Desert songs - The Joshua Tree turns 30

30 years ago I'd not yet set foot in America, let alone visited California or the Mojave Desert where a certain type of tree grows in the apparently waterless terrain. But even though it would be another five years before I would feel Western sunshine on my face for the first time, one album had already put me there: U2's The Joshua Tree.

Released 30 years ago today it took the Dublin band over the threshold of superstardom. Hit singles like Pride (In The Name Of Love), Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day, plus the critically acclaimed albums Boy, October and War, had already established their credibility, placing them on the fringes of daytime mainstream without brushing them out of the evening radio shows where the not-yet-huge could consider themselves cool.

Two things happened before The Joshua Tree became U2's turning point: firstly it's predecessor, the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced Under A Blood Red Sky, had netted them hits in Pride and the melancholy The Unforgettable Fire. And then the following year, on 13 July, 1985, the-then still-young band became one of the standout turns at Live Aid. This was due in part to U2 challenging Queen for the liveliest set of all the acts at either Wembley or in Philadelphia. Having torn through Sunday Bloody Sunday and then an extended version of Bad, Bono hammed things up by beckoning British teenager Melanie Hills to join him on stage (a Springsteen-esque gag he'd pulled before), shortly followed by her sister Elaine. At the singer's behest, bouncers attempt to pluck the girls from the crowd, but with Harvey Goldsmith's strict 20-minute limit on each bands' sets ticking away, Bono himself dived into the crowd to assist. A third girl, the 15-year-old Kal Khalique - there principally to see Wham - was also pulled from the throng. She's the one Bono ended up slow-dancing with. It was all gloriously hammy, and not entirely spontaneous ("I don't like the distance between performer and audience. So I'm looking for a symbol of the day, something I can hold onto", Bono would later say) but it carved an eternal mark in the collective memory of Live Aid, not least of which, because it occurred during a set that U2 had scheduled (via clever negotiation) just as the vast US audience was joining Bob Geldof's "global jukebox". It was a masterstroke.

Fast forward, then, to 6 March, 1987. I was in the control room of Studio 5 at Tyne-Tees Television in Newcastle, invited there by the show's producers on the day Jools Holland returned from suspension for saying a naughty word during a live teatime promo. Paula Yates (I think it was) spoke to camera to introduce a world exclusive - the first ever playout of the first single from a new U2 album. The screen faded to black and a quiet but distinct Adam Clayton bassline started to pulse. From the darkened screens in an utterly hushed, pindrop-silent room, Bono emerged, his hair slicked back into a pony tail, wearing a leather waistcoat with a guitar strung across his back. "See the stone set in your eyes," he semi-breathed, "See the thorn twist in your side. I wait...for you.".

We were hearing With Or Without You for the first time. It's a moment I clearly won't ever forget. Like so many bands, I'd not disliked U2 previously but I'd never been all that fervent about them, either. Tonally, too, With Or Without You didn't sound all that different from The Unforgettable Fire, their last single, but there was a notable flavour of Americana (then not really a term) about it. The following Monday The Joshua Tree was released, and it all started to come together.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn's cover photography for U2's fifth studio album set the tone. There, in a black and white strip taking up a third of the cover space were Larry Mullen Jr, Clayton, The Edge and Bono, squeezed into the left-hand half of a frame, with grey desert occupying the other half. There was more of this sparse, monochrome photography on the inner sleeve and back cover, all shot in the vast Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs in California, and all with the band looking less like the punk-inspired New Wave rockers from Dublin that they once were, and more like members of a native American nation. "When I see the people we were back then," The Edge has written in a forthcoming personal photo diary of the Corbijn shoot, "I see a bunch of pilgrims on a journey towards some kind of creative home. I think that really does capture the spirit of the band at that time."

Corbijn's cover art was perfectly in keeping with the music within. Produced by Eno and Lanois (who'd most recently been responsible for Peter Gabriel's breakthrough So), it managed to encompass the signature U2 sound - Edge's instantly recognisable delayed guitar, Clayton's thudding bass, Mullen's crisp drums, and Bono's breathy vocal style - in a simpler, more stripped down sound, one which somehow evoked the desert landscape on the album sleeve. The desert theme became instantly obvious with the opening track, Where The Streets Have No Name, a compelling, scaling song that, according to Eno, had been tortuous to record ("...a ridiculous saga" he tells the latest edition of Mojo, "I estimate that 40 per cent of the time was spent on that one song. It became a kind of weird obsession."

As the album opened up further, it was clear that the Irish quartet were deliberately exploring the badlands of the Americas. Just as Bruce Springsteen had successfully evoked New Jersey and the industrial north-east, The Joshua Tree was doing the same for the barren south-west, with Red Hill Mining Town and even One Tree Hill (a tribute to a U2 roadie who'd died in a motorbike accident the previous year), drawing on the searing heat and dust of the West. Bullet The Blue Sky, while set in South America, sort of followed the album's unspoken theme of America's influence (it had been inspired during U2's involvement in the Amnesty International 'Conspiracy Of Hope' tour of Central and South America).

30 years on, The Joshua Tree is, perhaps, more legend than milestone. But for the 19-year-old me, it opened up a fascination with American music that I hadn't yet fully appreciated. I could recognise references to the blues (later to flourish on The Joshua Tree tour, with their BB King collaboration, When Love Comes To Town) and the various Lanois-influenced clips of Americana that dot the album. What is certain is that it launched U2 into the upper echelons of global achievement, with Time magazine featuring them on a cover with the splash "Rock's Hottest Ticket". Crucially, The Joshua Tree - with its American themes - established them in the country of its inspiration, becoming their first ever No.1 album in the US just three weeks after its release.

Some will argue that Achtung Baby, the Berlin-recorded studio follow-up, was a better album, written deliberately to confound the belief that U2 had, via The Joshua Tree and it's live release Rattle And Hum, become an Irish version of The Eagles. But, perhaps, with Americana as a genre taking more subtle strides to appropriate the American heartland, U2's first commercial colossus can be appraised afresh. A piece by Tim Sommer in The Observer last Sunday made a somewhat valid point that U2's unashamed appropriation of a blend of authentic genres was "the most basic thievery", but no more than a Led Zeppelin had done beforehand. However, Sommer wrote, "the sheer weight of U2’s personality and charismatic energy" allowed them to get away with it. "In their hands, it doesn’t feel like plagiarism, but like a redistribution of deserving and lesser-known art to the masses." Surely, though, isn't this what everyone has always done? From rock and roll to Chicago house music, someone's always taken from someone else and turned it into something different.

This spring and summer we'll get a chance to make our own minds up with U2 retreading The Joshua Tree in a 30th anniversary tour of, first, the US and then Europe, playing the album - as is the vogue - in its entirety. On 2 June the band will issue an anniversary edition of the record itself, including in the obligatory super deluxe package a live recording from the 1987 tour's Madison Square Gardens show, B-sides from the album's singles and new remixes from Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite and others, along with an 84-page hardback book of unseen personal photography shot by The Edge during the Corbijn cover art photo sessions out in the desert.

Obviously it's a package aimed squarely at people like me and my vintage, but as someone who believes that U2 peaked in the contrasting period of The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and began to lose their appeal with the bombast, gimmicks and pontification that followed (not to mention the violation of that free iTunes album...) I will happily take the journey back three decades, get some desert sand on my feet again, and remind myself of what it was like to dream about America long before I got the chance to experience it for real.

Down the tube - the history of rock and pop on TV

It's now just over 61 years since rock and roll - and therefore the beginnings of pop music - made its visual debut. Indeed, rock was still in its infancy when Elvis Presley exploded onto American TV, performing Heartbreak Hotel on CBS's Stage Show in January 1956. Of course, radio had already been established by then, and while video hardly killed the radio star as a result, Presley's hip-swinging, breakthrough appearance set in train a worldwide culture. Television gave a face and a body to the performers who would otherwise only be heard on radio, or pictured in the press or on record covers and, for those lucky enough, made accessible via the stage.

Bill Haley and The Comets predated Presley by performing Rock Around The Clock on The Ed Sullivan Show the previous summer, and some still say that was pop's Big Bang moment. But in the conventional, simplified sequence of musical history, it was Presley's arrival that begat The Beatles, and The Beatles who sparked the rock and pop explosion, which, running the course of the next 40-odd years, brings us to the present day.

One constant through most of this has been the evolution of television. In fact, you could argue that television has had as much of a symbiotic relationship with pop and rock as radio or any other outlet. That certainly is the impression one gets from Rock & Pop On British TV, the tremendous new book by Jeff Evans, which charts the history of music TV in the UK by going right back to the era of stuffy 'light entertainment', when music was anodyne, presenters wore dinner suits and ballgowns, and the teenager was robustly encouraged to be seen but not heard.

Published today - the 60th anniversary of the BBC's seminal Six-Five Special being broadcast for the first time - Rock & Pop On TV delivers a definitive appreciation of how music on British TV grew and has since receded, as well as providing a backdrop to social and cultural changes via shows like Ready Steady Go!, Top Of The Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test, The Tube, The Word, The White Room and, latterly, the lone survivor - Jools Holland's Later....

While talking about the book at a recent Word In Your Ear Podcast recording, Evans raised the notion that anyone, of any musical generation, will have their 'moment' of music television - be it David Bowie's performance of Starman on TOTP (straining then-contemporary views on sexuality with his arm draped around Mick Ronson) or hoary old Dutch prog rockers Focus yodelling Hocus Pocus on Whistle Test, Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax being banned by the BBC in January 1984 and then performed on the TOTP Christmas edition of the same year, right up to more recent times, and Seasick Steve's breakthrough, as a novelty item on the 2006 Hootenanny. We shouldn't forget, either, the moments of notoriety: Bob Geldof's expletive-laden rant during Live Aid, the painful live broadcast of The Brits in 1989 when it just didn't go right for Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox, and the ludicrous poking-with-a-stick of The Sex Pistols by Bill Grundy on Thames Television's Today show in 1976.

My own memories of music television are as vivid today as anything in my 49 years - be it Alvin Stardust and his somewhat creepy performances, leather jumpsuit-clad with a ring on top of a leather-gloved hand, or actually being a part of the TOTP studio audience as a teenager in the show's relentless, ra-ra skirted, balloon-fest sixth-form disco 1980s era.

Not surprisingly, Evans himself has his own poignant memories: "I do remember very clearly the moment when the UK was introduced to Meat Loaf, via the video shown on the Old Grey Whistle Test. That was what dominated conversation at school the next day. I should also point out that seeing Wizzard perform See My Baby Jive on Lift Off With Ayshea [ITV show which ran from 1969 to 1974] was the moment when I decided to start buying records. I was blown away by the fullness of the sound and the colour of the performance (Roy Wood in all his Technicolor glory and the rest of this huge band larking about behind). That said, some of my very earliest memories are of TV pop shows, because I had an older brother and sister. I don't remember any detail but I recall seeing programmes such as Thank Your Lucky Stars and Discs A Gogo at a very early age."

Without doubt, one show that spans the generations, still, is Top Of The Pops. Running from New Year's Day 1964 until July 2006, and recording weekly audiences in the tens of millions at its peak, it became a national institution which, says Evans, actually made it difficult to kill off. "It was struggling from the 1980s onwards," he says, "and not least because the music video, which had once seemed like a godsend for Top Of The Pops, because it was so handy for covering the absence of artists in the studio, was now available to every other television show. This meant that TOTP was no longer the only programme to cover the latest hits."

When TOTP began in 1964, from a cold, converted church in Manchester, pop was still an unknown beast. By the time it ended, the Internet had arrived, and pop, to some extent, had been and gone as televisual entertainment. "[TOTP] kept going until it really was no longer viable in the age when anyone could access music via the Internet at the press of a button," says Evans. "This longevity was probably due to the efforts of the various producers who were brought in to gee it up and keep it alive. The show was constantly being refreshed and changing its look so these were perhaps little kisses of life but eventually there was no way back. It might have lasted longer, given more goodwill by the BBC hierarchy and better scheduling, but probably not much longer."

Evans does argue, however, that perhaps we place too much significance on the role of shows like TOTP, despite it's perceived cultural importance, and that has some bearing on the absence, today, of the competition of music shows that existed in the '60s, '70s and '80s. "In truth, music shows have never generated huge audiences. TOTP was the one exception, with its viewing figures of around 20 million in the 1970s. This alone is disincentive enough for commercial channels but it also has a bearing at the BBC. It is not so hamstrung by audience figures but it still needs to get justifiable numbers for its programmes."

The arrival, in 1981, of MTV brought about another shift, though not immediately in the UK. Jeff says that this indirectly encouraged record companies to commission more videos which could then be shown across a broad range of entertainment shows. "Music shows then suffered as a result because they lost their USP. Increasingly, you saw broadcasters commissioning live performance shows as a contrast, or recordings of gigs and festivals, but even these have disappeared now."

Indeed, today television has lost its monopoly. "The general dearth of TV music programmes is also no doubt related to the fact that television is just one medium through which you can get your visual music fix these days," says Evans. The novelty of seeing a band 'in the flesh' has worn off in an era when poor quality smartphone footage of a gig is uploaded to YouTube within a matter of minutes of the house lights coming up. Or, worse, being streamed on Periscope.

"It's not just the easy access and the extent of availability, it's also the immediacy," Evans says. "If Rihanna has a new video out, fans are not going to wait a few days to see it on a regular weekly show. They will watch it straight away. In the same way, if there are still chart followers out there, they want the latest information there and then and not have to wait until later in the week for a run down."

Picture: Maidstone Studios

The one beacon in the dark is Holland's Later..., now in its 25th year and as a result, the second-longest music show on British TV after TOTP. "I think it [has lasted] because it is fairly timeless. Unlike Oh Boy!, Ready Steady Go!, The Tube and TFI Friday that flared brightly then burned themselves out, it has never been tied to one musical fad or era. With its broad cross-section of talent, it protects itself from the changing mood of the music buying public. Similarly, there are no gimmicks, which equally date a show. An intelligent editorial approach is also part of the success."

In mentioning Oh Boy!, Evans also raises memories of some of the more obscure pop shows that have come and gone. Who remembers All Systems Freeman!, a single-series 1968 platform for Alan 'Fluff' Freeman?  Or A Whole Scene Going, Rock Goes To College, Poparound (presented by Gary Crowley), Supersonic, and the legendary Cool For Cats, presented by future ITV wrestling commentator Kent Walton? One of the many joys of Evans' book is appreciating just how, for a good 40 years, music was everywhere on British TV - during kids' TV, Saturday mornings, Saturday evenings, weekday lunchtimes and weekday evenings. And it was spread across the channels, especially - and here's one for the teenagers - when television was exclusively terrestrial and, until 1982, comprised of just BBC1, BBC2, and ITV.

Even then, says Evans, there was an editorial difference between the BBC and ITV. "The BBC was still very Reithian [In the 1950s] in its approach to programming, including music programming," he says. "It wasn't just entertainment, it had to educate and inform at the same time, which was why Six-Five Special was no match for Oh Boy! once Jack Good had gone over to ABC. ABC allowed Jack to do his own thing and just go for pure fun."

As '60s beat pop gave way to more 'serious' music, as The Beatles concentrated on the studio and singles gave way to albums, the BBC tried to progress televised pop music with groovy shows like A Whole Scene Going, How It Is and Colour Me Pop. Says Jeff: "Thereafter, ITV always struggled to put together any sort of challenge to Top Of The Pops and Whistle Test, largely because it had problems networking shows. A lot of the music offerings were either designed for children - Granada shows like Lift Off and Get It Together, and therefore not available to the working adult, or they were made regionally and rarely made it beyond their own region, because they couldn't get into that important peak-hour networked period that was dominated by sitcoms, soaps, game shows and variety."

One significant entry in this canon, and which had a peculiar regional bent, was The Tube. Launched in Channel 4's first week, Malcolm Gerrie and his production team challenged the notion that major bands only appeared on TV shows in London, and successfully provided a breakthrough platform for a whole load of acts between 1982 and 1987 from Studio 5 at Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle.

As a fledgling journalist I was lucky enough to visit The Tube a couple of times - the first to interview Jools Holland on his return from suspension (after dropping the F-bomb in a live teatime promo...), and where I was also in a pindrop-silent control room for the world's first playout of U2’s With Or Without You video, heralding The Joshua Tree and the onset of the band as a global rock phenomenon. Gerrie invited me back six weeks later for the show's finale, after Channel 4 pulled the plug on the show after five series and 121 editions due to declining audiences (although the Holland incident didn't help). It was, nonetheless, a brilliant, brave show, providing a robust challenge to the light entertainment pop of Top Of The Pops, the earnest music journalism of Whistle Test and the emerging pervasiveness of the MTV format.

Today, though, apart from the ghoulish spectacles of the talent shows and somewhat incongruous live performances on The Andrew Marr Show or The One Show, fans of live music on TV must rely on Later...  and the annual Glastonbury visit for their fix. Notably, both are on the BBC, the result of the strong music editorial department run by Mark Cooper.

"I think there have been times when music programmes have been important to broadcasters," reflects Evans. "A good example is during the Beatle-inspired beat boom in the early '60s when pop was suddenly infiltrating all kinds of programmes from documentaries to soaps to kids' shows. Generally, because of the audience numbers, I don't think they have always been so important, however, although - of course - broadcasters have (in the past at least) needed to find a broad mix of programming, so music shows helped with that."

That repeats on BBC Four of vintage Top Of The Pops episodes generate huge - and often ironic - traffic on Twitter is a reflection of the unique shared TV experience of at least a two or three generations. "I'm sure TOTP has been missed," says Evans, "but probably only by some of its former audience, and in a nostalgic sense. I can't imagine today's teenagers, never having seen it except at Christmas, would consider it a huge miss, when they have so many options for accessing music. TOTP also belonged to an era when people watched television together. We had only three or four channels and there was no Internet. That collective experience – shared at a given time every week – has also gone."

A shame, perhaps, but for those who love music, and love seeing music, you could argue that the alternatives - the video streaming services in particular - do still do the job. But as Rock & Pop On British TV consistently reminds, there can never again be a first time for seeing The Beatles, or Bowie strumming his 12-string to Queen Bitch on Whistle Test, or Oasis making its snarling debut on The Word, and such events being the talk of the classroom the next day. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but for this music head, recalling the childhood joys of Sweet or Suzi Quatro or Slade, or finally 'getting' Britpop thanks to TFI Friday and Chris Evans' infectious zeitgeist consumption, there still is a place for an iconic 'appointment' music show on British TV today.