The U2 Classic Brian Eno Wanted to Erase From 'The Joshua Tree,' "Where the Streets Have No Name" (2024)

By 1986, U2 had already started working with co-producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno on their third album Unforgettable Fire from 1984 and both continued with the band during the recording of The Joshua Tree. Set up at a Georgian Mansion in Rathfarnham, Ireland, the band soon began budding heads with Eno while fleshing out their opening opus “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

At one point, Eno became so frustrated with the song that he wanted the track erased so they could start it from scratch.

At the time, Bono had traveled to Ethiopia, following Live Aid, and was inspired by the country, which started translating into a song he started sketching on an airline sickbag on his way to Africa.

“All this stuff about deserts and the parchedness of the earth, I wrote those things on Air India sick bags and scraps of paper, sitting in a little tent in a town called Ajibar in northern Ethiopia,” said Bono of the opening track. “It’s a sort of odd, unfinished lyric, and outside of the context of Africa, it doesn’t make any sense. But it contains a very powerful idea. In the desert, we meet God. In parched times, in fire and flood, we discover who we are.”

Eno was on a similar plane and wanted the timbre of the album to follow some form of an Ethiopian anthem right from the start with “Where the Streets Have No Name.” When Bono first presented the song to Eno, he only had an early rendering of it and didn’t know what it was about yet. It ended up consuming more than 40 percent of Eno’s time and he became so obsessed and then discouraged with the direction of the track that he asked the studio assistants to wipe it out.

“It was a bit of a tongue-twister for the rhythm section, with strange bar lengths that got everybody in a bad mood,” remembered Lanois in a 2008 interview with Mojo. “I can remember pointing at a blackboard, walking everybody through the changes like a science teacher. There’s a part of Eno that likes instant gratification.”

Though Bono initially wrote “Where the Streets Have No Name” on his way to Ethiopia, it evolved into another anthemic charge, one also inspired by a practice in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which determined a person’s income and religion by the street they lived on.

“‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it’s a sketch,” said Bono in 1987. “I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling. I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don’t hold you down.”

Bono added, “An interesting story that someone told me once is that in Belfast, by what street someone lives on you can tell not only their religion but tell how much money they’re making—literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further up the hill the more expensive the houses become. That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place where the streets have no name.”

I wanna feel sunlight on my face
I see the dust cloud
Disappear without a trace
I wanna take shelter
From the poison rain
Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name
Where the streets have no name
We’re still building and burning down love
Burning down love
And when I go there
I go there with you
It’s all I can do

Released on August 31, 1987, “Where the Streets Have No Name” went to No. 4 in the UK and peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, and remains a U2 classic.

“We must have played it a thousand times,” said Bono, “and no matter how sh*te a show, how off form the band or, more likely, the singer, to this day when we play ‘Streets,’ it’s as if God walks through the room.”