The art of The Joshua Tree: how U2 found what they were looking for – in a freezing desert
Irish rock band U2 have always had a strong sense of visual presentation. It probably helps if you went to the same school as one of the most gifted graphic designers in the country. Steve Averill had fronted Ireland’s first punk band, The Radiators from Space, and was working at a top advertising agency when he was contacted in 1978 by schoolboy band The Hype, whose members came from his alma mater, Mount Temple Comprehensive in Dublin. It was Averill who persuaded them to change their name to U2, because it was graphically strong yet ambiguous, with an inclusive pun (which singer Bono admits he did not originally spot and has hated ever since). Averill designed their first poster and has overseen all U2 artwork ever since.
There is usually a strong conceptual element. The cover of Boy, their 1980 debut album, featured a child as a symbol of innocence and beginnings. The same boy reappeared with a cut lip on the artwork for War (1983).
What is it?
The Joshua Tree was U2’s fifth studio album. Released in 1987, it topped charts in 20 countries and went on to sell more than 25 million copies. The front cover is austerely framed in black and gold, with a letterbox format enclosing a stark black and white photo of the four band members in a grey mountain desert landscape. Dressed in black, grimly staring, U2 occupy just one side of the picture frame. The tree mentioned in the title is nowhere to be seen, appearing instead on the back cover and inside gatefold sleeve, where the unsmiling band stand in front of a lone silhouetted yucca, indigenous to the Mojave desert in the US. In the colourful and zanily styled world of 1980s pop, it is an image that reeks of seriousness of purpose. The Irish band resemble frontiersmen in a vast and untamed Western landscape, a ragged gang of preachers traversing desert wastelands to save the soul of rock and roll.
The story behind the cover
The album was still being recorded when the band took a three-day break in December 1987 to drive around the deserts of California in a minibus, staying in motels while searching for a suitable cover location. Working titles were “The Desert Songs” and “The Two Americas”, reflecting tensions inherent in material that explored both American frontier idealism and political imperialism. “The idea was to find a place where civilisation and the desert met,” according to Averill, who was along for the ride. The trip started in Reno, Nevada, took in a deserted gold mine in Bodie in the Sierra Nevada and continued south to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.
Group photography is a notoriously difficult art, as anyone who has ever tried to take a family portrait can attest. The challenge is to capture a themed, unified shot while simultaneously satisfying the egos of individual members; no one wants to be seen on their own album cover not looking their finest. From 1983, U2 established a long-standing relationship with Anton Corbijn, the Dutch photographer and filmmaker who had previously photographed the cover for Ice Cream for Crow – the 1982 album by the eccentric American artist Captain Beefheart – in the Mojave desert, with a curious tree in the background. In a motel bar, Corbijn told Bono how Mormon settlers named the plant (Yucca brevifolia) the Joshua tree, likening its outstretched branches to the arms of the prophet Joshua exhorting his people to follow him to the Promised Land. The next morning, the singer got on to the bus with a Bible in hand and announced that The Joshua Tree would be the new album title.
The next job was to find one. The party started a drive hundreds of miles south towards Joshua Tree National Park, where the trees grow close together in abundance. They never got that far. A short way down highway 190, someone spotted a rare single tree. The band decamped, walked into the desert, posed for some shots, then went on their way. “It was all fairly spontaneous,” says guitarist The Edge. Their notoriously grim expressions on the cover photos reflected the fact that they were freezing the whole time, having taken off their coats to pose in temperatures barely above zero. “The look we were going for was a displaced European immigrant arriving in the desert,” says bassist Adam Clayton.
The cover design was completed by Averill in an established U2 graphic style, framed to lend it a cinematic scale. The chosen photo for the front was taken at Zabriskie Point, as it was felt too literal to feature the tree on the front. The band are clumped tightly together, with Bono in profile, staring off into the distance. The tone is almost mythic. “The desert is a transitional place,” says The Edge. “It doesn’t have a kind of right or wrong, nor any kind of strong personality. For us, it was like a journey through this neutral ground, to get where we were going.” The result was one of the last great sleeves of the vinyl age, with smaller, uglier designs for the original CD and cassette versions, focusing on the band rather than the expansive landscape.
What is the music like?
The sound is as monumental as the cover suggests: thunderous bass and drums adorned with epic guitars echoing to infinity. U2’s roaring anthems span the dreamy quest of Where the Streets Have No Name, soaring gospel of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, romantic desperation of With or Without You and brutal assault of Bullet the Blue Sky. It was one of the definitive rock albums of the decade, bringing a new sense of purpose to guitar music in an age of synth pop. It remains U2’s biggest-selling album. A 30th-anniversary revival was the highest-grossing tour in the world in 2017.
What is its legacy?
Bono grew increasingly irritated by the seriousness of the image U2 had saddled themselves with. By the time of Achtung Baby (1991), with its kaleidoscopic full-colour Corbijn sleeve, Bono was dressing like a cartoon rocker, disguising his crusading idealism with humour and talking about “chopping down The Joshua Tree”.
Sadly, it seems, some fans may have taken this almost literally. The site of the inner sleeve photo became a place of pilgrimage for U2 fans, who would break off parts of the tree, until it expired around 2000. Today, its massive desiccated trunk and gnarled branches still lie surrounded by tributes, trinkets and personal messages. A concrete plaque lies in the desert ground, asking, “Have you found what you’re looking for?”
