by NEIL MCCORMICK
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| U2 at the 2009 Brit Awards CREDIT: DAVE HOGAN/GETTY |
Forty years ago, on Saturday 24th September, 1976, one of the most loved and hated, popular and influential rock groups of the modern era got together for the very first time.
It was in the crowded kitchen of a semi-detached house in Artane that a bunch of teenage school boys from Mount Temple Comprehensive, Dublin, gathered to discuss forming a band. There was barely enough room to fit around the drum kit, with five guitarists squeezed between the fridge and the bread bin. A chaotic jam session involved wobbly renditions of Rolling Stones hits Brown Sugar and Satisfaction, with no consensus as to the correct chord sequences.
One wannabe lead guitarist was forced into the role of singer because he had neglected to actually bring a guitar. Another young guitarist established his position as lead instrumentalist because he had mastered the solo from Rory Gallagher’s Blister on the Moon. The bassist couldn’t play but had the best hair and, crucially, owned an actual bass guitar and amplifier. The drummer was definitely in because it was his family’s kitchen. And thus, U2 were born.
This weekend, fan conventions are taking place at venues in Dublin and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Irish supergroup. The reason this momentous date is known is because my younger brother, Ivan, was present and noted it in his pocket diary. “Watched TV. Joined a pop group with friends. Had a rehearsal. Great.” Sadly, he did not record for posterity exactly what he watched on television.
Most bands have such inauspicious beginnings. The truly remarkable thing about the birth of U2 is that the multi-million selling stadium band today is exactly the same core who met in the kitchen four decades ago: vocalist Paul Hewson (aka Bono), guitarist Dave Evans (aka The Edge), bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jnr (who instigated proceedings with a notice on the school board looking for band members). There were a couple of quick losses. My brother, the youngest at 13, only lasted a few rehearsals. One other guitarist, Dick Evans (brother of the Edge and, at 18, some years senior to the rest), hung on as a part time member but was gradually eased out as the band established its identity. The line-up that made its debut at a talent contest in the school gymnasium in 1976 was the very same as you still see on the world’s biggest stages today.
I will never forget that concert, because it was the first time I had ever seen a live electric rock band. They played on four tables taped together, kicking off a short set with a version of Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way. The drums and bass were pounding so hard it looked like the tables might come apart. Guitar chords rang out, echoing off the wooden floor. When Bono got to the chorus, he grabbed the microphone stand and held it in the air, stomping his feet as he yelled “I want you … show me the way!” Young girls in front of the stage started screaming. Realistically, I don’t suppose there was anything that would have made an experienced observer think they were witnessing a moment in rock history. The rest of the set was made up of a Beach Boys medley and The Bay City Rollers Bye Bye Baby, which they played twice, by popular demand. But that gig changed a lot of people’s lives, mine included.
I was U2’s friend at school, and I’m their friend now. It is hard for me to be objective on this particular subject, for which I make no apologies. Perhaps you can never love music as fiercely as the stuff that gets into your bloodstream as a teenager, when you are trying to find out who you are and who you might be. Even after all these years, my most intense memories and feelings for U2 are inevitably bound up in that primal experience: the becoming. I was privileged to watch them become a white hot rock band in school discos, bars, clubs and church halls around Dublin. I have been continually delighted by the leaps and bounds they have made on their way to being feted as one of the greatest rock bands ever, decried by some for their vast ambition and big gesture music.
One of the questions an anniversary such as this throws up is whether their future was inherent in that first meeting, whether it was something anyone could have foreseen? The answer should be no … and yet maybe. It would have been absurd to seriously contemplate conquering the world from Dublin in the Seventies but teenagers are absurd. We were all a bunch of dreamers, fixated on rock and roll. I can remember schoolboy conversations with Bono about making an album to beat Sergeant Pepper, so there was never any shortage of ambition. They very quickly became an extraordinarily powerful and original band, shifting through the gears from sloppy covers to sleek new wave, changing their name from Feedback to The Hype, before blossoming into the epic sci-fi of U2, unveiled at a gig in my village church hall in March 1978.
Bono’s dynamism as a frontman was immediately apparent, and, honestly, he was a star in the school corridor before he ever took to the stage, every bit as gregarious, curious, charismatic and passionate as he is now. The Edge’s genius as a musician took a little longer to shine through but by 78 he was already on fire, using a primitive Memory Man echo unit to conjure up vast walls of sound. Those two might have been a productive partnership whoever else was in a band with them, but the two they arbitrarily locked together with turned out to have exactly the right skills and personalities to balance the dynamic. Larry Mullen Jr is an idiosyncratic, powerhouse drummer and one of the most stoic, loyal and quietly driven people you could meet, adhering to a very firm inner code. Bono likes to call him “the brakes in U2”, with the proviso that “when the rocket is veering wildly off course, you are very glad to have brakes.”
Bassist Adam Clayton represents a more maverick element, in both playing and personal style. He is one of nature’s gentlemen, with an easy going manner and instinct for conflict resolution that helps make the functioning of a small group of individuals possible. But he was also the most rock and roll kid any of us had ever met, turning up on his first day at school wearing an Afghan coat and a yellow workman’s helmet. For Adam, it was always rock stardom or nothing, and his single minded ambition was a huge part of pushing the band forwards from the very beginning.
U2’s unwavering line-up is possibly unique in the history of popular music. I cannot think of another successful band who have achieved so much and gone on so long with exactly the same unit of people. To put it into perspective, the four Beatles lasted less than a decade together and there are enough ex-members of The Rolling Stones to form another group altogether. Bono, Edge, Adam and Larry have been bonded by a loyalty and friendship that has sustained them whilst all of their contemporaries, without exception, have fallen out, brought in new members, broken up, sometimes reunited with different line ups. And it goes to the heart of what U2 is, and why they remain a force to be reckoned with.
A great group is a little miracle, where competing forces and personalities align in some kind of cosmic balance, often only for a short periods of time. From some perspectives, a band is just about the least efficient or logical way to make music. A classical composer writes notation down for musicians to follow but a band essentially stumbles upon its identity by getting together in a room and playing. Its sound and style is a summation of the personalities and how they express their character through their instruments (and through their clothes, politics and social ideas). They don’t have to be the best musicians. They just have to be the right musicians.
Most bands, at some time or another, alter their chemical make up by replacing an original member with another musician (often removing the weakest musical link for a putatively stronger one) and frequently losing everything in the process. Bands break up for all kinds of reasons but often spend the rest of their musical lives hankering after the indefinable chemistry of that special unit. As this forty year anniversary demonstrates, U2’s togetherness is their greatest strength. It is a four decade long manifestation of unity and loyalty inherent in their great anthem, One, which proclaims the strength of being “one but not the same”, of which the joy and privilege is “to carry each other.” It doesn’t surprise me that U2 themselves don’t appear to be planning anything to mark this anniversary. For them, it remains a continuing story, with rumours of a new album and tour next year. Maybe they are saving fire for the half century.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
