“Steve Lillywhite deserves credit for forcing our hand on that one”: Bono on the huge U2 hit that they saved from the scrapheap

U2 in 2004.

Last month, U2 released How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, a collection of ten outtakes from their 2004 record How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. U2’s 11^th studio album, …Atomic Bomb was described by Bono at the time of release as the Irish quartet’s “first rock album” and was heralded as such with the cascading rock grooves of lead single Vertigo. Writing about the period in a recent edition of music magazine Record Collector, Bono said the song, which became such a huge anthem for the accompanying live show that the band not only named the whole jaunt the Vertigo Tour but also often started and ended their gigs with it.

“Vertigo ended up out of a song that we recorded with Chris Thomas called Native Son,” Bono writes in the magazine. “In that case, we were right not to trust our first instincts. Chris is great with guitar sounds, as well as singers and bands, heh got it as far as he could but it wasn’t the combustible, unstable chemistry we needed for our show.”