Who is Declan Gaffney and why is he mixing tracks for U2?

This was spotted by edge89 in our forum and seems worth posting here: If you go to the Twitter profile for London’s Artillery Studios and browsew back through their past tweets, you’ll find several like this:

Here are the links for these tweets:

• 5:27 AM Apr 21st
• 7:33 AM Apr 13th
• 6:18 AM Apr 1st
• 4:07 AM Mar 12th
• 4:01 AM Feb 13th

So now the obvious question is…

Who is Declan Gaffney?

You’ll see his name if you look through the liner notes of No Line on the Horizon. Or you could just visit his web site, where you’ll find this:

In 2009 he mixed half of U2’s album “No Line On The Horizon” as well as being the sole mixer and co-producer of the lead single from that album. His relationship with U2 continued throughout the year as he mixed all u2’s live broadcast appearances, including 5 appearances on the David Letterman show, a live show from the roof of the BBC Broadcasting House, U2 360 live from Sheffield and u2 360 live from LA Rose Bowl, the largest ever internet streaming and first live broadcast on Youtube (over 10 million viewers). He was given the role of Sound Production Consultant for the U2 360 stadium tour and contributed the original piece “Little Tin Galaxy” to the show as well as setting up and recording live link ups between the the International Space Center and the U2 show.

He’s also half of the “Fish Out of Water” team that remixed “I’ll Go Crazy…” and “Get On Your Boots” — the latter track is on the fan club release, Artificial Horizon. And he also handled the recent recording of “Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour)” that Bono and Edge did with Jay-Z and Rihanna.

This interview from May 2009 goes into some great detail about his work on No Line on the Horizon.

So why is he mixing tracks for U2?

Great question. It could be any number of possibilities:

• There’ll be some new songs and some kind of minor release — not an album, perhaps something digital — to coincide with the tour restarting.
• It’s for the next album, which Paul McGuinness recently said might be out before the end of the year.
• The new tracks are actually video or somehow related to the upcoming U2 360 at the Rose Bowl release.

Your guess is as good as ours.

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