Story of the Song: ‘The Fly’ by U2

During their time in Berlin, working on the 1991 album Achtung Baby, Bono took to wrapping a pair of fly-shades around his eyes. Behind the sunglasses, Bono assumed an alter-ego, whom he figured could answer the charges of megalomania he was getting from the press. “I thought – well, let’s give them a megalomaniac!” he said.

Bono created “The Fly”, part-savant, part-pub bore leaning over to impart drunken wisdom: “They say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon”; “Ambition bites the nails of success”; “Every poet is a thief”.

“I became interested in these one-line aphorisms,” Bono said. “So I got this character who could say them all.”

“The Fly” was drawn from the various barflies that U2 had encountered in Dublin pubs: “And they know everything,” said The Edge, the band’s guitarist. “Some of the things they say can be incredibly smart. And yet they are probably mad. I think that’s what Bono was playing with.”

The character allowed Bono to report on world events, especially the Gulf War, which hit the headlines mid-recording. “It was written like a phone call from hell,” Bono said. “It was this guy running away – ‘Hi honey, it’s hot but I like it here’.” It signs off with the bathetic lines: “Look, I gotta go, yeah I’m running outta change/ There’s a lot of things, if I could, I’d rearrange.”

The song started out as a circular jam; the final version sways like a hornet’s nest in a thunderstorm. Recorded in Berlin and Dublin, it was produced and mixed by Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite and Flood. The Edge’s frenzied guitar slashes away, and Bono delivers sotto voce, which makes it seem rather threatening. It changed the band’s outlook – Bono described it as the sound of four men cutting down The Joshua Tree – and took U2 back to the No 1 spot in October 1991.