The Joshua Tree: 20th Anniversary Box Set.

It’s been 20 years since U2 unleashed this Rock/Pop classic upon us.

Virtually every track, from the building grandeur of Where The Streets Have No Name and the muscular gospel of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For to the hoarse latitudes of Red Hill Mining Town and the “see, we’re very very sombre” Mothers Of The Disappeared, would be immediately familiar (particularly if you have a Coldplay album or two in your collection).

In other words, every track is a winner.

Beyond the baubles, what lasts is the fact that no matter how much we “know” this album, no matter how much it has been parodied, pilloried and countered, the songs (and crucially in these days of single-track downloads, the songs in this order) still move, mark and shape you.

While I liked/like The Joshua Tree I personally thought U2 did their best work in the early 1990s with the likes of Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop.

As the band said of the opening bars of ZOO Station from Achtung Baby, it’s “the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree”…