"New Year's Day"

With the snow falling in Chicago today, it calls to mind one of the earliest impressions we music fans had of U2: their video for the song “New Year’s Day.”  There’s a great story to tell about the song itself that will have to wait until our concert Friday night.  But the video the band made to promote their single and the album that contained it took them into heavy rotation on MTV.  According to U2’s manager Paul MacGuinness, getting their video played wasn’t that big of a challenge at the time.  “MTV was really quite a small organization, and you could get somebody to watch your video and have the pleasure of seeing it on the air a few hours later.”

The band had recruited director Meiert Avis to guide the production as he had done for them already on the videos for “I Will Follow” and “Gloria.”  The decision was made to shoot in Sweden while they were in Stockholm for a concert in December 1982.  But the city didn’t offer the majestic mountains and unspoiled snow they’d hoped for.  So a helicopter was hired to fly everyone to a ski resort further north.

Think about all that.  Shooting a video outdoors in Sweden…in the dead of winter.  Doesn’t that sound as though it would be pretty cold?  Apparently, the band thought so and only filmed their performance scenes.  And even those involved some compromises.  Because in order to stay warm, the members of U2 had to wrap themselves up.  But then, that would render them unrecognizable in a video.  So in those sub-freezing conditions, Bono chose to stand in front of the camera with his head exposed.  Looking back, The Edge commented that their singer got so cold, he had trouble mouthing the lyrics properly.

And while their director Meiert Avis recalled that “the shoot was brutally cold,” they did make some attempts to cope with it.  “There are bottles of whiskey buried in the snow all around, some probably still there. The band eventually were carried away rigid, like Jack MacGowran in [the movie] The Fearless Vampire Killers.”

But how did they get all the footage they needed?  “We had to find some Swedish girls to do the horse riding scenes.”

Fortunately, the song gave U2 their next boost up the ladder of fame.  Though producer Steve Lillywhite remembers he had little time to mix the song because the group had a last minute request.  U2’s recording sessions were essentially wrapped up, but Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen, Jr., decided they needed a song to close out the album.  So with the next band waiting outside the studio for their turn, and Lillywhite only able to do a hasty mix of “New Year’s Day,” the three band members who were still at the studio put together the song “40.”