U2: "Angel of Harlem"

A swizzle! "Angle of Harlem" isn't a ruddy Christmas song! No, indeed it isn't. Neither is Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "The Power of Love" nor East 17's "Stay Another Day". You know what else? "Jingle Bells" isn't a Christmas song. Except they all are because that's what they've been made into. And so it is with the shimmering shards of ver 2's top ten hit from December of 1988.

Having hit it massively big in the US a year earlier, U2 were happy to return the favour with their sixth album, the all-things-Americana Rattle & Hum. In one way or another there are tributes to, covers of and collaborations with Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bo Diddley, B.B. King, The Beatles (notably, not an American group but the misguided "God Part II" is a nod to John Lennon, the Fab Yanks tend to be fondest of) and Van Dyke Parks. But it's with "Angel of Harlem" that Bobo,The Hedge and the other two found themselves most in over their heads. A stirring tribute to vocalist Billie Holiday, it nonetheless left them unable or unwilling to go full-on jazz. Indeed, there's a very real sense that they don't know what their talking about as Bono sings of "Birdland on fifty-three / the street sounds like a symphony / we got John Coltrane and A Love Supreme / Miles, and she's got to be an angel": if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they don't what they're talking about. What exactly do Miles Davis and John Coltrane have to do with Lady Day? Lester Young was much closer to the singer both personally and professionally and he merits nary a mention (although he does turn up in the video which, incidentally, appears to celebrate U2 much more than any jazz great you care to name).

Not that this meant anything to me at the time (and, I dare say, quite a lot of other young people); I hated jazz back then and would have been relieved to hear that they decided to ape sixties' soul in order to best give props to a legend who (a) died in 1959 and (b) performed within a different genre. Doing so may well have been lazy or it could have been done out of sheer ignorance but, either way, it was for the best. The Irishmen may not know their Artie Shaw from their elbows but they are well-versed in Stax and Motown. (It's a wonder why they didn't just decide do a tribute to the similarly deceased Sam Cooke or Otis Redding instead) If there was ever any doubt about the influences they were attempting to mine, then all doubt is removed the moment the Memphis Horns kick in.

In truth, "Angel of Harlem" is far more effective as a Christmas song than as an ode to a legend. With The Pogues having reinvented the holiday classic twelve months earlier with "Fairytale of New York", the 2 may have had something similar in mind. But where Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl laid the city's sleaze bare, Bono chooses to celebrate being caught up in its magic ("New York like a Christmas tree / tonight this city belongs to me") while paying his respects to a figure who wasn't so lucky ("God knows they got to you"). There's little sense that he recognizes it could just as easily be him. Yet, beyond all that, it is what James Masterton calls a "warm and comfortable" record and it earned regular spins in pub jukeboxes that winter all over the British Isles. And it conjures up images of London at Christmas time: old men selling bags of chestnuts outside of tube stations, the homeless begging for change, Hamley's done up like a palace. In attempting to sound American, U2 never seemed so British. 

So, how did the soul acts that U2 revered handle doing not-quite-Christmas-songs? They played tight, fast and to-the-point. Let's have it.