It seems like we have come full circle from when "The Joshua Tree" songs were originally written, with global upheaval, extreme right wing politics and some fundamental human rights at risk. To celebrate the album - as the songs seem so relevant and prescient of these times too - we decided to do these shows, it feels right for now. We're looking forward to it.

[on David Bowie] Next to The Beatles he stands as the most influential artist of all time. He truly altered the course of music history.

Rory Gallagher was the man for any music fan from Ireland in the mid-1970s. Especially for someone like myself who was trying at the time to master the electric guitar. He was a hard act to follow. He had an ease and command that was enviable. He left us too soon but his legacy is evident in the number of young guitarists who are drawn to his music, and through it to the music that inspired him, the Mississippi Delta blues.

What I hope people pick up from U2 is that individuality is the crux of what rock'n'roll is about. Every single person who picks up a guitar has the potential to do something unique, and they thwart their potential by trying to sound like other people.

Of course we want to be tax efficient - who doesn't?

[on "Beautiful Day"] We were also reclaiming, I guess, some of the best-known musical and sonic hallmarks of the band, on the basis that if everyone else was ripping us off, why couldn't we?

You can't fret about your songs being too popular and I always get a thrill when I hear one of our records out of context.

The songs we record are always changing. They seem to have a new aspect depending on the time and place of their performance. Some need to be retired for a while so we can see them in a fresh way, but the best songs seem to always connect.

It's often the case that our most luminous moments have a pop quality. In the end, we're always trying to express something in the most straightforward way and that's also true of great pop music. It's about clarity and it's about ideas that resonate. I'm a big fan of pop - I just wish I was better at it.

"Beautiful Day" itself had come through various different incarnations and though we'd always felt it had something, it was kind of hard to see where it was going. Really, the moment it got exciting was when Bono hit on the lyric: "It's a beautiful day". It seems in some ways such a banal sort of lyric, but combined with the music something wild happened and we all recognised it. Then Brian's (Brian Eno) contribution was that fantastically Euro kick drum opening and keyboard line, and that gave us the clue as to where it should go next.

When you think you probably don't need to be recording then you definitely should, and when you're pretty certain you ought to be recording you probably don't need to. Literally, at any second, if everyone's in the room, then something great can happen.

Songwriting for U2 is always a very ambiguous process. We write as we record, but in the case of Pop we took that to the nth degree. The loops and machines offered an endless amount of options and in U2 options are not your friends. Limitations, in fact, are often really the thing, and we've made full use of our limitations over the years.

"All That You Can't Leave Behind" was a chance to rediscover the core chemistry of U2 as a band. On the previous record, Pop, we had deconstructed the concept of the rock 'n' roll band and then on the PopMart tour we'd celebrated the surface of things, not in a cynical way but in the spirit of Warholian pop art. Even so, I think we also realised that in the process we had lost something and the attempt on "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was to find that thing again: what it was to play in a room as a band and to rediscover the eccentricity and elusiveness of what a band can do when they're performing together.

During my time as a performer, I've certainly felt that I was seeing the end of the guitar.

[on playing the guitar] When I came along, there was a clear need to reassess the instrument. I was drawn to the idea of minimalism. To get the maximum effect from the minimum number of notes. There was a clear need to change the furniture around.

People always ask us if we think our songs can really change anything. And I always say that's not why we wrote the songs. We didn't write them so they would change the situation.