He tells Flood that he won't be in tomorrow—he is going to an old

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friend's wedding and really looking forward to the break. Adam says he remembers the "black hole" U2 went into after The Joshua Tree. "Record­ing The Joshua Tree was relaxed, great fun," Adam says. "Then it all exploded. That tour was a piece of shit. Rattle and Hum was a piece of shit. Making Achtung Baby was a piece of shit." Adam is talking about the working atmosphere, by the way, not the work.

Flood commiserates, "I remember one meeting about scheduling a meeting to decide about making a decision."

"It was only on the Zoo TV tour that it really came together again," Adam says sadly. "And now here we are, back in the studio doing it to ourselves again."

"But you accomplished what you set out to," Flood says. "When a band's reinventing itself, as U2 has, there has to be a lot of theorizing. From now on you're going to have to carry that extra burden."

It's not hard to understand Adam's frustration with the Socratic approach to record-making. When there's a disagreement about which way to go with a song the argument is as likely to be won by who scores the most debating points as which music sounds the best. Of course, if everyone agreed on which one sounded the best, there'd be no debate.

Adam says that making the first three U2 albums was joyful. They were done in weeks. "October was a bit of a slog, waiting for the lyrics. For War we had all the songs and it was easy. Unforgettable Fin was tough. Same black holes, waiting for the lyrics on that one. We had six songs, then Brian came up with 'Elvis Presley and America' and '4th of July' and gave us something to tie it together." He sits sadly, blue about the amount of baggage that has been tied to a band that used to just get in a room and play.

Edge sticks his head in the door. "Phone for you, Adam. I think it's Naomi."

Adam goes off to the alcove to pick up his call and Edge comes in to play Flood the piano part he's just recorded on the boom box. Flood loves it. "Let's find a backing track with no chords," Edge says, "and put it down. We'll play Bono something he's never heard and just hand him a microphone."

Adam comes back in with a canary-scaring smile across his face. "Guess who I've got as house guests for the weekend," he announces. "Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington! They just decided! They're going straight to the airport."

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The two supermodels are stuck in Paris, too late to get a plane out, so Adam just offered to hire a plane and send it to fetch them to his castle.

Flood looks at Adam, whose black mood has been transformed, and says, "Tough life."

Adam takes off to prepare his bachelor pad for visitors. This is the time of night when Edge and Flood go to work like shoemaking elves, cranking through the small hours so that when the others return tomor­row they will be amazed at the creations laid out before them.

Edge's guitar tech, Dallas, points to his boss and smiles, "That guy never goes home." Dallas has worked for a lot of top dogs in the business, from the Eagles to Prince, but U2, he says, is something else. He says they often come into the studio without a song, jam away and you think nothing's going on, and all of a sudden—wham—a song will appear. And they'll change anything. Most bands get locked into playing a song a certain way. U2 will work and work at something, get it almost finished, and then one of the guys will suddenly change the part he's playing and they'll all follow him off in a whole different direction, Bono will start singing a different melody, and you'll think, "What are they doing? It was almost done! Wrap it up!" But often, Dallas, says, that new part will lead them into something better than what they had.

It seems to me that U2 has more faith in the strength of the song itself than many bands do. A lot of artists treat their songs as fragile things that can easily be destroyed. U2 knows that if an experiment fails, the original is still there to be returned to.

Edge puts up his new demo and listens to it. He asks if Larry is still in the building. No, Flood says, Larry went home. Edge gets up and goes out to the big room, takes a seat at Larry's drums and starts whacking out a raggedy beat while his demo plays. He spots a roadie packing a flight case and asks him to come over and just keep doing this. The roadie does, and Edge moves over to a keyboard, adding another part.

Flood records the whole thing and then Edge listens to it play back. He thinks there's a song there but would really like to hear it with a different structure—use this part as an intro, repeat the verse twice the second time through, repeat the intro going into the final chorus. He thinks about it for a while and then asks Flood if it would be possible to sample each section of the song onto a keyboard, so that hitting one key

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