All That You Can't Leave Behind ... in France! U2 and the Incredible Disappearing CD!

Now, you've just spent the last two years writing and recording songs for your next album--your band's first new collection of songs in over four years and the record is almost finished. There are just a few tweaks left to perform in the studio and with those the disc will be done. All the songs--the so-called "rough cut"--are on a single compact disc. The title of the new album is rumored to be "Vertigo."

You keep the disc in your bag, which you take with you to the balmy South of France where you and your band mates will finish recording the album using the tracks on that CD. While you're there you do some press, a photo shoot, to supply publicity images for the media maw. During the shoot, you leave your bags unattended, naturally, as you go to work mugging and posing for the camera.

After the photo shoot, you come back and notice that the rough-cut CD is missing. It's gone. Vanished. You look around you everywhere. You ask around, "Hey, anyone seen a CD lying around here?" You start to worry. You get a little pissed off. You get a little scared.

You think, "Two years of work is on that disc. An entire album--OUR entire next album--digitized on a single round piece of plastic, which is gone. Did I mislay it? Did I forget it? Dear God--PLEASE!--Tell me I left the disc back in Ireland!"

No, that's not it, matey. The logical conclusion is someone took it. Thieves . Or a thief. But who? Why?

Technically the disc (or rather, its contents) doesn't even belong to you; the rough-cut tracks are property of a record company, the corporate entity to which you are contractually obligated.

"Holy sh*t!" you think.

Oh yeah, and it's 2004 and there's that thing called the Internet, upon which are run peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, connecting millions of users via personal computer via which the digital contents of an audio compact disc can be easily copied and transmitted via a few simple mouse clicks. And at last count you heard there were something like, maybe, 40 million Internet users worldwide.

"F**************************ck!" you think.

But the French police are on the case, hunting for the missing disc and the culprit, if any. Your loyal and adoring fans sympathize. The press is all over this news, especially the entertainment media. Britain's vicious, rabid music journalists are frothing at the mouth on this one. Your homeland's newspapers give the story big play, after all, you're among Ireland's biggest, most famous native sons. The media in general have a field day whipping out pun-filled headlines that make heavy use of some of your back catalog's most popular song titles.

You make some comments to the media about the incident. You say, "A large slice of two years' work lifted. It doesn't seem credible but that's what's just happened to us... and it was my CD."

Your band is named after an American spy plane made famous by an incident in the 1960's in which one such plane was shot down over Soviet Russia. You don't use your real name; People call you "The Edge" or sometimes just "Edge," minus the definite article. Your band is named U2.

And, yeah, you still haven't found what you're looking for.

--Ivan "Micropundit" Corsa

RELATED LINKS

U2 Official Web Site
"U2" Google News Search Results
Not a Beautiful Day: U2 Tunes AWOL [E! Online]
French Police Still Haven't Found What U2 Are Looking For [Belfast Telegraph]