U2 have released a recording of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, the high-energy song Shane MacGowan wrote in 1988, in an arena-scaled reading that came out on August 28 through Rubyworks. It is drawn from the tribute album 20th Century Paddy - The Songs of Shane MacGowan, due November 13.
The cover continues a long connection between the band and MacGowan, who died in December 2023 at 65 after years of poor health. U2 played the Pogues song A Rainy Night in Soho acoustically in his memory afterwards, and Bono had already sung it at MacGowan's 60th birthday party in Dublin in 2018.
The Edge used the release to talk about what made MacGowan's writing work. He described him as an artist full of contradictions, and said the crooked grin and the old-Ireland inflections were signals rather than disguises, placing him in a line running from the pub storyteller to the punk stage.
He went further on the songs themselves, saying MacGowan pulled together folk tradition, political memory, gallows humour and romance and made them sound inevitable. The songs, he said, sound as though they have always existed, with almost nothing of their author's biography visible in them.
20th Century Paddy was announced in March, led by Bruce Springsteen's version of A Rainy Night in Soho. The rest of the guest list runs to Tom Waits, MacGowan's former Pogues bandmates, Hozier and Jessie Buckley, Johnny Depp and Imelda May, David Gray, Dropkick Murphys, the late Glen Hansard, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Kate Moss, Primal Scream, Steve Earle, Bob Geldof and the Libertines.
Half of the artist royalties from the album go to the Dublin Simon Community, which provides housing and medical care for people who are homeless. The single is listed on the release calendar ahead of the November album date.
It is a straightforwardly rock treatment of a song that started life somewhere rowdier, and it arrives in a year that has produced several tribute records, among them Busta Rhymes' J Dilla set Dillagence 2.
The facts
- U2's version of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah came out August 28 on Rubyworks
- The song was written by Shane MacGowan in 1988
- It appears on 20th Century Paddy, due November 13
- MacGowan died in December 2023 at the age of 65
- Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Hozier and the Libertines also appear
- Half the artist royalties go to the Dublin Simon Community
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