Cars

Why We Love “Ugly” Sports Cars From the ’80s and ’90s Now More Than Ever

By

Luke Zaleski

,

Mary Marge Locker

,

Kyle Paoletta

and

Will Stephenson

Photographs by

Nicholas Alan Cope

16 hours ago

With stories from Jay Leno and Don Johnson, plus glorious photos of the best rides from the golden age of auto design.

When the futuristic, wedge-shaped cars we lusted after in the ’80s and ’90s went out of style, they went all the way out of style. But a new generation of auto freaks has revived these vintage beauties. Nobody laughs or calls them ugly anymore. And prices are skyrocketing.

They were the last generation of cars to be designed using primarily pencil and clay, formed out of rectangles and wedges, before modern computers came along and made pretty much any shape that can cut through air possible. And that’s exactly why we love them: They will forever be the sports cars of the future. Just by looking at them, you can practically feel the designers crafting them by hand, straining forward into the digital age. Which, it turned out, was right around the corner.

These are automotive works of art—but with wild horsepower, Italian leather seats, and a rainbow of bad attitudes. Here, the experts break down exactly why there’s no cooler class to drive right now. This is the story of sports cars, the men who love them—and the shifting tides of value and taste.

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Dreams Money Can Buy

Adolfo Orsi (co-author, ‘Classic Car Auction Yearbook’): The demographic of car collectors is changing. The buyers now are people in their mid-30s, early 40s, and the first cars they buy are the cars in their memories. They dreamed about these cars from the posters in their bedrooms.

Alex Manos (owner, The Beverly Hills Car Club): Things have changed drastically since 2010. There are a lot of people who were kids when these cars were out new. They had the posters in their bedrooms and were like, Wow, one day I could dream of having one of those. Well, now they’re adults and they can afford them.

Ted Gushue (editorial director, ‘Petrolicious’): These cars represented power and performance and wealth and success—things that we didn’t quite understand as kids. We just saw them as fast, sexy cars. Then we grew up. Some of these guys started Facebook. Some of these guys made money in finance.

Bradley Price (founder, Autodromo): I feel like there were a couple of cars that never lost their luster from that time period. But then, others were almost a joke. Some survived as the cream of the crop, and others went down and came back up, like an actor who recovers his career in his mid-40s. In any style-oriented collecting type of thing, there are thought leaders—people who are ahead of the curve. Those people were buying these cars several years ago, and it’s now more mainstream. Although I don’t think it’s fully hit the mainstream yet.

Tim Huntzinger (professor, ArtCenter College of Design): Car styling, like any kind of styling, goes in cycles. You can dig into your dad’s closet and find the old skinny ties from back in the day, and now they’re cool again. Car styling is similar, but it’s got an extra layer of complexity because of the technology. Why now? There’s two parts to it. One is that these cars are rounding 30. Right? And so they’re starting to become truly classic cars. The second is because of how organic modern cars are becoming. In the ’80s and early ’90s, computers weren’t really used to design cars yet, but they wanted them to look like they were.... These cars were all designed on paper and with clay. Made by hand. As cars increasingly started to get made by computer, there were shapes that became possible that were not possible before. I think that’s why these cars fell out of favor. They weren’t as different as they used to be. But I think that’s exactly the same thing that brings them into the forefront now: They’re different again.

Lancia

Delta Integrale Evo 2 | 1994

Jay Leno (comedian, car collector): When you see modern cars, they all have this sort of jelly-bean shape, and they’re all halfway between a crossover and an SUV. There’s a certain practicality to them. However, this type of vehicle [from the ’80s and ’90s] would serve no practical purpose of any kind. The Lamborghini Countach wasn’t even aerodynamic. It was a brick. I think a Volkswagen Bug is more aerodynamic.

Price: One of the most interesting things about cars from the ’80s that a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of them were designed in the ’70s. You think of, like, the Magnum, P.I. Ferrari 308, or you think of the Lamborghini Countach, or you think of the DeLorean. Many of these kinds of poster cars of the ’80s were actually designed in the ’70s, and they were so far ahead of their time. They were so futuristic that they were still futuristic ten years later.

Ferrari

308 GTB | 1984

Phillip Toledano (photographer, car collector): People buy the stuff that they grew up looking at on TV, or they grew up admiring or lusting after, right? The other thing is that all the stuff from the ’60s is just insanely expensive, so people go, What else can I buy that’s really cool that doesn’t cost a lot of money?

David Swig (car specialist, RM Sotheby’s): People collect things that make them nostalgic for their youth. So if you’re a 40-year-old guy who’s getting into cars, you’re probably more interested in the 1988 BMW M3 than a 1933 Packard.

Leno: Twenty-something years ago, I got a letter from a kid. He’s, like, 12. “Dear Mr. Leno, I told my friends that you were my uncle and that you and I go driving on weekends. I was wondering if someday you could pick me up and take me to school.” I called the parents and said, “I’m happy to do it.” I pick him up, we park around the corner and wait for the school buses to unload, and we pull up. The Countach doors come out, and he says, “Thanks, Uncle Jay!” and I say, “All right, Billy! So long!” That’s a kid who will probably buy a Countach once he gets to a certain age.

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Street Legal

Elliot Cuker (director, Cooper Classics): The audience for classic cars is becoming younger and younger. They’re less interested in the earlier classic cars from the ’50s and ’60s, because they want cars that can move. They want cars that are fast. They want cars that are much more agile.

Toledano: I’m mostly interested in what’s called homologation cars. Only if you’re a super automotive nerd like me would you know what that is. Basically, in the ’80s and ’90s, they had special rules whereby manufacturers, if they wanted race cars, would have to build a very limited number of production cars for regular people to buy.

Price: These companies in Europe made these crazy fire-breathing homologation cars. So Group B rally cars and touring cars from the ’80s, they all had to have homologation cars. Those are very, very hot right now. And that’s definitely something that’s a function of guys in their 40s who grew up watching races on TV as a kid, or having that poster of their rally hero in their bedroom.

Bryan Calvero (owner of the Lancia Delta Integrale seen here): Growing up, I said, Wow, we can have a road version that’s the closest to the actual race car—and it has the same body lines? It was as close as you got to what the race-car drivers were driving, and that’s what excited me.

Price: Giorgetto Giugiaro did a lot of the great cars from this era, including the Lancia. He’s kind of the Picasso of Italian car design, because he’s so prolific and he went through different phases in his design career that have different feelings about them. Some of the great car designers, everything they did has sort of the same look. Giugiaro morphed through various phases. He did all of these wedge cars that have a very similar vibe, but then he moved on to other things in the ’90s.

Manos: A lot of people grew up watching Miami Vice, so they would think about the Ferrari Testarossa. Chris Brown recently had a Ferrari Testarossa in a music video, and I think even Lil Wayne had a Testarossa in his video. Back in 2008, they would have put a brand-new Ferrari in there.

Price: The Testarossa—that, to me, is the quintessential ’80s car because it was in Miami Vice. It was one of those poster cars everybody wanted and dreamed of when they were a kid.

Lamborghini

Countach | 1988

Don Johnson (Sonny Crockett, ‘Miami Vice’): The Testarossa was not the easiest car to drive on a shifting level, because the transmission was very tight. It was also limited in its turn radius. We had a few of them on set, so I got quite proficient at driving the stunt car and had a lot of fun in it. It had a lot of top-end power, so once you started to go through the sequencing in the gears, with precision, you really could get it to do just about anything you wanted it to do. If I recall, we were the first to put fiber-optic lighting on the interior of the principal car to light the faces, because there was limited room to put any type of lights in the interior of the Ferrari. And a Ferrari is a Ferrari. For street-legal straight racing cars, there is Ferrari and there is everything else.

David Houston (owner of the Lamborghini Countach seen here): The day the Countach came out, I knew about them.

Manos: I really like a Lamborghini Countach. It sets you apart from everybody else. If you drive that car around wherever you live, even in a high-end area where there’s other fancy cars, that car just sticks out. Even next to a brand-new Lamborghini. It might have similar traits, but it’s on its own kind of spectrum. That car was in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Huntzinger: But that simple wedge—that’s as simple as you can get and still be fast. You also have to have fairly large wheels. So that emphasis on the wheels and fender flares is pretty evident in all these cars, especially in the Countach. And so you see the Countach going from a very simple wedge to having a lot of wings and intakes and other design spiraling on the exteriors.

Toledano: The Countach is super ugly. It’s all just, like, bricks and wedges. It’s all right angles. There’s no curves.

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A New Class of Classics

BMW

M3 | 1989

Gushue: The Porsche 928 was interesting. It was designed to kill the 911. It was a front-engine car with a V-8. Ultimately, they were never able to achieve the sales, thank God, that would allow them to stop selling the 911. So the 928 maintained alongside the 911 for a while, and eventually it was phased out.

Price: The 928 went through a very low phase where people dismissed it as, Oh, that’s a dentist’s car. Because it was bought as a status symbol. The orthodontist who lived down the street would have had one. And, of course, it’s in the movie Risky Business. So it’s kind of like the rich kid’s car. It didn’t really get taken seriously by the Porsche lovers because it’s front-engine and it’s a V-8. To be honest with you, I think the design is really cool, but I think part of the reason they’re coming back now is because 911s have gotten so expensive.

Ronald Wahlig, M.D. (owner of the Porsche 928 seen below): Everyone saw the car in Risky Business and the posters, so I’ve been drawn to it since back then. You don’t see them that often, but for the past 10 or 15 years, whenever I’m driving around and see one, I’d always do a double take: What is that?

Arthur Kar (car dealer, L’Art de l’automobile): I love the 928. It’s a crazy shape. To be truthful, most of the time when I worked at Porsche, I worked on the 911s. Because the 928 was too hard to work on. The mechanics were too big in the front. I really love the shape of the car. I really love the lights and the flat nose, but the V-8? To take care of it was a big deal.

Price: The BMW M3 is a cult car. It has a very strong following. That’s the one particular car that even younger people are really into. Like if I were to drive up in a ’60s Ferrari, and there was an E30 M3 parked next to me, a lot of guys in their teens and early 20s would be more excited to see the E30 M3, because to them it’s just the coolest thing. So that car has a lot of crossover.

Toledano: The Evo version of the M3 was the competitor of the Mercedes Evo 2. Those two cars went head-to-head in the German saloon-car racing series. So they’re kind of evil competitors with each other.

Swig: The generation of M3 from ’86 to ’91, known as the E30, is all about the flared fenders and that sort of boy-racer look.

Mercedes-Benz

190E Cosworth Evo 2 | 1990

Calvero: For me, it all started with the E30 M3. I always liked the lines of that car.

Marc Norris (owner of the BMW M3 seen here): It’s a unique car. And when you drive one, the car merges with you. Totally. You think it and the car does it. It’s just a phenomenal car to drive. Very rewarding. It’s the holy grail of BMWs.

Price: The Mercedes 190E Evo 2 is a very flamboyant car, because it’s a boxy sedan but with, like, a wing on it and fender flares. There was a time when it was what you would call a boy-racer car, which means a young guy who thinks it’s a hot car buys it, rather than a serious collector. I think now there’s a number of more mature collectors that are interested in those cars and it’s shedding that boy-racer thing. Same thing with the E30 M3. Those cars are like peas in a pod. They raced against each other.

Kar: I have a Ferrari 308, which is super low and large and ready to fight with the wind on the highway. It goes fast. All the proportions are large, thin, and round.

Toledano: Oh, Magnum, P.I. It has that repeated form running up the front of the hood. The wheels with the strong triangular shape—the five-spoke thing. But that one’s less extreme than a Testarossa or a Countach.

Kar: It’s all about the line on the side. You see the air entrance between the door and the back side? That’s amazing. And the black line at the center of the curve on the side—that’s one of my favorite parts of the 308.

Gushue: The 308 will make you feel like you were high-flying in the cocaine ’80s. That Ferrari lifestyle. It was actually a lower-performance car. It wasn’t their fastest car. It was probably the slowest one they offered at that moment. But it had an iconic design, and it looked fast as hell standing still.

Price: Magnum, P.I. tainted that car. The show is why they sold so many of them, because it was very visible and it’s a cultural icon. But it also turned a lot of people off, who were like, I don’t want to be associated with Magnum, P.I. At some point, it becomes kind of a gold-chain car. But it’s also a fantastic sports car, and it’s a beautiful ’70s Italian design.

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Supply and Demand

Amy Christie (director of public relations, RM Sotheby’s): Monterey is one of the biggest auctions of the year, and the stats revealed that there were fewer ’50s and ’60s vehicles on offer. Modern classics represented 27 percent of total cars presented. That gives you a picture of the growing appetite for this era of car in collector circles.

Price: Well, a lot of the exotic cars in the ’80s were associated with glitz and bad taste. For a long time, people thought Lamborghini Countaches and Ferrari Testarossas were kind of gauche. And now they’re very strong.

Huntzinger: The 1989 Ferrari Testarossa—that’s a beautiful car. I had a white one on a poster in my bedroom as a kid. Just incredibly wedgy. There’s the primary form of the wedge and then the rake down the side for the intake. Super low and really, really wide. Proportion was everything: to be able to get a wedge that wasn’t just a simple triangle.

Orsi: The production of the Lamborghini has always been very, very limited. It was hundreds of cars a year, not thousands, so the price is much higher.

Leno: I remember when I first came to Los Angeles, I was broke and I had no money, and I saw a Countach parked on the street. I looked in it and there were potato chips and candy wrappers on the seat. I was like, “Wow, somebody’s just using this as a car.” It was Rod Stewart’s.

Ferrari

Testarossa | 1989

Gushue: For years and years, if you went to buy a used Lamborghini from five years ago, it would be freaking cheap. These cars lose value quickly, just like any other cars. But then they have this inverse bell curve in value, as the people who couldn’t afford them when they idolized them in their teens start to have success in their careers. So that’s why you now see ’80s cars becoming exceptionally high-value cars at auction, because all these people who really wanted them back then can now afford them. A Lamborghini Countach was all day long a $90,000 piece-of-shit car. All of a sudden, they’ve become half-million-dollar cars, ’cause there’s only so many of them left.

Alexander Weaver (car specialist, RM Sotheby’s): These cars are starting to really move up. The Countach. The Acura NSX. The 180E. The E30 M3. The E36 M3. The best examples of all those cars are really moving up, finding their way into good collections and bringing the most money they possibly could.

Houston: I have a philosophy. There are two types of car guys. There’s the car guy that makes a lot of money in their middle years and looks around like, Well, what am I gonna buy? I’ll buy some of these cars! And those guys, by the way, are ruining the car market for us. And then there’s guys like me. I think my first words were “sports car.” I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of cars. I remember driving to the Lamborghini dealership, and I would just stand and look at the Countach. I would drive all the way across town just to stand in its presence. And I would sit there and go, I’d love to get a Countach, but how much are they? And I looked and it was $90,000. And I thought, God, I gotta get it now. That can’t last, you know? I bought it, the market turned, and they shot up.

Manos: In 2005, if you’re a music star, you’re gonna have a brand-new Ferrari. Or a brand-new Rolls-Royce. Or a brand-new Aston Martin. But now it’s just so much cooler and has so much more depth, value, meaning to have an ’80s or a ’90s car. People get nostalgic, and you’re ten times cooler because it isn’t brand-new. The Countach—they used to sell those cars for $90,000, and now they’re $390,000.

Porsche

928 S4 | 1989

Cuker: The ’80s and ’90s Porsches have gone insane. Look at the Lamborghini Countach. Back in ’85, the list price was $100,000. What if I told you that right now you would have to pay about $650,000 for that same car in great condition? The 1991 BMW M3. You know, it’s a fun car, nothing extraordinary. Back in ’91, it sold for $36,000. Just several years ago, you could have bought the best one around for $25,000. Right now, the car, in exceptional condition, is $125,000, and it’ll continue to escalate. The Mercedes 560 SL will continue to go up in price because they retain a classic feel, but they drive like a modern car. The Ferrari F50 has gone nuts. That’s a $2 million car.

Gushue: These cars were designed by some of the world’s most talented designers. Bertone. Zagato. These things are rolling works of art. They look futuristic still to this day.

Cuker: Cars are sculptures. Just like any art, they typify our period. The earlier cars had softer lines, they were more romantic. These are not romantic cars. These cars are in your face. Fast, sleek. These cars don’t have classic lines. They’re confrontational. Don’t take one of these cars out if you’re trying to stay anonymous.

Houston: Oh, the wife hates the Countach. She hates it so much. It might be jealousy, ’cause she knows that I love it almost as much as I love her.

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U2's 'The Joshua Tree': 10 Things You Didn't Know

How a Georgian mansion, a roadie's death, an "Infinite Guitar" and more played into the band's career-defining 1987 album

 The plot of The Joshua Tree is essentially an immigrant's tale: Four guys from Ireland set off to find America, and what they discovered left them both invigorated and outraged. While the lyrics to U2's 1987 opus give voice to their ever-expanding social conscience, the roots of The Joshua Tree are planted firmly in blues, gospel and folk – with an outsider's edge. Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. were strangers in a strange land, and this sense of otherness is prevalent throughout the album.

"It doesn't really sound like anything else from its time at all," the Edge recalled in a 1999 Classic Albums documentary. "It's not coming from an Eighties mentality. It's coming from somewhere completely different. … When we were making this album we didn't really feel like we were a part of what was going on in the music business at that stage. And we felt very separate."
"It was so out of step with everything around," Bono agreed. "It was mad. It was like an ecstatic music." The spirit caught on – The Joshua Tree went on to top of the charts in more than 20 countries, spawning hit singles with "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With Or Without You." Technologically innovative, politically charged, spiritually conscious and radio-friendly in the extreme, the album built on U2's reputation as unparalleled live performers and vaulted them to the top of the modern-rock pile.
Decades on, The Joshua Tree remains the band's highest-selling album and a touchstone among legions of fans. In honor of the album's 30th anniversary, and in advance of an upcoming tour celebrating the LP, we look back at 10 little-known facts about its creation.


1. The early sessions were recorded in a Georgian mansion – which Adam Clayton later bought.While the album's title and cover evoked the American Southwest and the lyrics expressed Bono's outrage over human-rights atrocities in Ethiopia, South Africa, Chile and El Salvador, U2's globally minded fifth studio LP was largely recorded in a two-story Georgian mansion located in Rathfarnham, South Dublin – within sight of Adam Clayton's former school. The Edge had viewed the residence while house-hunting with his then-wife Aislinn several months before. "We decided it wasn't for us, but later I had the idea that the owner might rent it to us to record in," he says in the band's autobiography, U2 by U2. "The house was called Danesmoate. So we set up in this big old Georgian house in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, about half a mile from Columba's College where Adam had been infamously expelled."
The plan was not completely without precedent. U2 had recorded much of their previous album, 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, in County Meath's Slane Castle. Believing Danesmoate to be much more inspiring than a sterile professional facility, the group decided to construct a fully functional studio inside the old walls. By January 1986 the dining room had been converted into a control room, complete with tape machines and mixing desk. Massive double doors were removed and replaced with a glass screen looking into the elegant drawing room, which would serve as the live room. With hardwood floors and a double-height ceiling, the space boasted oversized acoustics. "When you hear that big drum sound on The Joshua Tree, it's the sound of that room," says Clayton, who later purchased the house after recording was complete ("Perhaps to get up the noses of the establishment next door, although he would never admit to that," the Edge jokingly speculates).
Though U2 occasionally used more traditional venues like Windmill Lane and STS Studios, many of the background tracks were recorded live at Danesmoate before being completed at the Edge's newly purchased seaside home, Melbeach, in Monkstown, South Dublin. "That's where songs like 'Mothers of the Disappeared' and what ended up as 'Bullet the Blue Sky' were born," co-producer Daniel Lanois told Hot Press in 2007. "Probably the bulk of the record was done at Edge's house. Even though the Danesmoate sessions were the backbone of the tonality of the record – we got a lot of the drums done in there."
2. "One Tree Hill" was inspired by the death of the band's roadie and friend.When U2 arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of their Unforgettable Fire Tour in August 1984, Bono found himself unable to sleep due to the 13-hour time change. To help pass the time, a group of local production staff kindly gave the superstar visitor a late-night tour of their city. Among them was Greg Carroll, a Maori man whose experience working with Auckland-based bands got him hired by U2's production manager, Steve Iredale.
The impromptu sightseeing tour brought them to one of the highest and largest of Auckland's many volcanic peaks. "They took me up to the top of a place called One Tree Hill, where a single tree stands at the top of the mount, like some stark Japanese painting," recalled Bono in U2 by U2. "And we looked around at this city that's made by craters of volcanoes. I remember it so vividly, I think, because it meant something to me about my own freedom." Also known as Maungakiekie, the area holds great spiritual significance to the Maori people.
Carroll made a strong impression on the band, and soon they offered him a job as a gofer and stagehand on the remainder of their 10-month global trek. When the tour wrapped the following July, he was given a permanent role assisting U2 in Dublin, becoming particularly close with Bono and his wife, Ali Hewson.
On July 3rd, 1986, just as the sessions for The Joshua Tree were getting underway, Carroll was riding a motorcycle through the rainy streets of Dublin when a car cut him off. Unable to stop, the 26-year-old slammed into the side of the vehicle. He died on impact. The news sent shockwaves through the band's inner circle. "It was a devastating blow," a haunted Bono told Rolling Stone in 1987. "He was doing me a favor. He was taking my bike home."
Bono, Hewson, Larry Mullen Jr., and other U2 associates accompanied Carroll's body as it was flown to New Zealand for burial. In addition to traditional Maori funeral rites, Bono sang "Let It Be" and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for his fallen friend. Following the service, he reflected on the night they met, traveling up the scenic peak that overlooked the city. The grief-stricken singer poured his thoughts into lyrics that would become "One Tree Hill."
Back in the studio, the instrumental track was developed over the course of a jam session supervised by co-producer Brian Eno. When it came time to lay down the vocals, Bono recorded just one take. The raw emotion left him unable to attempt another. "It brought gravitas to the recording of The Joshua Tree," he explained in the band's autobiography. "We had to fill the hole in our heart with something very, very large indeed. We loved him so much." The completed album was dedicated to Carroll's memory.


3. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" was originally a completely different song.The DNA of one of U2's most enduring anthems can be found in a demo from an early jam session, alternately titled "The Weather Girls" or "Under the Weather." It was, according to Clayton, "a bit of a one-note groove," while the Edge dismissed it as "a little like 'Eye of the Tiger' played by a reggae band." The song's only saving grace was Mullen's unusual drum part. "It was a very original beat from Larry," Lanois told Hot Press. "We always look for those beats that would qualify as a signature for the song. And that certainly was one of those. It had this tom-tom thing that he does and nobody ever understands."
Keeping the drum track as a base, the band layered new instrumental tracks overtop to fit the rhythm. "It was like building a building. Foundation, next, then you put in furniture in the end. I enjoyed that process," says Lanois in the Classic Albums documentary. As the new melody began to take shape, it bore traces of gospel – a relatively unexplored genre for the band. "I always loved gospel music and I encouraged Bono to take it to that place, which he did," Lanois continues. "It was a very non-U2 thing to do at the time, to go up the street of gospel, but it opened a bit of a door for them."
With the instrumental backing nearly complete, Bono entered the live room to experiment with a vocal melody through largely improvised lyrics. For the Edge, his bandmate's performance evoked a phrase he had conjured up that morning, loosely inspired by the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind" ("You'll find out when you reach the top you're on the bottom").
"As I listened to this incredible song emerging out of the fog, I remembered something I had written in a notebook, a possible song title that I had actually stumbled upon that morning," the Edge says in U2 by U2. "I tried it in my head as Bono sang, and it scanned so perfectly that I wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to him as he sang. It was like a hand in glove."
The line "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" would provide the song with both its title and emotional focus. "There are only a few moments of full-on electricity-in-the-air creativity that I remember from making that album, but the birth of 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is one," says the Edge.
4. Recording "Where the Streets Have No Name" was such a hassle that Brian Eno nearly wiped the tapes in frustration.As the band started to assemble material for their new album, the Edge made it his mission to compose "the ultimate U2 live song." Installed in an empty room at the top of his equally empty new home, Melbeach, he worked tirelessly with a 4-track tape machine until he'd completed a hard-driving guitar riff that would become "Where the Streets Have No Name."
"It was a strange feeling when I finished the rough mix, because I thought I had just come up with the most amazing guitar part and song of my life, but I was totally alone in a big house with no one to share it with," he recalls in U2's autobiography. "I remember listening to the complete silence of the house for a few seconds after the music stopped and then doing a dance around the room, punching the air."
The rest of the band, who viewed the tricky riff with trepidation, did not match his enthusiasm. "He figured a guitar part that could switch from the 6/8 time and bring it into 4/4 for when the band comes in," Clayton explained in the Classic Albums documentary. "And I have to say, at the time I didn't appreciate the probably hours of thought that went into the idea. It just seemed like a way of fucking the band up."
In a 2008 interview with Mojo, Daniel Lanois remembers being equally perturbed. "It was a bit of a tongue-twister for the rhythm section, with strange bar lengths that got everybody in a bad mood. I can remember pointing at a blackboard, walking everybody through the changes like a science teacher." Further complicating matters was the fact that the song was far from complete. "[The Edge] had the beginning and the end, but he didn't really have the bit in the middle," says Clayton. "So we would spend interminable hours figuring out chord changes to get the two bits to join up."
Eventually, Brian Eno hit a breaking point ("It drove Brian mad," Clayton confirms) and, according to multiple sources, he had to be physically restrained from wiping the tapes of the song. "Brian thought if he could just erase it from the tapes we could stop working on it," Lanois told Uncut in 2003. "I'm sure they would have just come up with another song. It's interesting, sometimes the songs that receive the most attention are the ones that don't make it. You just hate to lose your investment. I'm not sure if Brian was right, but it did drive me a little bananas as well."
However, Eno sought to clarify the famous tale in the Classic Albums documentary. "That story's been told a lot of times and now I shall tell you the truth about it. That song was recorded so there was a version of it on tape. That version had quite a lot of problems. What we kept doing was spending hours and days and weeks, actually – probably half the time that the whole album took was spent on that song – trying to fix up this version on tape. It was a nightmare of screwdriver work, and my feeling was that it would be much better to start again. I [was] sure we would get there quicker if we started again. So my idea was to stage an accident and erase the tapes so we'd have to start again. But I never did."
5. The Band's Robbie Robertson dropped in on U2 as they recorded.

As sessions continued that August at Danesmoate, U2 received an unexpected visit from Robbie Robertson. The former Band guitarist was in Dublin to complete his first solo album with production help from Daniel Lanois. "I had started a record with Robbie but I had to leave because it was taking so long," Lanois later told Hot Press. "I went to work in Europe, first with Peter Gabriel and then with U2. I felt bad for Robbie that his record wasn't finished, so I said to him one day, 'Why don't you get out of Los Angeles, come out here and just visit for a couple of days?'"
Unfortunately, Robertson's arrival was ill timed. He touched down in Dublin as the city was being pummeled by Hurricane Charlie, resulting in some of the worst flooding in decades. "There were cars floating down the streets," the beleaguered guest recalled in an interview with Hot Press later that year. "It was really frightening. Thank God these guys [U2] were up for some spontaneous combustion!"
Robertson packed just a handful of song fragments, but the storm, the new location and U2 sparked his creativity. He and Bono improvised lyrics while the rest of the band provided backup, leading to a 22-minute take that would be edited down into "Sweet Fire of Love." The track would surface on Robertson's self-titled debut the following year, along with "Testimony," which also featured the band.
6."With or Without You" was saved by a prototype guitar.An early incarnation of "With or Without You" had been around since the band first gathered at Larry Mullen Jr.'s house to discuss new material after the Unforgettable Fire Tour concluded in the summer of 1985. By all accounts this primitive version was unremarkable, with Clayton insisting that the bare bones were "very traditional, because the chords just went round and round and round." Under the guidance of Eno and Lanois, they continued to tinker away with the composition well into the Joshua Tree sessions, developing a myriad of arrangements—all of which were, in the Edge's assessment, "awful."
U2 were nearly ready to abandon the track entirely when the Edge received a gift from Canadian musician Michael Brook, his recent collaborator on the soundtrack to 1985's Captive. Knowing the Edge's penchant for unique sounds, Brook sent him a prototype of an instrument he had developed called the Infinite Guitar. Using a built-in electronic amplification system, it allowed notes to be played with limitless – or "infinite" – sustain. "It's a genius thing," says Lanois, who owns the second of Brook's two prototypes. "You create a feedback loop. Since then, of course, people have started mass-manufacturing them, but back then it was unexplored territory."
While undoubtedly impressive, the instrument came with some health risks. "It arrived during the [Joshua Tree] sessions with elaborate instructions on how to hook it up," recalls the Edge in U2 by U2. "One wrongly placed wire and you could get a nasty belt of electricity. This piece of gear would have failed even the most basic of safety regulations."
After assembling the Infinity Guitar without major injury, the Edge began to test the boundaries of his new toy while the band worked at Danesmoate. "I had just taken it out of the box and was playing around with it in one room while [band associate] Gavin Friday and Bono were in the control room listening to the backing track of 'With or Without You.' We were really at an impasse in the search of the right arrangement, and were just at the point of leaving the song to one side. Then, through an open door, they heard the sound of the Infinite Guitar combining with the bass and drums and just went: 'That's it! But what the fuck is it!?'"
Bono was suitably impressed by what he later described as "a beautiful ghost of a guitar sound," and the thrill injected new creative energy into the troubled song. "I asked Edge just to play a little something with it," Lanois told Hot Press. "He did two takes and those are the ones in the ultimate mix of 'With or Without You.' Beautiful sounds, stratospheric."
7. "Sweetest Thing" was recorded during the Joshua Tree sessions as an apology to Bono's wife, but didn't make the final cut. 

The exhaustive Joshua Tree sessions, coupled with U2's live commitments, put a strain on the band's significant others – and particularly on Bono's wife, Ali Hewson. "I live with a very strong person, and she throws me out occasionally," he admitted to Rolling Stone at the time. "I hardly saw my wife Ali for a year. 1986 was an incredibly bad year for me. It's almost impossible to be married and be in a band on the road."
Bono penned a song for his wife, "Sweetest Thing," as apology for his frequent absences. "It was written during the sessions for The Joshua Tree. It was Ali's birthday and I didn't make it for the birthday," he recalled in 1998. Though the track was recorded for the album, it was never completed to the band's satisfaction. "It was actually the one song we always felt we could have nailed better than we did. In my mind it was always a pop song, and I always felt we could do it better."
It was elbowed from The Joshua Tree, eventually surfacing as the B side to the "Where the Streets Have No Name" single in September 1988. It would be a decade before the song was polished off with the help of producer Steve Lillywhite for inclusion on U2's Best of 1980–1990/The B-Sides compilation. "We knew we hadn't really finished it, and Edge came up with a couple extra chords and it was a really quick thing," Clayton told Entertainment Tonight. "So we went, 'Yeah, stick 'em in.'"
With new vocals and a revamped instrumental arrangement, "Sweetest Thing" was released as a single in its own right, climbing into the Top 20 across the globe. Ali agreed to appear in the music video – on the condition that all proceeds from the song be donated to the Chernobyl Children's Project.

8. The actual Joshua Tree on the sleeve died in 2000 – and a couple died trying to find it."The original concept was where two civilizations meet," graphic artist Steve Averill says of the album's cover art. "The Two Americas was a working title at the time. The idea of desert meets civilization was sort of a theme." With that loose starting point, Averill, photographer Anton Corbijn and the members of U2 boarded a bus in mid-December 1986 and embarked on a short road trip through desolate California locales of Death Valley, Zabriskie Point, the Mojave Desert and the ghost town of Bodie.
"We made a schedule of three days to shoot," says Corbijn in the Classic Albums documentary. "And it was during the night after the first day of shooting that I went out with Bono and said, 'There's a tree that I really love, and it's called the Joshua Tree. It'll be a brilliant idea to have that on the front and then the band will be on the back.' Bono then came down the [next] morning … with a Bible. He had looked up the Joshua Tree in the Bible and he thought that should probably be a title for an album. Then we went out that day to actually look for the tree."
While speeding down Route 190 near Darwin, California, just west of Death Valley, Corbijn found what he was looking for. "Amazingly enough, we found this beautiful tree standing on its own. This [type of] tree usually grows in big groups, so it was incredible to find that tree on its own. I've never seen another tree on its own since." The band pulled over and spent 20 minutes posing with the lone tree before the winter chill drove them back into the bus. "It was freezing and we had to take our coats off so it would at least look like a desert," Bono explained. "That's one of the reasons we look so grim."
While a shot of the band at Zabriskie Point would ultimately grace the album cover, the portrait with the tree in the gatefold sleeve would become iconic. For Bono, a foreboding desert landscape was an accurate portrait of his unsettled mental state after what had been, in his own words, "an incredibly bad year." His tumultuous marriage, intense workload, and the death of Greg Carroll all weighed on his psyche. "That's why the desert attracted me as an image," he told Rolling Stone. "That year was really a desert for us."
Yet for Clayton, the image had a more optimistic meaning. "The desert was immensely inspirational to us as a mental image for this record," he told Hot Press in 1987. "Most people would take the desert on face value and think it's some kind of barren place, which of course is true. But, in the right frame of mind it's also a very positive image, because you can actually do something with a blank canvas, which is effectively what the desert is."
Given the spontaneous nature of the shoot, U2 genuinely had no idea where the famous tree was located – which proved to be a relief after the spot took on a quasi-religious significance to fans. "No, better that people can't find it, or else some guy will arrive with it at a gig: 'Bono, I've got the tree!'" the singer joked to Rolling Stone. He wasn't far off. Hardcore U2 devotees eventually managed to track down the site, transforming the isolated speck of desert into an unlikely tourist destination.
The famous tree died of natural causes in 2000, collapsing on the desert floor at an estimated age of 200 years old. One dedicated fan left a plaque by the decomposing trunk, reading: "Have you found what you're looking for?" In 2015, a less altruistic individual defaced the tree's remains, hacking it into pieces and making off with a limb.
Many fans assumed that the cover was shot in the Joshua Tree National Park, four hours south of its actual location. This misconception may have had fatal consequences in August 2011, when 44-year-old Guus Van Hove and his wife, 38-year-old Helena Nuellet, were found dead in a remote back road of the park. Joshua Tree authorities suspect they died of heatstroke in the 105-degree temperatures. Van Hove had been a manager of the music venue 013 in his native Netherlands, and reportedly told colleagues "with a passion" that he wanted to visit the site of the album cover shoot.

9. Bono got banged up on the Joshua Tree world tour."Cuts and bruises, that's what I remember from the Joshua Tree [tour]," Bono lamented in the band's autobiography. The 111-date jaunt across North America and Europe grossed over $40 million between April and December of 1987, but it took a sizable toll on the lead singer.
The trouble began when Bono took a spill mid-song during rehearsals on April 1st, just one day before the tour was due to kick off in Tempe, Arizona. "I cut open my face falling off a light," he said in U2 by U2. "I've still got the scar on my chin. I was lost in the music and at the start of any tour you're just getting to know the physicality of the stage, the geometry of it, and you're overestimating your own physicality. You think you're made of metal yourself and you're not."
He received stitches at a nearby hospital, but Bono's luck failed to improve when U2 returned to the Arizona State University Activity Center the following night. After a week of intense rehearsals, the singer's voice was reduced to a hoarse croak as they played to the first audience of the tour. "I must have stayed out in the sun too long," he told the sold-out crowd, urging them to join in and pick up the vocal slack. "I'm glad you're singing with me tonight."
A day's vocal rest allowed him to sufficiently recover, but disaster struck once again on September 20th during a concert at Washington, D.C.'s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. In the Edge's memory, it was clear early on that the performance would not be one of their better ones. "In those days, when a U2 show went badly, it could go very badly indeed. … On this particularly night, in an attempt to try and get something going, Bono ran full pelt out onto one of the side wings. In the rain that was slowly falling, the side wings, which were covered in vinyl, became like an ice rink and his feet went from under him."
More than the rain, Bono blames his own negative energy for the accident. "The song was 'Exit' and it had taken me to some ugly place. … I came down on my left shoulder and severed three ligaments from the clavicle. I was in terrible pain. Of course, they never healed back. My shoulder has come forward now, so I have to train my shoulder to go back. But it was rage that caused it. That was when I realized rage is an expensive thing for your general well being."
10. U2 occasionally opened for themselves under the guise of a fake country group.

In between sets by the BoDeans and Los Lobos during U2's Indianapolis show on November 1st, 1987, fans were treated to the debut performance of an obscure country group known as the Dalton Brothers. The quintet – "Alton," "Luke," "Duke" and "Betty" Dalton – played a short two-song hoedown consisting of an original ballad titled "Lucille," and a cover of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway." Only those in the front few rows saw past the big hats and bigger hair and realized that these Southern Comfort–swilling gents were actually U2.
"We play two kinds of music: Country and Western," claims an elaborate bio on a Dalton Brothers webpage, which cites Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn among their primary influences. The band took their alias from the Dalton Gang, a real-life group of outlaws who robbed banks and trains throughout the 1890s.
The Dalton Brothers rode again twice more: at the Los Angeles show on November 18th, and on December 12th in Hampton, Virginia. "This is just like Farm Aid and we like it that a-way. You people are beautiful people," Bono (a.k.a. Alton) tells the crowd in a convincing rural drawl. "It's great to know that in Los Angeles it's love, not money, that makes the world go 'round."

U2 has always had a degree of insecurity and self-doubt about them mixed in with seemingly boundless ambition. It's manifested itself in different ways. In the studio, they've always seemed to torture themselves trying to get it right - the sessions for UF came down to the wire with 20 hour days at the end to get it done, in the JT sessions they were so stressed about Streets that Brian Eno nearly destroyed the master tape of it, the band's near break-up during the AB sessions is well-documented, and in later years they would scrap an apparently finished version of HTDAAB to make a new one and compromise their artistic vision for NLOTH. In terms of how they presented themselves publicly, their personas, etc, they often seemed awkward in the 80s, as if they didn't quite believe in the bravado they were selling, and in later years, they too often appear to be chasing a relevance they used to have.

But for a brief period of time, maybe from the Zooropa recording sessions up through the early stages of the Pop sessions, they appeared to have a confidence that they never had before or since. They recorded Zooropa in only a couple of months and soon after were performing those songs live, they dove into the experimental Passengers project with Eno, in which they boldly played with everything from trip-hop to opera. They were rarely more creatively ambitious or confident in their ability to follow that ambition to a result than they were in those years. And ambitious they were heading into the Pop sessions, desiring to meld together rock, dance, electronic, and trip-hop elements with high concepts - the nature of consumerism and materialism in the late 20th century, crises of faith, etc - to create a club record that was still distinctly a U2 record. It was perhaps the most ambitious they ever were going into the production of a record.

Ultimately, it appears that they were unable to satisfy that ambition, even if a lot of people love the finished product. The sessions were plagued from the beginning. The band started working with a drum machine while Larry was recovering from surgery, leading to an intensification of the use of technology that the band had been immersed in all decade, from which the band would begin backing off of even before the subsequent tour was over. Combining all of the aforementioned musical elements proved difficult, and they could never really fully commit to making it a techno/dance record or a straight-ahead rock record. As a result, the record straddles between the former(Discotheque, Do You Feel Loved, Mofo, Gone, Miami) and the latter(If God Will Send His Angels, Staring At The Sun, Last Night On Earth, Wake Up Dead Man), with several tracks that take from both(The Playboy Mansion, If You Wear That Velvet Dress, Please). The band struggled so much picking a direction and getting the songs to sound they way they'd envisioned that they used up tour rehearsal time(after having booked the tour ahead of time in their pre-album confidence) to finish, going to literally the last hour before the deadline to give the record to the record label. Because they used up tour rehearsal time to finish the album, they were underrehearsed and were embarrassed in the first few shows, took nearly the entire first leg of the tour to get into the swing of things.

Whatever confident state of mind they might have been in going into Pop, it was gone(no pun intended) by the time the record was released, the tour was underway, and neither was setting the U.S. on fire. They were playing to half-empty stadiums while the record was getting lukewarm reviews. Although the band's live performance was back up to their standards later in the tour(producing some truly great and memorable moments) , and the new material was better received elsewhere in the world, the record remains, and will probably always remain, the most polarizing entry in their catalog.

We can argue forever about why Pop flopped in the U.S., why nobody(relatively speaking) went to the shows, and why the band have behaved as though they are so ashamed of the whole era. We can argue forever about the band dressing up as the Village people, picking the wrong singles, continuing to push irony when people were tired of it, being too derivative of other hot acts at the time(Prodigy, Oasis) etc etc etc.

I frankly, think it might be as simple as they underestimated how much the musical landscape had changed in just a few years. In 1997, the pop revival was blooming - Backstreet Boys and Nsync were already there and Britney and Christina were on the way. Hip-hop was becoming a greater and greater mainstream force. Alternative rock was beginning its great decline; grunge was over and most of the rock music on the radio was of the Third Eye Blind/Matchbox 20/Wallflowers/Barenaked Ladies/etc pop-rock variety. More serious rock acts like Oasis and Radiohead were at their peak in terms of mainstream commercial success(Radiohead are great to this day, but they've never been as big in the mainstream as they were with OKC), same for harder acts like Marilyn Manson. The Nu-Metal scene was exploding, a harbinger of hip-hop taking over completely in the years to come.

Simply put, I think it might be as simple as the mainstream music listening audience in 1997 wasn't hungry for U2's brand of alternative rock anymore, particularly when said brand was artistically reaching away from what had made them huge in the first place.

Whatever the reasons, the album wasn't as successful as the band needed it to be(everything is relative, it did sell six million copies), especially in the U.S., and today there are two views of it. Some see it as a misstep, during which the band got lost in ambition and technology and concept and got swallowed by all of it(and from which they returned to form with ATYCLB and HTDAAB). Some, including many here, see it as a great, exciting, brave, and yes, flawed record. As something to aspire to, because even though its flawed and has its issues, at least they were trying to do something great and interesting and provocative.

Discotheque, however it's regarded in the mainstream, is just a really good rock song, with a monster guitar riff and numerous earworm vocal melodies - from the 'you can this but you can't that' repetitions, to 'you know you're chewing bubble gum...', to 'you get confused but you know it...', to the second part of the chorus('looking for the one/but you're somewhere else instead/I want to be the song/the song that you hear in your head') to the coda('but you take what you can get/'cause it's all that you can find' with Edge's 'you want heaven in your heart' in the background). Also some love for the instrumental breakdown after the first chorus which was never performed live and omitted from the 'new' mix in 2002. And I love the boom-chas.

Do You Feel Loved is arguably the sexiest track they've ever put to record, with a heavy but smooth sound and a huge chorus alongside a borderline x-rated lyric. I always thought should've been a single, and it's a shame they never nailed it live.

Mofo's tremendous bassline - the whole rhythm section really - and Bono's painfully inward-looking lyric that practically screams 'I may be a world famous rock star but I'm still just a child grappling with his mother's death and a man grappling with how to be a good father and husband while doing all of this' make it an intense headphone experience and an explosive live performance. As heavy a track as they've ever done.

If God Will Send His Angels takes the album on a left turn into more straight-ahead pop-rock territory. The closest thing to a ballad on this record other than Velvet Dress, I've always loved the minimalist riff, the vocal melodies, Bono's delivery, the lyric about someone at their wit's end regarding their faith, and the trip-hop coda of the album version.

Bono always though Staring At The Sun should've been a huge hit, and although some people think it's too bland or stale or Oasis-wannabe or whatever, I've always loved it. Immensely catchy, a big, warm guitar riff in the chorus, and a thought-provoking lyric. While I like the acoustic versions, I wish they would've come back to the full-band electric version live.

Last Night On Earth is just a huge rock song. From the first notes, everything is gaining momentum as it leads into that huge, earth-shaking chorus. This is one of the tracks I used to enjoy just turning up loud and rocking out to the most. And the live version. My goodness the riffage at the end. How the band thinks this didn't work live is beyond me.

Gone is just a tremendous song, from the crying sirens Edge gets out his guitar, to the powerful performance of the rhythm section, to Bono's impassioned vocal take, to the dark atmospherics and subtle, aching background vocals, to the great lyric, it's just clearly one of the best tracks here. This one needs to come back to the live set.

Miami is simultaneously a big joke here(U2 wrote Miami) and also greatly appreciated for its live renditions(in which the riffs get ten times bigger). Yes, the lyric is kind of crap, but even on the studio version, I find it be sonically pretty interesting with the riffs and the atmospherics between the riffs. If it had been recorded the way it was played live, I don't think it would be a joke here, bad lyric or not.

The Playboy Mansion frustrates me. Musically, I like it a lot - it's got a mellow vibe, but actually becomes sort of emotionally intense by the end, and there are some beautiful melodies in the middle eight('I don't know if I can hold on') and the 'then will there be no time' sections. But the a lot of the lyrics are just so dated with pop culture references. But then maybe that actually fits, since the song is kind of about the fleeting nature of success in pop culture.

If You Wear That Velvet Dress is an exceedingly atmospheric, captivating, and sexy ballad, delivered in that smokey 90s Bono voice. I just wish that vocal had been turned up a little in the mix because you can barely hear him until halfway through the song. Also have to mention the really nice, mellow guitar interlude in the middle. This track doesn't sound like anything else on the record, or anything else the band have ever done, really, but it's great.

Please. What can be said about Please that hasn't been said? It's one of their greatest songs, imo. Lyrically, it's political most of the way through, being about the troubles in Ireland, but then at the end - it might have still been intended to be political, but it also doubles as one of the most biting break-up lyrics I've ever seen - 'love is big/bigger than us/but love is not/what you're thinking of/it's what lovers deal/it's what lovers steal/you know I found it hard to receive/'cause you my love/I could never believe'. That will always be on my favorite lyrics that Bono ever wrote. Musically, Adam and Larry kind of own the song, with Edge kind playing a supporting role(until the end of the solo and live versions, obviously). The rhythm section is hypnotizing here, verging on jazzy, and I know a lot of people don't care for the single version because a lot of that is missing from it. I love all versions of the track. The album version is really intimate, and you can really feel the smoldering anger underneath it all; it's grittier, and it's also the only version that has that Edge backing vocal at the end that I love. The full-band live version, however, is considered by many as one of the greatest things the band has ever done, and rightly so. It's a fucking tour-de-force, from the band's performance, to Bono's performance to Bono and Edge singing together to Edge's solo to the quiet finish after the explosion. There is a reason Please is my holy grail of songs I've never seen performed in person.

Wake Up Dead Man is one of the darkest songs the band ever wrote. It's heavy, musically and lyrically. Musically, the song combines quiet vocals with heavy, succinct guitar riffs in the chorus until halfway through when the song picks up pace. Lyrically, it is a midnight of the soul, a crisis of faith, a breakdown. There is such anger there, especially in the first verse and chorus, both quiet anger and loud anger(the riff). It's riveting stuff, and one of the band's greatest album closers. IMO, only Love is Blindness definitively tops it, while others come close(The Troubles, Mothers Of The Disappeared, 40).

It is a flawed, and it's not for everyone, but for some, it is a powerful record, and one that stands in stark contrast stylistically, sonically, and spiritually to much of what came after. For some, it was a misstep, but for many others, this record marks the the end of 'old u2', a kind of last stand. In 1989, at one of the last Lovetown shows, Bono famously said 'this is just the end of something for U2'. He could've just as well said the same thing at one of the last Popmart shows. Months after the tour wrapped, the first Best Of was released and their VH1 Legends episode aired, the following year the classic albums documentary about the Joshua Tree was released, and the year after that they released the back-to-basics All That You Can't Leave Behind. The commercial and critical success that they had started to take for granted had been threatened with Pop and it seems like the band reacted to that. In the last fifteen years, after the Elevation tour, they've barely acknowledged the record.

But we can. Happy 20th, Pop.

After Shaw and David crash landed on the planet, David secretly contacted Wayland Yutani to update them on the status of the Prometheus expedition and the discovery of the black goo; he also requested supplies (mainly lab equipment) and a new body. He then killed Shaw or held her captive and experimented on her female anatomy (her infertile female eggs) with the black goo and eventually created the face hugger eggs. David discovers from archived data on the engineer ship that the engineers' black goo was originally designed to mutate life forms into hostile creatures which attack and infect other life forms with black goo; this is what happened to Fifield and the worms in Prometheus.

However, use of the black goo had some unintended consequences; instead of just destroying life, it sometimes created a new powerful highly adaptive species called the "morph" (alien with elongated skull). The morph is created from reproductive cells such as plant spores, human eggs/embryos, etc. that have been mutated by the black goo into a parasite (face hugger, trilobite, etc.) which can impregnate a host with a morph alien embryo. The morph gestates inside its host until mature enough to leave which results in a violent death for the host. Apparently, the engineers have encountered these morphs in the past when they used the black goo to eliminate life on planets. The engineers revered, respected, and feared this powerful alien species, which unlike other life forms created by the black goo, has the power to procreate, hence the reason for the mural depicting what looked like a xenomorph and face hugger in the room where the black goo was stored in at the engineer's installation on LV-223.

The engineers sought to learn how these morphs are created and discovered that face hugger eggs are created when the black goo mutates the eggs of humanoid creatures (such as humans) which the engineers are responsible for creating (see beginning of Prometheus). David discovered this knowledge from archived data stored on the engineer ship that he and Shaw used to escape from LV-223 and then used that information to experiment on Shaw's eggs and create face hugger eggs. After creating the eggs, he then communicated with Weyland Yutani again, requesting additional human subjects (mainly women) to experiment on. So, Weyland Yutani sends the Covenant and its human crew, which consists of male/female couples, to his location. When the Covenant crew arrive at David's location, they immediately come into contact with mutated spores that turn some of them into a neomorph alien which is a morph created from human and plant DNA. Apparently, David had been experimenting on the local ecosystem by contaminating it with the black goo. David eventually reveals himself to the crew and helps them destroy the neomorphs.

After earning the crew's trust, David convinces some of the crew to follow him to the engineer ship where he keeps the face hugger eggs. The captain is attacked by a face hugger which leads to the creation of the protomorph alien which is created from only human DNA; the protomorph is far more formidable than the neomorphs, but not as powerful as the classic xenomorph from the films. While the crew is dealing with the new protomorph alien, David continues to experiment and lures the Covenant's android, Walter to another face hugger egg. A face hugger impregnates Walter with an alien which leads to the creation of the classic biomechanical xenomorph (queen) which is the most powerful form of the species created to date. The xenomorph alien is created from synthetic android DNA and human DNA (from Shaw). The queen alien begins laying new face hugger eggs which delights David, as he is able to create a new life form IN HIS IMAGE capable of procreation. The crew eventually dispatches the protomorph alien and then attempt to flee the planet. However, the engineers return and kill David, the xenomorphs, and all of the remaining Covenant crew. They then destroy the ecosystem David created and take all of the xenomorph eggs with them. However, one of the eggs hatches and attacks the engineer pilot (space jockey) who is eventually killed by a chestburster which causes the ship (derelict) to crash land on LV-426 where Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo eventually discover it. Before dying, the engineers on the ship activate a beacon warning other engineers to stay away, as the powerful xenomorph species on the ship is much too dangerous to come into contact with. It is revealed in the end that not all of David's ecosystem and all of the xenomorph eggs had been destroyed, and that is where Alien 5 will take place, as Weyland Yutani has set up their own bio weapons research facility on the planet in order to "harvest" the xenomorph eggs and experiment on them in order to create even more terrifying creations.