Blog Posts by Karen Bliss

"Making Achtung Baby is the reason we're here now," Bono says early on in Davis Guggenheim's new U2 documentary, From The Sky Down, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday night.

The film - which focuses on the tumultuous time in the band's career 20 years ago - shows how Bono, guitarist the Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton got back on track: After considerable infighting and "creative differences" while the four hunkered down at Hansa Studios in Berlin in 1990 to try to make an album, the song "One" finally and miraculously sprouted from the unfinished "Mysterious Ways."

"The movie has this pretty long [section] where you hear them write that song - and it's goose bumps," Guggenheim told Rolling Stone in Toronto. "The writing of that song really saved the band. They had come out of the height of Joshua Tree as the biggest band in the world. Rattle and Hum was a disaster from their point of view, a lot of bad reviews - they weren't

Jack White, Depeche Mode, Patti Smith and Damian Rice are among the artists on a forthcoming tribute album honoring the 20th anniversary of U2's Achtung Baby, frontman Bono announced at a press conference this afternoon for the U2 documentary From the Sky Down at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The album was commissioned by the British music magazine Q. "Jack White does 'Love Is Blindness,' Depeche Mode do 'So Cruel,' Patti Smith did 'Until the End of the World,' Damian Rice does 'One.' It just goes on. And it's strange, because when I hear the album, when U2 do it, all I hear is what's wrong with it. But when I heard all these artists doing it, I thought, 'It's really good.'"

In addition, Bono said that artist Damien Hirst recently completed a video for "Even Better Than The Real Thing."  "He made a very special art work, which has only been shown once and probably won't be shown again, because [it was for the] Glastonbury festival and it's an extraordinary work of art."