Like everyone else, U2 have been asked what they think about the Ed Sheeran/ Macklemore controversy that has taken up so many column inches this month.
Bono and Larry Mullen Jr were discussing the band’s upcoming Carnaval De Luz album with Rolling Stone UK when – with a certain inevitability – the subject came up. “I would say with Ed and Macklemore that we shouldn’t personalise this, what’s going on,” surmised Bono. “Brian Eno said today that pop stars are like little fish in a large sea of huge forces and religion and politics. And so I don’t want to dwell on Ed and Macklemore and that incident.”
But the singer did suggest that Sheeran’s non-political stance was obvious when the two parties collaborated on a track on U2’s Days Of Ash EP earlier this year. Sheeran guested on Yours Eternally, which is written from the perspective of a Ukrainian soldier during the current war with Russia. Initially, it seems he was reluctant to sign off on the collab and it took Bono’s formidable powers of persuasion to convince him.
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“I will say this,” Bono said. “When we did Yours Eternally, he was saying, ‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?’ And I said, ‘This soldier who inspired us, he loved you Ed, and you’ve worked on this song’.”
Apparently Sheeran then said: ‘Yeah, but I just want to keep my thing free,’ which left the U2 singer to reflect that “you can’t be pushing people around.”
Larry Mullen Jr then quoted from the band’s long-time producer: “Brian Eno was saying that artists choose whether they want to be involved, and they are entitled to choose whether they want to be involved or not. And it’s not our job to criticise that, no matter how we feel. He said that it takes time for these things to evolve and people to come to realisations and, not to personalise this.”
“But,” he insisted, “we are absolutely clear about promoters or billionaire owners and the idea that they could have some influence on what you say or what you do on a stage. We’ve talked about this, and (if) you applied that logic to U2, we would have been out of business on Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”
Bono then brought up U2 performing Pride (In The Name Of Love) in Arizona when the then-governor of the state was resistant to the creation of Martin Luther King as a public holiday. “We were told we weren’t welcome there. We’ve been getting into this trouble. It’s what we do, and we’re happy to do that, but we’re also happy to recognise if there’s other people don’t want to get into that kind of fight.”
“I think what Eno was saying is you have to persuade people by reason,” he concluded. “You can’t try to force people into a position.”
