Feeling trapped and exhausted by their own success at the close of the 1980s, U2 took a leaf out of David Bowie's book and looked for the future in Berlin, at Hansa Studios. One is a song about disunity written against a backdrop of reunification. 'Every time I hear it or play it, it connects.' 'If I was to pick one song which encapsulates everything about who and what we are, it would have to be One,' drummer Larry Mullen Jr once told me. It remains a touchstone for the band members, too.
I put the song on and just broke down crying.' In a 2003 special edition of Q magazine, it was voted the best song of all time. Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses once said he considered One to be 'one of the greatest songs that has ever been written.
One's parent album Achtung Baby came out 30 years ago this week. The genre-fluid music ahead of its time 'It's one of those songs that has this incredible flexibility for different occasions.' 'That I found incredibly powerful,' the Edge, U2's guitarist, tells BBC Culture. The next day, the song topped France's digital download charts. At a televised national memorial service five days later, his coffin was carried into the courtyard of the Sorbonne to the sound of one of Paty's favourite songs: U2's 1992 single One. In October 2020, a Parisian schoolteacher named Samuel Paty was murdered by an extremist after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression.
