Woman Fish

I know I've said this before, but Youtube is seriously the greatest thing ever. Here's another example of why... this morning I was reading a U2 biography when I came across this passage by The Edge, talking about the early stages of writing the songs that would become The Joshua Tree:

"There were some very rough versions of what became 'With Or Without You,' 'Red Hill Mining Town'; a song of Bono's called 'Trip Through Your Wires,' and a song called 'Woman Fish' that mercifully never saw the light of day, other than on an Irish TV show that we agreed to do in a moment of dementia. We hadn't shot ourselves in the foot for a while, so with two songs half written we decided it was the perfect time to go to the nation to showcase our 'new direction.' It was dreadful, the worst in a long line of ropey TV appearances. The idea, if there was one, was to try out the new material in front of a live audience. We found out instantly that we had a long way to go. We tried later to bribe the staff of RTE to give us the tapes, but it turned out they had shared our opinion of the
performance, and hadn't thought it worth keeping."

My first thought was "hmmm, I wonder if that might be on Youtube?" Two minutes later, voila...



The Edge is absolutely correct... it's terrible. I mean, they can't even get the count off right. I barely made it through the whole four minutes. The other song they performed on TV Gaga that day, "Trip Through Your Wires," was a lot better. It sounds pretty much like the version we're all familiar with, except the lyrics are completely different, apart from the hook.

And since this post is all about about early versions of U2 songs, here is another song that later turned into something else. I'll let you do the math...

U2 - "Always" (mp3) from the Beautiful Day single