Pride (In the Name of Love)

The second track on The Unforgettable Fire was its lead single, produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The melody and chords were improvised at a soundcheck before a November 1983 concert in Japan on the War Tour. The group kept working on it at Bono's home in a Martello tower in Bray, where the Edge devised a guitar part, and it was the only song re-cut at Windmill Lane after the sessions at Slane Castle.

Bono had meant to write about Ronald Reagan's pride in American military power, but Stephen B. Oates's biography of King and a book on Malcolm X made him consider the violent and non-violent sides of the civil rights campaigns. He has said he was unhappy with the lyrics, which he describes with Bad as simple sketches, and that Eno encouraged nonsense words as placeholders. The line Early morning, April 4 is wrong, since King was shot in the evening, and Bono often changes it to Early evening on stage. The 2023 re-recording for Songs of Surrender corrected it. Chrissie Hynde, credited as Christine Kerr, sang backing vocals.

It reached 3 in the United Kingdom and 33 in the United States, the band's first US top 40 hit, and was number one in New Zealand. Reviews were mixed at first: Robert Christgau disliked the moralism and Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone said it succeeded on its beat and bass line rather than its lyrics. Three videos were made, directed by Donald Cammell, by Anton Corbijn in a hotel basement near Heathrow, and a third compiled from footage of the Slane Castle sessions. Rolling Stone ranked it 378 on its 2004 list.

Live

It was first played on 29 August 1984 at the opening show of the Unforgettable Fire Tour in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has been played at virtually every U2 concert since. As of 2009 it was the band's most played song, with over 770 documented performances. On 18 January 2009 the band played it at the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial for upwards of 400,000 people. The Roots covered it in a medley with Sunday Bloody Sunday at an NAACP dinner for Bono in 2007.