It’s Not What U2…

What could possibly be the connection between London’s Acklam Hall, that moody and modish venue under The Westway, and the battered interior of a lodge which guards the driveway to a small country mansion a few miles outside Dublin, a house owned by a young German landowner given to posing around the grounds, shotgun at the ready? 

The answer is likely to be equally cryptic. Acklam Hall was the location of the last of a dozen or so English dates played by Ireland’s next major contribution to the questionably wonderful world of rock ‘n’ roll, the band called U2; the lodgehouse is the setting for your scribe’s second encounter with the same U2, after being whisked through a labyrinth of country lanes to their cramped rehearsal space.  

Our driver, U2’s pleasantly civilised and hard-headed manager Paul McGuinness, and singer Bono Vox pump for details of London gossip, eyeing my case for test pressings of their Island single, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” and current magazines; panic prevented either being packed. 

Bono is quiet and calm, white-raincoated in the back seat, throwing into sharp relief memories of an emotion-wracked figure straining over the edge of a certain stage in London W11 in a tense pose of authoritative vulnerability. 

Bono Vox (his own mock-classical for “good voice”; McGuinness informs him later that it’s also the name of a brand of hearing aid) is the main force of the band in conversation, partly because he’s one of those people with an irrepressible need to continually expose his thoughts to the scrutiny of those around him, and because he speaks in such arresting images, which don’t always work. 

While the rest of them shuffle shyly on the spot inside the lodge, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry, chewing over bits of business with McGuinness or searching vainly for an unspent teabag, the singer has already launched into a comparative discussion of favorite bands. 

Attempting to describe listening to Joy Division—one of U2’s guiding lights—he pulls out a painfully graphic but not atypical image out of the metaphoric grab-bag: “It’s like having an iron pole pushed up your arse, right up your spine and into your skull, so you can’t move an inch.” Most unpleasant. 

The quality that had proved so refreshing about U2 at Acklam Hall those weeks ago again imposes itself unmistakably on the couple of spare metres separating the band and I in this tight cubby-hole. Call it what you will—experience, maturity, perspective—U2 have it written all over their t-shirts. 

They play an immediately distinguished brand of hard, yet melodic, rock, which has obviously taken many months of intelligent working-out. But they play it with all the force and immediacy of a band a few weeks old and suitably inspired, a band in that first unrepeatable flush of potency. 

First, though, introductions: Adam Clayton plays precise twanging bass lines, wears glasses and has short blond-dyed hair. His perfect English accent is the result of attending an English public boarding school in the mountains of Eire: “I was thrown out of school and Mount Temple Comprehensive, where we met, for doing nothing—no work. Public school meant I was mixed in with kids being trained to be part of the English elite, but it didn’t work; a lot of them are having real trouble fitting into the real world. It made me much more objective about how I wanted to run my life. I decided to take music very seriously and work really hard at it.” Determination born out of boredom. 

Bono is fair-skinned and lightly freckled under an angular busby of black hair. Excitable, nervous, liable to wind himself up to a pitch of conversation where he suddenly falls asleep ravaged by a migraine, he’s healthily dismissive of his sensitivity: “I used to cry a lot when I was a child,” he laughs, “I really felt I had something to offer to the world.” 

“I don’t have a musical background as such. I used to paint and draw and if I got very highly strung about things around me I used to write the feelings down on paper. I think an awful lot about the things I see around me. My father, for instance, who’s worked in the Civil Service since he was 14. He’s also a self-taught singer, actor and painter, but work is killing the creative side of him; he’s still got paintings around which are just left unfinished, like him really. I’m determined that’s not going to happen to me.” 

The fresh-faced Edge, who carves out a broad-minded variety of guitar backdrops to Bono’s vocal dramatics, insists upon retelling the story of his first instrument, in spite of polite warnings against such a huge cliché: “It was red, right? I was very proud of it. I was playing it on this wall and it slipped off, breaking the neck. That was when I was six. I didn’t have another guitar until the band formed, but I’m convinced something was drawing me towards the guitar all along.” 

Drummer Larry, who’s been lurking speechless behind his kit, has gone by the time his turn comes; indeed he’s not seen again before the evening flight to London. “Larry’s not here,” explains Adam helpfully, adding, “he’s talented, brilliant but very, very lazy.” 

It ought to be noted in the margin that it was Larry’s idea to form a band in the first place. 

Between ironic descriptions of the lodge’s owner, known to the band as “The Sauerkraut” and chasing up McGuinness to see if he’s paid the bills, U2 treat me to a run-through of some of their material: “Shadows and Tall Trees,” “11 O’Clock Tick Tock” and “Stories For Boys.” 

Even in this tight room, his voice all but drowned by The Edge’s reverberating echo-drenched guitar and Larry/Adam’s headlong rhythm tumble, Bono squirms about, squatting on a flight case, swaying precariously, eyes closed; to sing—literally and figuratively—is to be moved. 

Heading into Dublin for a bite, Bono explains how “We didn’t actually form in reaction to punk, we were forming at the same time and in the same way that the Pistols were.” 

They quickly grew out of this hopeful identification, though. “We certainly don’t feel part of the new wave now, but because we were actually so young then (15/16) when we started, it felt very much like those early Stones records or’‘My Generation.’

“It was something Joy Division has—a spirit—there’s something going on, the missing factor, a spark, a feeling that’s only actually there when you play together. We built the band around that feeling.” 

“Building a band” in Ireland doesn’t come that easy. Youth clubs provided the only sympathetic Dublin outlets at first but in order to spread themselves further, U2 took to the established circuit of pubs around the country—and failed. 

“We found out we were much better off playing Dublin, Cork, the centres. Playing to 24-year-old Eagles fans—drinkers—didn’t work, because if you’re sitting there in your laid-back existence and there’s this 18-year-old (on stage) banging his head against the wall,” Bono’s gone all metaphorical on me again, “it doesn’t really go down too well, and I can see why.” 

After such stunning lack of success in the country U2 spent the best part of two years writing and building a following in Dublin to the point of promoting their own gigs at the Car Park, part of a large outdoor market.

Sitting in Bailey’s Bar—into which McGuinness’s father and sister wander right on cue as proof of Dublin’s close-knittedness—Adam speculates on what strengths the approach may have given the band. 

“There’s always been a majority of our own songs, even when they were terrible, as they were in the beginning. We’ve grown in our own style as opposed to becoming an amalgram of everyone else’s.” A quick flip through the mental card-index of the Boomtown Rats’ chart-stoppers may serve to illustrate Adam’s point. 

The local payoff from U2’s considerable determination began to roll in towards the end of ’79. Three weeks in England and some encouraging press turned the Car Park gigs into headlining The National Stadium, Dublin’s largest venue, in February at a time when their second release on CBS (Ireland) was number one in the Irish charts; as McGuinness puts it, a “quantum jump” in their status. 

Extending the CBS connection, the London company didn’t satisfy, however, mainly because the deals offered fell down on matters like control over production, crucial clauses if you compare their CBS releases—”U23″ and “The Dream Is Over” where Chas De Whalley’s upfront mix makes them sound uncannily like CBS’s other Irish contingent, Starjets, and a thousand other R&B bands—to Martin Hannett’s spacious and elegant job on the new Island goodie. Exit CBS, enter Island and a more suitable arrangement. 

Having held back for so long, they’re not going to be rushed. For a start they’ve resisted overtures to move to London, for reasons which Bono explains, “It’s like a jungle, threatening. The first time I was there I went to the Electric Ballroom, which is what ’11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ is all about; ‘I heard the children crying and I knew it was time to go,’ as one line runs. 

“I see the punks as children, painting their faces like they’re messing about with their mother’s lipstick. They didn’t seem to be enjoying the gig, they wandered around lost. At 11 o’clock it was time to leave and they had nowhere—lost youth. I had an image of a painted face, like in ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I felt we didn’t have long to go.” 

The whole band agree with this reaction against the exploitation of adolescent confusion and insecurity, whether it comes from publishers of image-moulding teen mags or from older bands like the Stones or The Clash, an attitude they call “emotional imperialism.” 

“I think you can change people’s emotions, very slowly,” says Bono, “I don’t think people should be so scared of themselves.” 

“You and your music can put over something that reassures them, rather than frightens them,” agrees Adam. 

For a quarter of people barely into the 20s (only Adam is over 19), U2 have a remarkably mature perspective on what they want to achieve and how they mean to go about it. They’ve managed to turn The Great Dublin Rock Problem on its head by quietly building on their mutual commitment to the point where they can take the business head-on. Coming from a city that presents only the dubious precedents of Horslips and the Boomtown Rats to light the rocky road to the big time, there’s never been any shortage of warning signs. 

“The Edge and I met some old musos the other day,” Adam is saying as he drives the band van towards the airport at the close of the day. “Twenty-eight or so, been gigging around for years and finally ended up in showbands. ‘You’re very lucky,’ they were saying, ‘that your first band has held it together.’ All these great players, they get together in a band and if they’re not stars in two weeks, they lose interest, they’re too worried about cool. They’re backbiting and bitching and everyone in the band gets very insecure. 

“The most beautiful thing about this band is that it’s built on friendship—if someone’s got a problem it’s, in a sense, everyone’s; it’s never a case of throwing tantrums of ‘I’m not working with you.’ And that, in a way, is exactly what’s moulded the U2 sound.”

 

The Face, 1980.