By Duane Davis
In 1981, Dave Stidman and I used to joke that U2’s UK import 12″ single of “I Will Follow” was paying the rent for Wax Trax. Flying across the counter with the jingle-jangle of the cash register in the background, that single was one of our first experiences with what you might call a best seller. I can’t say for sure, but we may have been the only store in town stocking it at that time.
This was in the short time period between the UK release of U2’s first album, “Boy,” in 1980 and its domestic release that hit the shelves in March, 1981. Here in the states, the album peaked on the Billboard charts at #63, an okay showing, but not a barn burner, and nothing compared with their spectacular rise in the coming years.
They were part of an all-out assault on our shores along with other New Wave bands like Human League, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, and Duran Duran – a new British Invasion. With major labels gobbling up these bands from their small-time indie label roots and providing support for bare-bones tours, U2 landed in Denver for their first show in late March, 1981 at the legendary Rainbow Music Hall. They were back again in May of the same year, again at the Rainbow. U2’s final Rainbow appearance was on February 27, 1982.
Having caught their earlier performances for the Boy Tour at the Rainbow and knowing how important the band was to the folks who shopped at Wax Trax, I was eager to connect with the band and managed to set up an interview with them the day of that third show. As noted in the interview below, Bono and The Edge were straight-up polite, serious and dedicated – maybe even a little evangelical.
Not mentioned below is how Bono’s focus and intensity at times during the talk would wind him up to the point where he would jump up and walk around the room, agitated and concentrating on how to put into words exactly what he wanted to say.
For me, it was clear this wasn’t a Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll tour for these guys. It was a mission and they had a message: ‘We always believed that you must build the band around a spark, that’s what’s more important. The fire. The flame.’
A few minutes after these words below, the band walked out on the stage of the Rainbow and set the place on fire.
U2
[Local Anesthetic, April 1982]
U2 is a band of celebration and to hear their music or see their performances is to witness four young men attempting the impossible: the effort to embrace a world of sorrow and pain within the transcendence of an awesome, joyous music. The sound, the instrumentation, is an earthshaker, a force as elemental and deep as gravity tugging at the heart. And above it all is Bono’s gorgeous, soaring voice, beckoning the listener to a better world, a world where celebration has resolved the trials and evils of this earth.
I talked with Bono and The Edge, guitarist, at the Rainbow shortly after their soundcheck for that evening’s show. It’s not a nice thing to say in this day of the Big Ego, but these guys are really, well, nice. They were open, friendly and eager to communicate. In fact, this is the way it began—
Bono (upon noticing this interviewer’s nervousness and obvious ineptitude): You just talk away–anything you want to know. We’re here, whether you feel we’ve been asked before or not. It bothers me that lots of people assume that we don’t want to talk to a journalist, whereas I see the writer as a voice that we can speak through. You and your magazine are important to us because if we can talk about something and you get a better understanding of what we’re doing, then why should I mind?
LA: Well, that’s certainly the argument I would use on you. I’ll start with a question you may have been asked a few times already: how did you start? What kind of background do you come from?
Bono: Garageland. The garageband from garageland, as the song says. We formed because we weren’t very good at anything else.
LA: When was that?
B: ‘76
The Edge: Yeah, the beginning of ’76. When Bono said “formed” before I think that that word is probably a bit of an exaggeration. We sort of met and then had a few cups of tea.
B: The band more evolved than formed. In “formed” you get the impression that these five musicians come together and have this concept for a band and sort of work it all out on paper and then do it. It’s been a trial and error as to what actually works and doesn’t work.
LA: Are all of you the original band members then?
B: Um, except for one guy, The Edge’s brother, Dick. He now plays for a group called the Virgin Prunes, who are on Rough Trade. (Note: The Virgin Prunes play a weird, eccentric music full of dark corners, odd moments of lyricism and a few nasty surprises reminiscent ot something walled up behind the bedroom closet.)
B: Well, they’re very, very bright, the Prunes are. We all came from the same area. In fact. we all live on the same street.
LA: It’s strange, I mean the relation between the Virgin Prunes’ music and yours is…
B: …completely different. And it should be when you think about it. I mean there should be no following of sound just of the sake of it. When we first started playing, back in garageland-we actually played in a car park and places like that—we would be on and by the end of 45 minutes of me shouting at everybody I would just collapse into a heap on the floor and the two singers from the VP’s used to get up and take over.
LA: Is the Dublin scene fairly tight? Is it small enough that you, as a musician, know everyone else who is a musician?
B: U2 were not part of the scene. We stayed away from that. Like that was the point: that in the city center there were places to be, pubs to meet in and all that.
E: Yeah, I don’t think we were old enough to be involved in that. Then we actually realized we didn’t want to be involved.
B: The people in the scene didn’t much like us. We invented an imaginary place called Lypton Village. And we literally as an alternative lifestyle, Prunes and ourselves, became a group of people definitely opting out and, ah, opting into this thing which we built up. And people in the city referred to the whole lot of us as the Village and didn’t like us. We were very much outcasts at the time. While they were sitting around drinking and talking about what they were going to do, we started to go out and do it, putting up posters, playing, getting organized, and making something happen.
LA: So even at that early point you had some idea of what you wanted to do as a group?
B: Actually, we didn’t.
E: I think at that stage the ideas we had were more that we didn’t want to do. What we actually did want to do came later.
B: We certainly knew what was out of the question.
E: Going to pubs and kind of growing mustaches and beards. Musically, we knew we didn’t want to play either Jimi Hendrix or the Eagles.
B: Actually we quite like Jimi Hendrix.
E: It was another trial and error thing to find out what we did want to play. We didn’t hit on it right away.
B: And we weren’t musicians either, and we weren’t taken as musicians at first. We always believed that you must build the band around a spark, that’s what’s more important. The fire. The flame. And the rest, the form, follows that. When it’s the other way around you have dead music, and that’s what you hear on the radio. It’s people who have gotten together to play a certain kind of music. The form has come before the actual fire. We got it the right way around. And now, too, we can play.
E: The good thing about how we have developed is that we can at will, change our stance because the only reason we are in the particular stance to begin with is because we are who we are.
B: U2 is the music it creates. We are not a band that has grabbed a certain style of music then held on to it and said this and just this is what we do. It’s much looser than that. If we start to think things are getting a bit stale, then we change.
LA: Do you then still have an idea of where the band should be going?
B: What we are working for is having a positive effect on people rather than a negative effect. We want people to leave one of our shows feeling differently than they did when they came in. To feel joy in some way, or washed clean. A lot of bands, good bands which I like, when I go to see them come away feeling more tense than before. Whatever they’ve done, it hasn’t been good even though I may have enjoyed it. I want to have that excitement, that aggression of the three piece rock and roll band but I also want it to have a subtlety, to get across moods and atmospheres that are usually ignored by those kind of three piece bands.
LA: There seems to be a tension between the ecstacy of the music and a quality of sadness in the lyrics in your songs.
B: I’ve tried to approach in a realistic way my own feeling, what goes on inside me. And there is confusion there. But ultimately I believe there is a joy in me to get across. The second album is more spiritual in that I found that my belief in a God has given me hope. There are things around me which inspire the music, which inspire hope. There is hope…It’s not the Blues we’re singing.
LA: Being Irish are you asked to take sides in Dublin?
B: Very rarely.
E: Politics in Ireland is such a hot subject, especially in the North, that people tend to try and play it down as much as possible. The only time we’ve been challenged or asked about it is in America. Bringing out the flags and all that. It’s sort of misplaced.
B: Music should be breaking down those barriers. I think our song “Tomorrow” speaks more about Northern Ireland than rhetoric and slogans. I don’t think violence is a solution to anything. “Tomorrow” there is an image of someone knocking at the door. The Door is a very strong symbol in that song because it is a very strong symbol up North. Somebody knocks on your door and they could be there to blow your head off. The dilemma is whether or not this guy should go to the door and knock. It is a religious war, yet it is not. You know what I’m saying?
LA: No war is religious. Some people confuse religion with power.
B: Right. It’s irreligious. That’s what I’ve tried to say in the song: open yourself to the will of God. I believe that love is the only thing that is going to solve the situation. I don’t think it’s going to be sorted out through pens and paper and I don’t think it’s going to be sorted out through bombs and bricks.
Leave a Reply