U2 kicked off the Lovetown tour in September, 1989, in the West Australian coastal city of Perth.

With almost half of the entire tour’s shows played across the great southern continent (23 of 47), the band had 13 nights off Down Under in between shows, so Bono got writing.

Without knowing just how far he got into these songs, Bono has been quoted as saying that he wrote quite a bit in Australia at the time and spent the northern summer of 1990 organizing what he had created.

The band then hit STS studios in Dublin to record some of the ideas as demos including Who’s Going to Ride Your Wild Horses, the beginnings of Until the End of the World, Even Better Than the Real Thing and Mysterious Ways.

The demos made their way to Berlin where the band attempted to bend and shape them into fully forged tracks.

It was arduous work.

While the German capital celebrated the reunification of east and west atop the rubble of the freshly dismantled Berlin Wall, U2’s members were building barriers between each other.

Differences of opinion on the musical direction were taking their toll inside Hansa Studios, to the point where they almost called it a day.

But brilliance finally entered the room thanks to a segment of Mysterious Ways which morphed into what became the anthemic One.

From there, it was back to Dublin where the creativity continued until the album was carved out of what was now a bloodless stone.

Out of Lovetown, a challenging, moody, yet bright child was born.

It’s name? Achtung Baby.

Look back on U2’s links to Australia at my Facebook and Twitter pages.

Below: video of U2 in Sydney, 1989, around the time Bono started working on songs for Achtung Baby.