As we know now, the first new U2 album in almost ten years comes out in November and the band have given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone covering all aspects of Carnaval De Luz.
Aside from the group’s collaboration with Dolly Parton and their tribute to Rosalia, there’s the lowdown on Larry Mullen Jr’s injury, which at one stage threatened his place in the band and U2’s unbroken unity: famously, no other rock band has made it to fifty years without any line-up change.
It seems the drummer had been suffering from neck pain for some years before his 2022 – 24 layoff. It was the result of a congenital fusion in a facet joint and by the time Covid came around Mullen was in so much pain he couldn’t play. “I realised that I was physically damaged beyond repair… I shut down, and my body just went, ‘You’ve had enough.’”
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He – like the rest of the band – had already agreed to play The Sphere in 2023. “ I signed up to do it. And then a couple of weeks later my physio said to me, ‘You won’t make it through rehearsals. So you need to undo that,’ which was very difficult, very complicated to undo it, ’cause I’d made a commitment.”
Watching U2 play with another drummer was difficult, he says. In fact, he didn’t even see them play with Bram Van Den Berg until their penultimate show at the Las Vegas venue. “There’s a certain amount of humiliation when you get injured, and you can’t get over it, and I felt humiliated,” he says, “And it’s my own – that’s my own shit.”
“I absolutely understood,” he says. “Business is business, and nothing can get in the way of the process, and I accept that 100 percent. So the unspoken rule (that a band member could be replaced onstage) “applied to me in that case. It could apply to somebody else in another case. And that’s the cost of doing business. It is complicated being friends, being friendly, being in business.
“So yeah, we all have feelings. So I’m not gonna lie that it wasn’t difficult, but nobody imposed it.”
For a while the future of the band seemed uncertain. “We didn’t know if Larry was gonna come back,” Adam Clayton says. “Could we keep going? Would we wanna keep going? That’s still an open question.”
Luckily, Mullen made a full recovery following surgery – a procedure which doctors warned him entailed a real risk of full paralysis – and U2 returned to complete their fifteenth studio album.
“I don’t think we would’ve made an album if Larry hadn’t been able to play,” The Edge admits. “We would’ve just gone, ‘Why? Why make an album without Larry Mullen on it? Doesn’t feel right.’”
