up during the early Joshua Tree album writing sessions in late 1985. Bono's lyrics focused on the stress the dispute had on families and their relationships, many of which broke down. In particular, inspiration was drawn from the Tony Parker book Red Hill: A Mining Community. Bono was criticised in some quarters for not being politically specific enough. However, Bono said he felt he was more interested in the relationships and that others were more qualified to comment on the strike itself. During recording, Bono was displeased with an early vocal take and wondered why his voice made him sound "like a rich man with pound notes stuffed in his pockets when it's a song about unemployment". The audio engineer determined that the stereo plate reverb effect that had been added to the vocals was contributing to this feeling, and as a result, it was removed. Ultimately, U2 were not completely satisfied with the final result; producer Steve Lillywhite, who mixed the track, said, "It never got finished the way they wanted it. They always thought it could be a little bit better." One of the issues was that the brass accompaniment played by the Arklow Silver Band was considered out of tune. As a result, Lillywhite was told to raise the synthesiser track in the mix, as "in 1986, we were very impressed that you could get really good sounding brass instruments out of a keyboard." 2017 mix For the 30th anniversary reissue of The Joshua Tree in 2017, new mixes of several songs were created, including "Red Hill Mining Town". The 2017 mix of the song was worked on using stems from the original recording; the band and Lillywhite communicated over e-mail, as the producer was residing in Indonesia. Looking back on the original mix, Lillywhite believed it was a mistake to de-emphasize the brass, saying of the synthesiser, "yes it's a good sound, but sometimes the sound is not as important as the spirit." Since the brass was recorded on just two tracks, Lillywhite could not Auto-Tune the recording. Instead, he turned up the horns based on a recommendation that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards made 30 years earlier. Whenever Richards' guitar would get out of tune over the course of a take, instead of lowering the instrument in the mix and covering it with an overdub, he would turn it up so that, despite sounding out