Remember When: U2 Released an Album Under an Alias

By the fall of 1995, every single U2 album—plus their 1983 live EP Under a Blood Red Sky—had been certified Platinum. Each of their four most recent albums—Zooropa, Achtung Baby, Rattle and Hum, and The Joshua Tree—had topped the Billboard 200. Then the Irish quartet dropped an album in November 1995 and … crickets. The record missed the Top 50 of the Billboard 200, and while it performed better in several other countries, it did not get certified Gold (much less Platinum) anywhere.

What happened? The album in question, Original Soundtracks 1, was far from a typical U2 album. Even more importantly, it was not released as a U2 album. To be fair, Original Soundtracks 1 was technically not a U2 album, but rather a collaboration between the band and Brian Eno, who had co-produced four of their previous five albums. Still, an album billed as a U2 and Eno release probably would have gained a lot of attention. Released instead under the moniker Passengers, it was mostly noticed by U2 and Eno’s more hardcore fans.

But the collaborators consciously chose to forge a new identity for this project. Here’s why one of the world’s biggest bands and most esteemed producers went incognito, and how they created an album that continues to fly under the radar nearly three decades later.

The Concept Behind Passengers

The seeds of Original Soundtracks 1 were planted during the making of Zooropa. U2 emerged from those sessions with a collective case of writer’s block, as they burned themselves out by focusing intensely on minutiae. Eno decided to take the band out of their typical element and have them record some improvisational material.

At this point, U2 were more than happy to let someone else take the reins. In a promotional interview for Original Soundtracks 1, Bono expressed his own motivations for wanting to engage in a collaboration where Eno was in charge. “In U2, I get blame. In Passengers, Eno does, and that suits me fine,” Bono explained. “We wanted to be in his backing band. Actually, I prefer to be a passenger rather than the driver of the train, so to speak.” Eno, however, saw himself as a passenger, too, saying, “Passengers implies a driver. We haven’t said who that was.” He saw the whole project as being “carried along” rather than driven by any one person.

Music for Films, Real and Imagined

The initial improvisations went well, so the band continued to work using this process with the intention of recording music that could be used for a movie soundtrack. Eno would try to spark creative ideas by playing various sorts of videos, from films to news broadcasts from the 1950s. A plan to contribute music to the soundtrack for the 1996 film The Pillow Book didn’t work out. Eno kept the experiment going by instructing U2 to make music for imaginary films. They not only followed through by creating pieces for these non-existent movies, but they wrote synopses of the fake movies (which had names like Elvis Ate America and The Swan), which appear in the liner notes for Original Soundtracks 1.

However, some of the tracks on Original Soundtracks 1 were used or considered for actual soundtracks. “Your Blue Room” and “Beach Sequence” were included in the 1995 film Beyond the Clouds, and “One Minute Warning” was featured in the closing credits of the 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell. “Always Forever Now” was used in the Michael Mann film Heat, while “Plot 180” was also slated to be included in the film but didn’t make the final cut.

The best-known track from Original Soundtracks 1 is “Miss Sarajevo,” which Eno and U2 wrote for Bill Carter’s Bosnian War documentary of the same name. Bono produced the film, and Carter worked with U2 to provide live satellite linkups from Sarajevo to the band’s Zoo TV performances. The song was inspired by a group of women who held a beauty pageant during the siege of Sarajevo, which Bono highlighted as a symbol of Sarajevans’ strength and resilience. For “Miss Sarajevo,” the group picked up another “passenger,” as the legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti sang the song’s bridge section.

The Impact of Passengers and “Miss Sarajevo”

Original Soundtracks 1 didn’t draw much attention in the U.S., at least relative to U2’s typical albums. It peaked at No. 76 on the Billboard 200, and its tracks did not generate any substantial airplay. Despite the ambient, uncommercial nature of much of the album, it did register in the Top 20 of several countries’ album charts, including the UK, Canada, and Australia.

“Miss Sarajevo” was a Top-10 song in several countries, including the UK, France, Brazil, and Australia, but it did not chart in the U.S. American audiences have come to know the song, either through the Top-5 compilation album The Best of 1990-2000 & B-Sides or through U2’s live performances. “Miss Sarajevo” has become one of U2’s 50 most-played songs in concerts, making it onto more setlists than several of their hits, including “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” and “Staring at the Sun.”

George Michael covered the song for his 1999 covers album Songs from the Last Century. The biggest impact of “Miss Sarajevo” and of the Passengers project was the awareness it brought to the plight of the people of Sarajevo during the latter months of the city’s four-year-long siege.

Passengers provided U2 with a release valve during a particularly tense time. While it didn’t bring them great commercial success, it did produce some great music and one of their most important songs. It also gave them some anonymity and space, which they likely needed to recharge their batteries. With Pop and the other albums that followed, it didn’t take U2 long to resume their hit-making ways.

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