The Unforgettable Fire - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

The songs "Pride (In the Name of Love)", "The Unforgettable Fire", and "A Sort of Homecoming" were worked up at Bono's house in a Martello Tower in Bray Co. Wicklow. Recording for the album began in early May 1984, with a month-long session at Slane Castle, County Meath. Windmill Lane Studios, where they had recorded their first three albums, had no live room, so instead, Slane was chosen as a venue where they could record and play live in rooms with good sound quality. The band and crew stayed in the castle, and living together during the sessions fostered a camaraderie. They chose the castle's Gothic ballroom, which was specifically built for music with a 30-foot high domed ceiling, and it provided a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. It proved so relaxed, that one day, the band went so far as to record naked. "We got into gaffer art", commented Bono. Their approach at Slane was that rather than use effects and reverberation to revitalise usual studio sound, they would do the opposite and use a live room to "tame......wild sound".

Randy Ezratty's company Effanel Music, who recorded U2 in Boston and Red Rocks the previous year, was hired with his (then unique) portable 24-track recording system. His equipment was set up in the castle's library with cables run into the adjacent ballroom where the band played. The generator powering the studio often broke down and most of The Edge's guitar parts were recorded with the amplifier outside on the balcony with plastic over it to shelter it from the rain. The ballroom turned out to be too large, so recording was moved to a library in the castle which was smaller, surrounded them by books, and provided improved sound quality. Barry Devlin and his film crew visited the castle to make a documentary for RTE-TV about the sessions. The 30-minute programme, The Making of The Unforgettable Fire was released in 1985 on VHS as part of the The Unforgettable Fire Collection.

"With Steve, we were a lot more strict about a song and what it should be; if it did veer off to the left or the right, we would pull it back as opposed to chasing it. Brian and Danny were definitely interested in watching where a song went and then chasing it."

According to The Edge, Eno was more interested in the more unconventional material and didn't take much interest in "Pride (In the Name of Love)" or "The Unforgettable Fire". However, Lanois would "cover for him" such that the two balanced each other out. Much of the album was later recast in the Windmill Lane Studios, where they recorded from 6 June to 5 August. Synthesizer was used for the first time on a U2 album, with a Fairlight CMI used to work up a number of songs, the textures of which were later filled out with strings and other orchestration. At Windmill, tension grew between the production team and the band when largely because the band "couldn't finish anything". Twelve days before the official finishing date, Bono announced he couldn't finish the lyrics, and the band worked 20-hour days for the final two weeks. Bono later said he felt songs like "Bad" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" were left as incomplete "sketches."