Fifteen Minutes in Hansa

In late 1990, U2 were stuck in a converted ballroom at Hansa Studios in Berlin, trying to finish the bridge of a song nobody liked. The Edge had two chord sequences and couldn't choose between them. Daniel Lanois told him to stop choosing and play them one after the other. About fifteen minutes later, U2 had written “One.”

It is the song that saved Achtung Baby, and quite possibly the band. It is also, by its author's own account, a song about people who can't stand each other. That it is now played at weddings has puzzled Bono for more than thirty years.

The Biggest Band, Not the Best

U2 ended the 1980s as the biggest rock band in the world and privately unsure they deserved it. The Rattle and Hum years had left them sounding like a band in waistcoats playing the blues to stadiums. “We were the biggest, but we weren't the best,” Larry Mullen Jr. told Rolling Stone in 1992. At their final Dublin show of the decade, Bono told the crowd the band had to go away and “dream it all up again.”

They picked Berlin to do it in, arriving at Hansa in October 1990 as Germany reunified around them. The plan was only half a plan. Bono and The Edge wanted dance rhythms and industrial noise. Mullen and Adam Clayton wanted to stay a rock band. Mullen later said they were on “completely different pages” before they even landed.

Weeks of sessions went nowhere. “Berlin was a baptism of fire,” Clayton said in the 2011 documentary From the Sky Down. The arguments got bad enough that the four of them began to question whether U2 had a future at all.

Two Ideas, Played in a Row

The breakthrough came while the band were trying out bridges for another song. Accounts differ on which one, but not on what happened next. “I played these on an acoustic guitar and everyone was trying to decide whether they were any good,” The Edge remembered. Lanois suggested playing the two ideas in sequence. Everyone in the control room liked what they heard.

“So we all went into the big room,” The Edge said. “I shouted out the chords and we just started playing them. Bono got on the microphone and suddenly something very powerful is happening in the room. It was one of those hairs on the back of your neck moments.”

Bono improvised words over the top, and the song took shape in about a quarter of an hour. It was the only finished thing U2 took home from Berlin when the sessions ended around Christmas. But it told them the band could still write together. In The Edge's words, “It steadied everyone's nerves hugely in the studio.”

“A Very Bitter Song”

Bono wrote the lyric about what was in front of him. That was a band that couldn't agree, in a city that had just been joined back together after decades apart. The song is a conversation between two people who are bound to each other and not happy about it. It took a song about breaking up to stop U2 from breaking up.

"I never saw the song as something hopeful or comforting. To me, it was a very bitter song. It is a song about coming together, but it's not the old hippie idea of ‘Let's all live together.’ It is, in fact, the opposite."

He has spent decades correcting people who mishear its key line as an obligation. “I'm still disappointed when people hear the chorus line as ‘got to’ rather than ‘we get to carry each other,’” he said in the 2006 book U2 by U2. The point, he said, was that “we are one but not the same.”

Three Videos and a Herd of Buffalo

The band moved to a rented house in Dalkey, outside Dublin, and finished the album there. “One” kept changing until the final mix in September 1991. Even then, few reviewers singled it out when Achtung Baby came out that November. Niall Stokes of Ireland's Hot Press was an exception. He called it “the definitive language of emotional truth.”

“One” became the album's third single in February 1992, and U2 gave away its proceeds. The sleeve carried a photograph by David Wojnarowicz, an artist with HIV, of buffalo being driven off a cliff. The liner note was plain: “U2's royalties from this single will go to AIDS research.”

The video was harder. Anton Corbijn shot the first one in Berlin, with Trabant cars, Bono's father, and the band in drag. U2 pulled it. The Edge worried that the drag footage tied AIDS back to gay men at the very moment the single was raising money for AIDS charities. Mark Pellington made a replacement out of buffalo footage, flowers, and the word “one” in many languages. It was the first version sent to MTV.

That one was judged too static to carry a whole song. So the band called Phil Joanou, the director of Rattle and Hum. He turned a third video around in a matter of days, shooting the band live on Super 8 and Bono in a bar. That is the version most people remember.

Johnny Cash, Mary J. Blige, and Axl Rose

The single went to No. 1 in Ireland and Canada and reached the Top 10 in both the US and the UK. That was respectable rather than enormous. But “One” was played every night of the Zoo TV tour, and it outlasted almost everything else on the record.

Other artists found it fast. Axl Rose, not a man known for praising other bands, told RIP magazine soon after its release: “One is one of the greatest songs ever written.” Johnny Cash recorded it for American III in 2000. In 2006, Mary J. Blige's version, with U2 backing her, reached No. 2 in Britain, higher than the original had gone. Bono later borrowed the name for his anti-poverty campaign, ONE.

None of that would have happened if the Berlin sessions had ended the way they were heading. The record was finished in Dublin, and much of it was rebuilt there. But U2 still trace its survival to one night in a Berlin ballroom, when two chord sequences were played back to back.