Something to watch tonight: Saturday 13 July

Classic Albums: The Joshua Tree (King/O’Connor, 1999)

So, I had a draft of this on the go yes­ter­day when the plans for the day star­ted to dis­in­teg­rate faster than the El Reno cinema in Twisters.

Rather than wait a few days or ditch it entirely, I thought I’d break policy and slip it out on the weekend.

The Classic Albums series of doc­u­ment­ar­ies has been run­ning since 1997 and is up to 64 epis­odes by now. Although they’ve nev­er really been seen as a series by pro­gram­mers or stream­ers. Selected epis­odes seem to crop up reg­u­larly and then dis­ap­pear while oth­ers have only seen the light of day on DVD.

Each epis­ode focuses on one record­ing from a well-known artist. It looks at how that record was con­struc­ted in the stu­dio – often quite forensic­ally – while also pla­cing its in the con­text of that artist’s career.

It’s a lot to get through in roughly an hour and the edit­ing is cru­cial to how well the storytelling works. That, and access to the storytellers themselves.

The Joshua Tree epis­ode came out in 1999 and has two great things going for it. Firstly, it’s an album that – in my opin­ion – bears end­less repeat­ing and secondly the co-producers of the record, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, are astute and artic­u­late wit­nesses. Lanois focuses on the stu­dio, man­aging the mix­ing con­sole to demon­strate how the sound­scape was put togeth­er, and Eno is all about work­ing with the band and sharpen­ing the creativity.

On the sub­ject of U2’s utter uncool­ness – even in 1987 – he points out that “cool” is often a defence. It’s a mask that hides sin­cer­ity, and for U2 being uncool is like their secret weapon. I like to think of them as a ser­i­ous band that knows how ridicu­lous they are and that ten­sion is one of the things that spurs them on.

I’ve been fond of them since “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and then the moment­ous per­form­ance of “Bad” at Live Aid, the Wide Awake in America EP with a won­der­ful live ver­sion of “A Sort of Homecoming”, and then, of course, The Joshua Tree.

I’m not a fan as such. In fact, I’m not a ‘poster on the wall’ fan of any­one music­ally these days. I used up all of my fan energy in 80s which means, des­pite an ongo­ing fond­ness for U2, I still think of Achtung Baby as ‘the new stuff’ even though it’s 33-years-old.

Anyway, the Classic Album series is real ‘dad rock’ and I only watch the ones for records that I love: Steely Dan’s Aja, Tears for Fears’ Songs From the Big Chair and Peter Gabriel’s So (also fea­tur­ing Lanois).

And there are some that I would watch but have nev­er come across my path: Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, Duran Duran’s Rio.

U2 always seem to find them­selves the sub­ject of good doc­u­ment­ar­ies so you may find they return here before too long.

Where to watch Classic Albums: The Joshua Tree

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland, UK: Streaming on Prime Video

Canada: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Roku or Freevee