Bono had to completely rewrite the lyrics to a major new football anthem. The singer and U2 partner The Edge teamed up with Dutch DJ Martin Garrix for the official UEFA Euro 2020 song We Are The People, which was delayed a year because of COVID. Garrix came up with the original but Bono was clearly unimpressed by his first attempt. “I had a rough demo with melody and he changed every single lyric and made it his own,” explained Garrix. “The memo that UEFA gave me was about ‘uniting’. Bono was like, ‘That’s not gonna happen for this song.’ Every lyric he does, it’s art. [So] he came up with, ‘We are the people we’ve been waiting for/ Out of the ruins of hate and war/ We will build it better than we did before.’”
Garrix contacted the U2 duo on a whim as his intro seemed to fit with The Edge’s guitar style. He added: “My manager was like, ‘Reach out to them, you never know.’ We contacted them and the same night I’m on the phone with Bono. It was a very long, interesting and beautiful conversation about music; where it comes from and what it should give emotionwise for a tournament like this. Bono was singing melodies six hours after we sent the email to them. I had to mute myself on the phone and scream then unmute again and play it cool.”