This is U2 in Nighttown, an X ray of four men who spent their

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teens and twenties being focused, serious, and pious and who, as they hit thirty, want to see what they missed. There was a song recorded in Berlin that didn't make the final sequence, in which Bono sang of wanting to "see and touch and taste as much as a man can before he repents." The Nighttown James Joyce created in Ulysses was a nocturnal urban world that promised knowledge in exchange for innocence. Ulysses was, among other things, a parody of Homer's Odyssey, with the hero battling the demons of his soul rather than mythical monsters on his long journey home to his wife. This trip U2 is intent on undertaking is just beginning. There's no way of telling how far it will bring them, or whether they'll all make it back.

"I don't think I've ever come home from a tour the same person I left," Bono says. "So there is always a moment where the people you come home to wonder if you're going to get on with them. Or if they even want you in the house. I'm an intinerant at heart. When I was fourteen my mother died. I lived with my father, and it was a house but it wasn't really a home after that. I always ended up sleeping on the floor of other people's places. And so, wherever I am I'm happy enough. I probably wouldn't come home at all if it weren't for the fact I had family." Bono thinks about that for a bit and says, "I think the real problems start when you come back, not when you go out."

The new album will be U2's first since the multinational record company Polygram, itself a division of the multinational electronics company Philips, bought Island Records, the label to which U2 is signed. Polygram paid something like $300 million dollars to get Is­land, which really means—given that Island has no other living super­stars—they paid it to get U2. Polygram is planning a massive push behind their first album by their superstar band and they need some information to get the ball rolling for the autumn campaign—like, Does the album have a name?

U2 consider the title Cruise Down Main Street, a reference to the cruise missiles that winged with such precision through downtown Baghdad, and to the Rolling Stones' classic Exile on Main Street. They talk about titling the record Fear of Women—but reject that as sure to make the Pretentious Police reach for their revolvers. They are determined not to call attention to the seriousness of the lyrics, to keep the media's eye on the flashy surface. It is all part of erecting the mask Bono talked about,

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the false face that will keep U2 from the embarrassment of standing around with their dicks hanging out. Which brings up a good idea! How about this for a cover: a big photograph of Adam standing there naked. The band calls in photographer Anton Corbijn and Adam proudly hangs out his manhood for the camera. Adam thinks that if they use this as the sleeve they should call the record Man——the logical sequel to their first album, Boy. Edge thinks it might be funnier to go with the nude shot and call the album Adam, in tribute to both their bassist and the first mortal (who was also the first man to get kicked out of his home and into the cruel world).

There is some brow mopping at Polygram when they hear rumors about a nude album jacket. Eventually U2, unable to decide which of Anton's many possible cover concepts to use, decides to go with them all: create a big montage with everything from the Adam willie shot to portraits of the four band members squeezed into one of those little Trabants. Anton is sort of distressed at the idea, but it's not his album. As for the name, they settle on something that no critic can take seriously: Achtung Baby. It is a reference—used frequently in Berlin by U2 soundman Joe O'Herlihy—to The Producers, the Mel Brooks movie about a pair of sleazy theater swindlers who try to create the biggest Broadway flop of all time by staging a musical called Springtime/or Hitler.

U2 figures that no critic will accuse them of pomposity with a title like that! Although this critic thinks that given the album's theme of faith and faithlessness Acbtung Baby suggests what Elvis Costello called "emotional fascism"—the dictatorship of fidelity.

"It's a bit of a con to call it something as flip as Achtung Baby" Bono admits. "Because underneath that thin layer of trash it's blood and guts. It's a very heavy, loaded record. It's a dense record." He grins. "I told somebody I thought it was a dense record and word got around that we were making a dance record.

"I think that the real rebels of the nineties are probably not musicians but comedians. Stand-up comics. Because they have people laughing while they're telling them where they're at. If people see you coming with a placard these days they just get out of your way. U2 has got to be careful. And smart."

By the way, in The Producers the crooked accountant who stages Spring­time for Hitler is named Leo Bloom. Maybe U2 has hit on the insight

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That he could be the same Bloom that James Joyce sent into Night-town in Ulysses. See, if you switch through the channels long enough, your synapses keep clicking around even after the TV is turned off.

Achtung Bono

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