Album and Single Releases
The Unforgettable Fire was released on 1 October 1984. The album took its name and much of its inspiration from a Japanese travelling exhibition of paintings and drawings at The Peace Museum in Chicago by survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The band spent a few days driving around Ireland with photographer Anton Corbijn looking for potential locations. The castle depicted on the cover is Moydrum Castle. The band liked the image's ambiguity and the Irish mysticism they saw in it. The photograph, however, was a virtual copy of a picture on the cover of a 1980 book In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland by Simon Marsden, for which U2 had to pay compensation. It was taken from the same spot and used the same polarising filter technique, but with the addition of the four band members.
"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was released as the album's lead single in September 1984, and it was at that point the band's biggest hit. It cracked the UK Top 5 and the U.S. Top 40 and would ultimately become the group's most frequently played song in concerts.
"The Unforgettable Fire" was released as the second single in April 1985. The song became the band's third Top 10 hit in the UK, reaching #6 on the UK Singles Chart and #8 on the Dutch singles chart, but did not perform as well in the U.S.
Read more about this topic: The Unforgettable Fire
Famous quotes containing the words album, single and/or releases:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)
“We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)