we just wanted to make music for the sake of it.
And Brian and Danny are co-musicians at this stage?
Yes, co-writers, co-conspirators and we don’t know where the music is going to go. We’ve recorded a lot here and elements of that might end up being used, we’ll see, but it could be that we take this material and re-record it elsewhere. We’re planting seeds really, working with the knowledge that whatever we end up with we’ll definitely preserve some element of what we have here.
Does being in North Africa make you think differently about how you make music?
Definitely and that’s coming through in the work, in the musical structures… we don’t feel confined by the standard formats of contemporary music. So if we feel like we’re doing something too reminiscent of how we might have done it in the past, we move on. We’re trying to find other blueprints and formats for songs.
Eno describes Arabic music as having a more narrative thread than the cyclical nature of African-based music…
Because of its scale it’s not a music that lends itself particularly to harmony and so it tends to be about a very clear melodic line. That top line can be taken by a vocal or another instrument - violin often - and it’s interpreted, reconfigured and restated in all kinds of different ways. So effectively a melodic idea, sometimes a very involved melodic idea, is really the centrepiece of the whole thing, unlike a lot of songs founded on the principles of western harmony. Now we’re not jettisoning that tradition but we’re allowing some of those ideas to bleed through into this new work.
Larry remarked on the connections between Irish traditional music and North African music, connections which have been obscured over the centuries.
Yeah, there are certain musics you can find in Ireland which are almost identical, like those you find in the west of Ireland, a kind of singing based on all the little quarter notes with a style totally North African and stretching out to India. It seems to have nothing to do with western music at all.
Last time U2.Com were in the studio with the band it was Abbey Road in London and Rick Rubin was at the helm?
We’re very excited about the material we worked on with Rick, some great songs came out of it - none of which we have played with Brian and Danny. It feels like that is a separate set of material. There were two recordings that did come out from that period on the last collection but if there is maybe not a full record there with Rick, there is the bones of a record and I think we’ll get back to that because we enjoyed working with him, he’s a very inspiring character.
It feels like you’ve hit a very strong songwriting vein since late last year ?
And we just want to keep going with it. It’s like we’ve hit a seam and we want to keep hammering away as long as we can. Inevitably, when you go on the road, your songwriting chops start to get a little dull - there are so many other considerations when you’re playing live - but we’re going to keep this writing going until we want to stop or until it is time to tour again.
At the same time, Bono and you are writing for another project?
Yes, the rumours are true, we’ve been working on the Spiderman stage show. What attracted us was the opportunity to work with Julie Taymor, the director. We’re also working with a writer, Glen Berger, and producers from the world of Broadway. We’ve actually done a lot of the writing already and we’re entering a phase where we’re going to workshop the first draft of script and songs. After that we’ll be in a better position to see if we’re close - or not too close! For us, like Julie, we’re kind of intrigued by the possibility that if we can find an interesting angle on Spiderman then it could have a far greater audience than if we got together with her to work on an opera which would risk being confined to the art house world. We don’t want to do something that is the usual musical fayre of Broadway, and we do want to break new ground, but we also want to make something that people can relate to, that has the chance of being popular on a mass scale.
U23D has also been on your mind recently, particularly with the Cannes premiere.
It’s worked out really well, and it does everything it says on the can. We had a great team on this who came on stage really close to the band and it is the perspective that all true fans of the band, of music generally, would really want to have at a concert. You get the full scale of the event, 3D and big-screen. I found the images of the stadium show pretty awe-inspiring along with the incredible intimacy that 3D brings, the ability to be so close to individual members of the band that you feel like you are standing next to them.
The Director of Photography on U23D said that the film would give even the band would a new take on being in the band.
Yes, its true, I’ve never seen a U2 show so this was the closest I’ve been. Some things were quite shocking to me - like Jim Sheridan picked up on how separate we are during the show up there. When you’re watching a 2D image, you don’t get a sense of that depth and distance and while there are lots of moments when we are very close to each other, a lot of the time we are really separated. Jim said to me he just realised how lonely it must be being the drummer - you’re holding down the whole foundation of the thing but there’s no-one there saying, ‘Come on Larry!’ or whatever because everyone else is off doing other things. Sure, with the technology we use, ear-monitors and so on, we’re totally in touch with each other musically, but physically that separation is interesting to me and I haven’t figured it out.
It’s an unashamed concert movie but as a visceral experience it is on a different planet to anything we’ve ever done in 2D. I was shocked by it, it’s extremely powerful.
More from Fez in a little while. source: U2.com / aug 14, 2007
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