The Year In Music: 4th April

Pride (In The Name Of Love), U2 (1984)

Spring as a time of new beginnings forgets the things that disappear. The early flowers that die. The soft frosts that melt into the soil. April, a cruel month, mixing memory and desire out of the dead land, bringing rain.

Dates in songs aren’t always stark reminders of seasons. Sometimes they’re echoes of real-world events that had effects that ricocheted across communities, cultures, countries. A few years into U2’s fame, Bono had been reading about Martin Luther King, and written two songs about him for their third album, The Unforgettable Fire, an album named after the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (released the month that Mick Jackson and Barry Hines’ film Threads was broadcast on TV).

U2 had already had hit songs about the murder of unarmed people in the Bogside and a love story between the leader of the Polish Solidarity Movement and his partner which I wrote about in passing back in January. Pride was even bigger, taking an icon of civil rights and expanding a detail of his life into some vaguer, louder, stadium-sized. Politics can be a handy foil for loud guitars, squalling voices – not that MLK’s influence was immediately clear in Anton Corbijn’s moody black and white video for this single, featuring the band playing in a hall north of the Liffey, and a lot of wandering about the shadowy Dublin docks.