All God wants is a willing heart and for us to call out to Him

in november of 1994 U2 are together again, in a small studio near Ladbroke Grove in London, finding out how all their parts fit together after a year away from each other. Adam came in and started programming keyboards. Larry played complicated drum pat­terns that impressed Bono. ("I'm less surprised that he can play that way than that he wants to," Bono cracks.) As they did with Rattle and Hum and Zooropa——and so disastrously did not with Achtung Baby—the band is trying to ease into making their next album without taking on the full pressure of BEGINNING U2'S NEXT STAGE. They will not offi­cially begin a new U2 album until the spring of 1995. But for now they will spend a couple of weeks working with Eno on improvisations that they will perhaps peddle as a motion picture soundtrack. (They have been screening rough cuts of upcoming movies, looking for the right one.)

Eno goads the band into all sorts of exercises, such as switching instruments. Edge is playing a lot of bass and Bono some impressively Edge-like guitar. During one jam with Bono on drums, guitarist Larry comes up with a surf riff inspired by the current movie Pulp Fiction that knocks everyone out. Bono says that one of the great things about such experimentation is that sometimes a complete song springs full grown to life in the midst of it: "A real Elvis Presley song appeared the other night. I figure we've got about eighty pieces altogether." He pauses a beat and adds, "Of course, fifty of them are awful, but still . . ."

Still, that leaves a lot of interesting material. Bono points out, quite accurately, that Tokyo is popping up all over the improvisations. "I thought we'd have to go back to Japan to get that spirit," he says. "But it's with us." Maybe it's just the group flashing back to the last time

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they played together, but it is startling almost a full year later to hear that sense of Tokyo overload coming out of the music U2 is making. A jam called "Tokyo Fast Bass" ducks and weaves with the barely orga­nized frenzy of the Alta train station. "Fleet Click" staggers like those nights in the neon back alleys, but what's impressive is that, unlike almost every rhythm track I've ever heard a rock band cook up, it does not suggest any limitation on what could sit on top of it. The piece could go anywhere.

Some of the improvs get silly—on one experiment Edge, Adam, and Bono play a dark, F sharp minor pattern a little like the Velvet Under­ground's "Ocean" while Eno has Larry play a happy Japanese jingle on the keyboard in C major. Eno calls the result "Black and White"— because three of the band are playing all black key notes and Larry's playing all white keys. It's a clever notion, but it still sounds terrible. U2 isn't worried; they're having fun and making music no one's ever heard before while Eno runs loony animated shorts and bits of old movies on a TV monitor to keep them inspired.

During dinner one night Edge announces that this is not even a U2 session—this is Bono, Edge, Larry, Adam, and Eno. He says this five-man group has an entirely different dynamic than the four-man U2 and deserves a different name. He votes for "Babel." Also at dinner—at a funky restaurant called All Saints—is the singer Neneh Cherry and several of her collaborators. U2 invited them down to put their own spin on a bass-powered track that has been around since the Hansa sessions four years ago. During the making of Zooropa it emerged again, picking up lyrics along the lines of "Power in the wires/Power in the satellite/Power in communication." After dinner Bono gets the waiter to put a new version of the song on the restaurant's cassette player and he, Neneh, and Neneh's friend Andrea scat over it at the table, throwing out ideas for words and melodies. Bono suggests they turn the notion of power on its head. Soon they are singing "Power in submission/power in letting go" and listing all the things one should strip away to make it through the needle's eye: badges, color, skin, backstage passes.

Long after midnight the party—which has expanded to include Fintan, Regine, Anton, and lots of other Zoo veterans—takes mercy on the weary waiters and moves on across Notting Hill to the hip under­ground club called the Globe—immortalized in song by B.A.D. There is a wide halo around the full moon along the way, and no room at all in

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the club when we get there. Inside are more Zoo vets, along with punks, rastas, mad old men staring into smoky space, and chess players ignor­ing the blaring hip-hop. Larry, bleary from hard work and wine, elects to go home to bed. Edge takes off with his brother, Dick. Dennis Sheehan assumes a watchful position by the front door. Bono grabs a spot by the crowded bar and dances in place with Neneh while passing drinks to all who draw near. Adam, sober for a year this week, laughs and shakes hands with old friends and regards the whole scene with easygoing delight,

After an hour or so—close to 3 A.M.—I wave good night above the music and head outside. A few things about U2 seem clearer to me now than they did in the middle of the Zoo TV tour. One is how much being on the road and in the spotlight for months affects everyone's personality, and how different they all are now that they've had a year off duty. Bono in particular is much more thoughtful, much more likely to see all the sides of an issue. He recently asked that in writing of our travels I not portray him "leaping up on the table to make pronounce­ments while waving a sword," which is fair enough—when he's off the road he does not act like that. And I think it's a little hard for him to believe that when he's on the road he sometimes does.

Bono's hair has grown out in its natural light brown after two years of being dyed black, and his pointed beard is flecked at the chin with a bit of white. Edge jokes that he resembles Buffalo Bill. I would have said Custer. He is now nothing like the Fly, but the Fly is who he was once and who he will be again. Watching U2 in the first steps of firing up the whole machine, I am struck by how hard it must be for each of them to come back—not to the band but to who each of them is when the band is together. These are four smart, worldly, and self-sufficient men who must spend half their lives fitting into roles based on who they were as teenagers. For one of them to grow, they all have to grow. Otherwise the formula doesn't work. But you know that—this, after all, is where we came in.

During their time off, Larry fell victim to the curse that hits many people when they move to New York: because it is possible in Manhat­tan to work all the time, that's what he did. He learned a lot about music and freed himself up as a drummer in ways that he wants to continue to explore. But Larry wonders where his vacation went—he hardly ever socialized or relaxed.

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Adam worked hard, too, but found time to have fun. A few weeks ago I ran into him with some friends at a club in New York and was reminded of what a remarkable character he is. One of Adam's friends said to me that years ago he had to make a speech taking an unpopular political position at an Irish university. He was quite nervous, and when he got up to the podium he looked down and saw Adam sitting in the front row, giving him moral support. That, he said, is the sort of thing Adam does all the time in a hundred different ways. He never asks for special consideration for himself, but when he spots someone who seems to be uncomfortable or having a bad time Adam slips in and makes sure they feel welcome. Adam seems to specialize in letting people know they're not alone.

By ducking off to America, Adam and Larry did manage to avoid some dismal Dublin duties—including the ongoing efforts to redesign the Clarence, the hotel that U2 bought. Bono and Edge ended up enduring long meetings during which they would sometimes look at each other and say, "Are we really sitting here arguing about forks'!" During one such conference Bono insisted everyone address each other by new names. Edge, for example, was "Mr. Comfort."

Bigger fish were also fried. The Zoo TV network seems destined to take to the American airwaves in two-hour blocks, leaping from channel to channel as it goes. And although nothing in the movie business is ever fixed until it is filmed, it seems likely that The Million Dollar Hotel will be made after all—by Wim Wenders.

This is a remarkable world U2 have built for themselves, a world that takes in what happens outside (last week President Clinton was given a stinging rebuke in the U.S. midterm elections—both houses of Con­gress went Republican for the first time in our lives. Today Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds was forced to resign) but carries on under its own rules. U2 imagined their own world and then they created it.

When they began, four teenagers who could barely sing or play, U2 thought they would be a world-beating rock & roll band in the tradition of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who. They thought this against absurd odds and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And they were right. They believed, and their belief was rewarded a hundredfold. Why would they stop believing now?

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