In Bono's words, from the middle of the MP3 from which this transcription was made:
"This is based on a...on the time we spent in a hotel called the Millon Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles. It's like a half-way house hotel for bums and people thrown out of hospitals under the Regean era. And I was being taken through this hotel--I was doing some filming down there--and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the bums drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line, 'The city of Angels/Has brought a devil out in me', and developed it on from there. The Rose in Ireland, as you know, is a sort of romantic image of love, obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself. That is an image I thought would be nice to subvert."
In Bono's words, from the middle of the MP3 from which this transcription was made:
"This is based on a...on the time we spent in a hotel called the Millon Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles. It's like a half-way house hotel for bums and people thrown out of hospitals under the Regean era. And I was being taken through this hotel--I was doing some filming down there--and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the bums drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line, 'The city of Angels/Has brought a devil out in me', and developed it on from there. The Rose in Ireland, as you know, is a sort of romantic image of love, obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself. That is an image I thought would be nice to subvert."