U2

Their story has a simple beginning, common to countless rock bands of every era. It's 1976 when future drummer Larry Mullen Jr. puts up a notice on the bulletin board at Mount Temple School in Dublin, Ireland's first non-denominational school: "Musicians wanted to form band". The ones who answer are guitarist Dave Evans, known as "The Edge", bassist Adam Clayton, and singer Paul Hewson, nicknamed Bono Vox after a hearing-aid shop on a street in central Dublin. They start out playing as Feedback, then become Hype, and finally, on the suggestion of Steve Averill of the Radiators, choose U2, after a type of American spy plane from the Second World War.

The four are very young: Mullen is 14, The Edge 15, Clayton and Bono 16. "I was good for nothing," the latter recalls, "the only job I could manage was as a petrol-station attendant. But music was the easiest thing in the world for me, it helped me escape the banality of a suburban kid's life". The death of his mother, to whom he would dedicate "I Will Follow", marks a turning point for Bono: the band becomes his new family. Just like the friends with whom he shared his escapades around underground Dublin, starting with those from Lypton Village, a collective of teenagers trying to flee the greyness of the Ballymun suburb, from a daily life split between school, religion and suburban squalor, taking refuge instead in music, art, and eccentricity of manner and look. Bono is indeed one of the "leaders" of that strange gang, alongside one Fionan Hanvey, who would go on to become a cult name of dark-punk at the helm of Virgin Prunes. The brothers Richard and David Evans were also part of the "circle". While the latter, under the nickname The Edge, would go on to form U2, the former – renaming himself Dik Prune – would join Friday and his Prunes. (…)

Throughout the 1980s, U2 crowned a coherent trajectory that, from the post-adolescent impetuosity of "Boy" and "War" and the live consecration beneath the blood-red sky of Colorado (the epochal "Under A Blood Red Sky") and in the London arena of Live Aid (1985), had led them toward a more complex rock sound, one that partly set aside the guitar frenzy of their early days in favour of more calibrated, experimental songs, with lyrics increasingly steeped in social and political commitment. It was a path that ran against the grain in that most vain of decades, and one not unlike that followed by R.E.M. on the other side of the Atlantic. U2 were no longer "the kids with hearts on fire playing 'Gloria' on the Dublin docks" (as Paolo Sforza put it); they were now a mature band, ready to shoulder the burdens and rewards of fame — even at the cost of alienating a few diehard early fans. Built around the "rhythmic" interplay of The Edge's guitar, with its trademark reverbs, power chords and delay, underpinning Bono's solemn vocals, their songs shine for the sharpness of their arrangements and the power of their melodies, achieving an epic charge that kept a safe distance from the rhetorical excesses of the years to come. And often even the B-sides and outtakes contributed to their legend. Then, after the final revolution of "Achtung Baby" (and "Zooropa"), the slow decline began...

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24/02/2026