Sitting down with the members of U2 between photo setups, it soon emerges that writing and recording “Ordinary Love” was a major disruption in the U2 flow and still is having fateful repercussions. Intensive work on the band’s 13th studio album, the first since 2009’s No Line on the Horizon, was underway in the summer, with a target release date of December 2013, when Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of the Weinstein Co. and a longtime friend of Bono and the band, called on behalf of Mandela’s South African producer, Anant Singh, and director Justin Chadwick to solicit a song for the nearly completed film.
“When we got the call from Harvey to say, ‘It’s happening, are you in?,’ it was like, ‘Oh man, really? Now?'” says The Edge, the U2 guitarist whose passport reads David Howell Evans. “But we just had to do it, with the history that we have with the man and the cause.”
“It was hard to stop what we were doing,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr. says. “We were on a roll-it was clear where we were going. And a decision was made to abandon ship, more or less, to focus on this.”
Despite the angst, all four members express zero regret about doing the song (the Oscar nomination helps), and they’re eager to detail U2’s long-running involvement in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and ’80s, from the band’s early days through Mandela’s release in 1990 and the emergence of a free South Africa. Together with Amnesty International, it was U2’s earliest international political commitment. “This was the one project you just couldn’t say no to,” says Adam Clayton, U2’s bassist. “For our generation, South Africa was a real illustration of how music could affect change in the world, and it was a rite of passage in terms of our political awareness.”