The second album is usually considered to be a difficult album to make. This was certainly the case with October, as Bono lost most of his song ideas when his suitcase was stolen on the last leg of the Boy tour and the band had trouble to combine their Christianity with a rock-and-roll lifestyle. When U2 released their first best of, The Best of 1980-1990, no song from the October album was featured. Only the title song appeared as a hidden track. So, in hindsight the band wasn’t very proud of it. Looking at the album sales it is clear that the fans themselves share this sentiment.
When you listen to the record you notice that a lot of songs are good ideas, but get never pass this stage. I mean what the heck is Is That All? about? The same is more or less true for the songs Fire, Scarlet, With a Shout and Stranger in a Strange Land. And yes, later U2 songs suffer from the same the-song-never-got-past-the-embryo-stage problem, but on this album it is most obvious. This lack of ideas and lack of songs, and most of all lack of good songs, is also reflected by the b-sides of the two singles: Fire and Gloria. They both feature live performances of their debut album.
Although I’ve said a lot of negative things about this album, I still think some songs are great or sound very uplifting. In the last category is definitely Rejoice. It has this uplifting quality that is shared with the first seconds of The Three Sunrises. Furthermore, being an aspiring guitarist myself, I like the guitar parts of the song very much. Hearing live versions of Tomorrow allowed me to appreciate the song more. In a live setting, the songs and the performance give something extra to the songs that isn’t captured very well on a U2 album. This is the reason why Under a Blood Red Sky is one of my favorite U2 albums.
Luckily, the extras on the bonus CD are not only the live tracks of the b-sides. It is the never re-released A Celebration that I like to hear again. I have the song on a tape somewhere, but I haven’t heard it in ages. I am not aware of the amount of radio sessions U2 performed, but the fact that the Richard Skinner BBC session was the only time Scarlet was performed live makes the bonus CD very interesting. Although, I think that this song is not much more than a very interesting demo, instead of a song to be featured on an album.
