Achtung Baby - Packaging and Title

Packaging and Title

"... the very title Achtung Baby strives for lack of significance and—just as insignificantly—the sleeve itself is not the usual single cinematic image of heroic import but rather a grid of snapshots evoking, if a little cleanly, the slapdash glory that was Robert Frank's artwork for the Stones' Exile on Main Street."

—Mat Snow, contrasting Achtung Baby with U2's previous albums

The sleeve artwork for Achtung Baby was designed by Steve Averill, who had created the majority of U2's album covers, along with Shaughn McGrath. To parallel the band's change in musical direction, Averill and McGrath devised sleeve concepts that used multiple images in colour to contrast with the seriousness of the individual, mostly monochromatic images from previous U2 album sleeves. Rough sketches and designs were created early during the recording sessions, and some more experimental designs were conceived to closely resemble, as Averill put it, "dance-music oriented sleeves. We just did them to show how extreme we could go and then everyone came back to levels that they were happy with. But if we hadn't gone to these extremes it may not have been the cover it is now."

An initial photo shoot with the band's long-time photographer Anton Corbijn was done near U2's Berlin hotel in late 1990. Most of the photos were black-and-white, and the group felt they were not indicative of the spirit of the new album. They re-commissioned Corbijn for an additional two-week photo shoot in Tenerife in February 1991, for which they dressed up and mingled with the crowds of the annual Carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, presenting a more playful side of themselves. It was during the group's time in Tenerife and during a four-day shoot in Morocco in July that they were photographed in drag. Additional photos were taken in Dublin in June, including a shot of a naked Clayton. The images were intended to confound expectations of U2, and their full colour contrasted with the monochromatic imagery on past sleeves.

Several photographs were considered as candidates for a single cover image, including shots of a cow on an Irish farm in County Kildare, the nude Clayton, and the band driving a Trabant—an East German automobile they became fond of as a symbol for a changing Europe. Ultimately, a multiple image scheme was used, as U2, Corbijn, Averill, and the producers thought that "the sense of flux expressed by both the music and the band's playing with alter egos was best articulated by the lack of a single viewpoint". The resulting front sleeve is a 4×4 squared montage. A mix of Corbijn's original images from Berlin and the later photo shoots was used, as the band wanted to balance the "colder European feel of the mainly black-and-white Berlin images with the much warmer exotic climates of Santa Cruz and Morocco". Some photographs were used because they were striking on their own, while others were used because of their ambiguity. Images of the band with Trabants, several of which were painted bright colours, appear on the sleeve and throughout the album booklet. These vehicles were later incorporated into the Zoo TV Tour set design as part of the lighting system. The nude photo of Clayton was placed on the rear cover of the record. On the US compact disc and cassette sleeves, Clayton's genitals are censored with a black "X" or a four-leaf clover, while vinyl editions feature the photo uncensored. The label of the physical CD and vinyl record features an image of a "babyface" graffitied by artist Charlie Whisker onto an external wall of Windmill Lane Studios. The babyface image was later adopted as a logo for Zoo TV Tour memorabilia and was incorporated into the Zooropa album cover. In 2003, music television network VH1 ranked Achtung Baby's sleeve at number 39 on its list of the "50 Greatest Album Covers". Bono has called the sleeve his favourite U2 cover artwork.

The German word "Achtung" ( ) in the album title translates into English as "attention" or "watch out". U2's sound engineer Joe O'Herlihy used the phrase "achtung baby" during recording, reportedly taking it from the Mel Brooks film The Producers. The title was selected in August 1991 near the end of the album sessions. According to Bono, it was an ideal title, as it was attention-grabbing, referenced Germany, and hinted at either romance or birth, both of which were themes on the album. The band was determined not to highlight the seriousness of the lyrics and instead sought to "erect a mask", a concept that was further developed on the Zoo TV Tour, particularly through characters such as "The Fly". Of the title, Bono said in 1992, "It's a con, in a way. We call it Achtung Baby, grinning up our sleeves in all the photography. But it's probably the heaviest record we've ever made... It tells you a lot about packaging, because the press would have killed us if we'd called it anything else."

U2 had considered several other album titles, including Man (in contrast to the group's debut, Boy), 69, Zoo Station, and Adam, which would have been paired with the nude photo of Clayton. Other possible titles included Fear of Women, and Cruise Down Main Street—a reference to The Rolling Stones' record Exile on Main St. and the cruise missiles launched on Baghdad during the Gulf War. Most of the proposed titles were rejected out of the belief that people would see them as pretentious and "another Big Statement from U2".