I’m at Mount Temple Comprehensive on the Malahide Road on Dublin’s northside watching one of their school bands going through their set on a podium in the yard.
It’s two in the day on a Friday. This quartet are called, depending when you ask, Feedback or The Hype or U2. Fifty years on from drummer Larry Mullen sticking a note up on a noticeboard seeking bandmates (Bono gives him kudos later in the gig) they’re still going. They played their last gig in this exact location in 1978.
It has been an open secret in the school all week. A friend of a friend’s child went out to the toilet during the week and bumped into Bono in the halls. Another appalled parent tells me: “I had to explain the importance of this to my kid. She said ‘What’s the fuss about?’ What’s the fuss about???”
It’s the equivalent, to be fair, of the teenage U2 being subjected to a performance by Count John McCormack or Archbishop McQuaid or any other stalwarts from 50 years prior. But there are several hundred of them here anyway, and they seem very into it, holding homemade banners and generally yammering away with joy (though one banner reads: “It’s a Beautiful Day, No School”).
RM Block
“We escaped from the lab,” says Bono when he takes to the stage, pointing to the nearby science lab. “How’s the experiment going for you?”
Soon the kids are screaming with appreciation. The elderly kids of the press and staff room are certainly enjoying it. Some are dancing. Several elbow feckless kids out of the way to get to the front. Fintan O’Toole is here, probably trying to figure out what it all means.
The band are all in black and they are, in fairness, on fire: Bono stalking the stage, Adam Clayton wielding his bass like a country gentleman wielding a barrel machine gun, the Edge wrenching arpeggiated shimmers from his various guitars, Larry Mullen chilled behind the drums like an Easter Island head and just as impervious to age.
After I Will Follow, they play Vertigo, which he counts in in Spanish (“Don’t come to me for Spanish lessons”), then Beautiful Day (with some quotations from Elbow’s similarly themed One Day Like This), then another almost 50-year-old classic, Out of Control, and then their slinky new garage rock banger Silencio.
Bono also introduces his bandmates according to their class designations (Larry 2I, Adam 5D and Edge 3U), notes that the appreciative kids have “nowhere else to go”, highlights the important work of their educational NGO Music Generation and he pays tribute to the teachers in the school who influenced them.
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They end it all with One, accompanied by a child string section and, finally, one more tune (there was a chant), a fingerpicked version of With or Without You.
Are U2 cool or uncool to these children of a new Ireland? That’s like asking a teenager if Brian Boru or a gothic arch or sedimentary rocks are cool or uncool. It’s sort of beside the point.
U2 are simply a fact of life now. And they are, in fairness, brilliant. To quote a Simpsons review of a school performance: “A good time was had by all”. It’s celebratory. It’s life affirming. It’s a bookend.
Later that evening they bring Grafton Street to a halt performing from the balcony of Bewley’s, Bono louchely hanging from the railings (“be careful man, you’re in your sixties!” I feel like shouting) as thousands of delighted people help him sing the lyrics of I Will Follow, Out of Control, One, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (with a breakout rendition of Molly Malone), With or Without You, Silencio, All I Want is You, Falling Slowly (sung by the Edge, in tribute to the late Glen Hansard), Beautiful Day, Vertigo and 40 (the Edge and Adam swap instruments).
“The buskers have really upped their game,” says Bono. The audience sing Happy Birthday.
But now outside the grounds of Mount Temple, I picture a slate grey Dublin, filled with unemployment and dereliction and Catholic repression. There’s hope in here, though, from the kids but also the chord sequences. These young men should possibly be concentrating on their studies but something tells me they have a future.
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