U2 have David Bowie to thank for their meteoric rise to worldwide super-stardom in the Eighties, according to the band’s frontman Bono.
Bono told Rolling Stone how Bowie first introduced his band to various methods of singing and production, and was also instrumental in U2 beginning a long and hugely successful collaboration with acclaimed producer and musician Brian Eno.
“U2 owe him a lot. He introduced us to Berlin and Hansa Studios; to collaborating with Brian Eno,” he said. “It’s the high singing, beyond your ‘man’ voice into the feminine. And there’s the staging, the attempt to be innovative. Bowie wasn’t afraid to use scale, to dramatise things. His setlist was not just a jukebox he could run through. It was drama.”
Later, Bono was also full of praise for Bowie’s influence as an artist, claiming his importance to British music is akin to the status provided to Elvis Presley in the US. “It’s not exaggerating to say what Elvis meant to America, David Bowie meant to the UK and Ireland,” he enthused. “It was that radical a shift in consciousness. The first time I saw him was singing ‘Starman‘ on television it was like a creature falling from the sky. Americans put a man on the moon. We had our own British guy from space – with an Irish mother.”
U2’s manager Paul McGuinness has recently confirmed the band’s plans to release a new studio album early next year.