Step aside Rodgers and Hammerstein. Move over Lennon and McCartney. Make way Jagger and Richards. A new pop team is set to release its first recording. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the product of a collaboration between U2, the Irish band who have grown from purveyors of protest pomp to stadium stardom, and Salman Rushdie, the novelist whose early writings were overshadowed by the succes de scandale of the Satanic Verses.

The lyrics are taken from Rushdie's new novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a story of love, death and music, the tale of an Orpheus in the Underworld of rock 'n' roll, set in India, England and America and covering a quarter of a century up to the 1980s.

Although some of the lyrics bear a passing resemblance to the pop standard You Are My Sunshine, the inspiration is the 1960s single Concrete And Clay byUnit 4+2. Rushdie, who described the music as a ballad, said: ``Bono (U2's singer) and I have been friends for several years, and I sent him the novel when I'd finished it, and he responded by coming up with this beautiful melody. Simple as that, but of course very pleasurable.''

Paul McGuinness, the band's manager, confirmed that the song, which is currently in demo form, had been recorded. ``The track exists and it would be great to make it available on its own at the same time as Salman's book comes out and well before the next U2 album. Let's wait and see if we can pull it off.''

One plan is for the song to be released on the Internet to coincide with the publication of Rushdie's new novel on April 13. Any commercial tie-in between author and pop group would doubtless please Rushdie's publishers Cape, who are reputed to have paid £1 million for the rights to his latest novel, the follow-up to The Moor's Last Sigh.

The lyrics for the song are included in the novel, which tells the myth ofOrpheus and Eurydice against a rock and roll background. Described in the text as an old song with new words, it begins: ``All my life I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her beauty's beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet.''

As with the Orpheus myth, the lovers are separated. The song continues: ``Go lightly down your darkened way, go lightly underground, I'll be down there in another day, I won't rest until you're found. Let me love you true, let me rescue you, let me lead you to where two roads meet. O come back above, where there's only love, and the ground's beneath your feet.''

Rushdie's musical excursion with U2 the two first worked together when the author appeared on stage with the band at Wembley in 1993 -- is not his first attempt to break into the world of pop. When working in advertising in the 1970s, during which time he brought the world the phrase ``Naughty, but nice'', the future best-selling novelist wrote a song extolling the virtues ofthe now defunct Burnley Building Society.

Titled The Best Things Begin With B, the song climaxed with the lines: ``You can dream a little/ You can dream a lot/ But the best dreams of all/ Are the ones you got/ Building in the Burnley.'' A challenge, even for a tunesmith of Bono's calibre.

The Observer News Service

Those Rushdie lyrics in full...
...From the forthcoming novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

All my life I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her beauty's beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet.

And now I can't be sure of anything, black is white, and cold is heat; for what I worshipped stole my love away, it was the ground beneath her feet.

She was my ground, my favourite sound, my country road, my city street, my sky above, my only love, and the ground beneath her feet.

Go lightly down your darkened way, go lightly underground, I'll be down there in another day, I won't rest until you're found. Let me loveyou true, let me rescue you, let me lead you to where two roads meet. O come back above, where there's love, and the ground's beneath your feet.