In December 1982, a rock band from Dublin premiered their new single on MTV: a doomy, minor-key epic driven by an ominous bassline. Its title referred to a day coming soon which would normally be associated with hope and renewal; but in Bono’s lyrics, “all is quiet” and “nothing changes on New Year's Day”.
These were politically turbulent times. That month, a disco had been bombed in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland, leading to 17 deaths. Thirty thousand women had held hands around the perimeter fence of RAF Greenham Common, as cruise missiles sat inside. The video to U2’s “New Year’s Day” also felt appropriately chilly. It featured images of the band in sub-zero temperatures in Sweden, and footage of Soviet troops advancing in winter during the second world war.
The single became the band’s breakthrough international hit, and remains a firm favourite with fans nearly four decades later. Bono commented on its gloomy appeal in a February 1983 NME interview: “It would be stupid to start drawing up battle lines, but I think the fact that ‘New Year's Day’ made the top 10 indicated a disillusionment among record buyers… people are growing disillusioned with pap, with the wallpaper music and the gloss.”
He may have had a point. The album U2 released a month later knocked Michael Jackson’s Thriller off the number one spot. Called War, it opened with “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Seconds”, a track about nuclear war, and then “New Year’s Day” burst into life.
“New Year’s Day” began life as a much simpler thing: a love song by the 22-year-old Bono for his new wife, Alison, who had been his girlfriend since his teens. At the time, Bono used to make up a lot of his lyrics on the spot in the studio, and he had been reading the news about Lech Walesa, then the leader of the Polish Solidarity movement. Walesa had been imprisoned since December 1981, when the Polish People’s Republic declared martial law, and outlawed his organisation.
Bono was moved by how Walesa couldn’t see his wife, Danuta, and kept thinking about how that must have affected them: he repeats the lyric “I will be with you again” with heady urgency throughout. He added to the NME: “A song like ‘New Year’s Day’ might be about war and struggle, but it is also about love. It is about having the faith to break through and survive against all odds. Love is a very powerful thing. There’s nothing more radical than two people loving each other.”
The earnestness of this single connected with U2’s growing fanbase, getting across how passionate and how huge the band could really be. Another lyric from “New Year’s Day” (“under a blood red sky”) became the name of their landmark November 1983 live album and concert film, which helped them break America. As a testament to its incendiary power, they have continued to play the song live ever since (it featured on their recent Joshua Tree 2019 tour, and on six concert films released on DVD).
Their performances of the song in Poland have been particularly memorable. At the Silesian Stadium in Chorzow in 2005, the crowd waved red and white sheets to create the Polish flag when they played it, to U2’s amazement (this gesture was repeated in the same venue four years later). U2 also licensed the song to the European Commission, for free, in 2009, for a film celebrating 20 years of political transformation in Poland since the end of the cold war.
The song’s musical urgency has also seen clubbers connecting with it. Studio 54 DJ and house music pioneer François Kevorkian first remixed it in 1983. Manchester rappers Kiss AMC sampled it heavily for their 1989 club hit, “A Bit of U2”, while Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino released a relentless, Eurotrance version in 1995. A 2001 remix by dance act Musique, called “New Year’s Dub”, peaked at number 15 in the UK charts. It was also covered in 2018 by American metal band Redemption, its guitar fuzz and drums yanked up to 11.
But perhaps the absolute power of the song remains in the couple who originally inspired it: the man who became Poland’s first democratically elected president after the fall of communism and the wife who collected his Nobel Peace Prize on his behalf while the cold war still raged. Lech and Danuta Walesa celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in November. Bono and Alison celebrated their 37th anniversary a few months before. Bono was right about the power of love.
What are your memories of ‘New Year’s Day’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Universal-Island Records Ltd.; ZYX Music / Media Records; Metal Blade Records
Picture credit: Paul Natkin/WireImage
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