U2 delay album following Trump election

U2 have delayed the release of the follow-up to 2014’s Songs Of Innocence following Donald Trump’s shock US election win.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, guitarist The Edge explained that the lion’s share of Songs Of Experience was written and recorded in the early part of 2016 before “suddenly the world changed”.

He said: “We just went, ‘Hold on a second – we’ve got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what’s going on in the world.’ That’s because it was written mostly, I mean, 80 per cent of it was started before 2016, but most of it was written in the early part of 2016, and now, as I think you’d agree, the world is a different place.”

“It’s like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction. So, anyway, we then were looking at the anniversary of The Joshua Tree, and another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle.”

“It was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realisation that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.”

The band this week announced details of a UK and European tour celebrating 30 years of The Joshua Tree, with Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds as support. Following the news, Liam Gallagher hit out at his brother for “brown nosing” the band.