While U2 did 40 shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 and ’24 with Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg in place of Larry Mullen Jr., who underwent neck surgery, they may not have recorded their new album, Carnaval De Luz, without him.
The Edge tells Rolling Stone, “I don’t think we would’ve made an album if Larry hadn’t been able to play. We would’ve just gone, ‘Why? Why make an album without Larry Mullen on it? Doesn’t feel right.’”
And once they started recording with Mullen, The Edge knew he was right, saying, “It really all started to make sense. All my questions and insecurities, everything started to just fall into place.”
And Bono adds, “I certainly was very aware from the first sessions with Larry back that he was playing differently. With more authority… But it was playful. Very playful.”
As for Mullen, he didn’t even know if he’d be able to drum after the operation as there was a chance it could have left him paralyzed.
“There wasn’t a moment that I questioned, bizarrely,” he says. “This is somebody who thinks things through. If you’ve got the head and the heart, I’m a head guy. I’ll do the calculation, the logic. But my desire to play again overwrote that…. It’s only when you are faced with the possibility that you may not be able to do the thing that you love, that you’ve done for most of your life… It’s funny what your brain will do, and your body. It goes into a different mode.”
With many doctors refusing to operate because of the risk, he found a young neurosurgeon in Dublin who was up for the challenge, telling him she’d do it because he is “a national treasure.” Mullen says, “I thought, ‘[Crap], OK. It’s really all going wrong now. [I] might be an out-of-work national treasure.’”
But, when it was time to get back behind the kit, he says, “Literally, it was like I got into a car, and I just put it in first gear. And I just started to drive … And I looked into the studio, and I could see the band kind of going, ‘OK, that’s not what we expected.’ And I’m going, ‘Not for me either.’”
And in the end, Bono says. “No one’s better at being in U2 than Edge, Adam, Larry, and me. They might want to be in U2, but we’re actually not bad at it.”
U2 will release Carnaval De Luz on November 13th and will do a stadium tour in support of it next year.
