Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1

I avoided buying this at first because the idea of an Eno/U2 supergroup didn't seem promising, getting Pavarotti in for guest vocals seemed on the surface like the worst kind of celebrity 'crossover' posturing, and the line from Achtung Baby to Zooropa suggested the Eno/U2 partnership was offering diminishing returns. And I don't care how tongue-in-cheek the cover is, it's terrible. But then Eno's diary of 1995, A Year with Swollen Appendices, and it was very frustrating to read about the recording of this album without being able to hear any of it.

It was a very pleasant surprise. Like Achtung Baby, the quality drops off dramatically in the second half, but I think it's the best thing U2 have been involved with apart from Achtung Baby. Bono's singing here, particularly on my favourite tracks Slug and Your Blue Room, is, to my ears, the best he's ever done, and shows what he can do when he's not reaching for that histrionic hubris effect. (Ah, Wikipedia tells me that Bono agrees with me, at least on the first part.) Pavarotti's contribution turns out to be a telling one, too, once you realise that his vocal takes the place of a guitar solo in the song, rather than being part of the singing.

The sleevenotes refer to the films for which piece is a soundtrack. A couple of the films are real, but most of them are made up. The notes are credited to Ben O'Rian and C.S.J. Bofop. It's not hard to spot that Ben O'Rian is an anagram of Brian Eno, but it took me longer to notice that, if you shift each letter in Bofop's name one space to the 'left' in the alphabet, it also spells Brian Eno.

In Eno's book (this is from memory), he explains that they put the album out under the name Passengers because they recognised that it wasn't as commercial as a regular U2 album, and the record label didn't want to confuse the fans, or (thinking more commercially) dilute the U2 'brand'. I read somewhere that Eno was more director than facilitator in this project — hence the rest of U2 being 'passengers', but I can't find that now. Interestingly, it seems Amazon now lists it as a U2 record. I guess that now helps increase its sales.

MusicBrainz entry for this album