Listen to this track by long-standing four-cornered Irish arena fillers U2. It’s “Red Hill Mining Town”, a high point song as taken from their epic-scale 1987 album The Joshua Tree. This song stands in the shadow of some bigger hits on that record, a part of an album that would put them into the stratosphere before the end of the decade.
Among the songs on the record that evoked lofty spiritual quests (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”), the all-consuming turmoil of love as it intersects with pain (“With Or Without You”), and apocalyptic visions that sound like the end of the world (“Bullet The Blue Sky”), this one is a down to earth portrait of a town full of hard-working people in trouble.
And yet, this song by known politically motivated U2 turns out to be not your standard political song at all.
The Delete Bin 