Fifty years ago today, half a dozen or so teenage schoolboys carrying an assortment of musical instruments crowded into a kitchen in Artane on Dublin’s northside. Countless such gatherings have taken place before and since. Most fizzle out after a few listless rehearsals. A tiny number lead to lasting musical careers.
This one produced a group known first as Feedback, then The Hype and finally U2. The settled line-up of Paul Hewson, David Evans, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jnr went on to become one of the most successful acts in rock history, and the biggest ever to emerge from Ireland.
There are many theories about why. Talent and creativity obviously mattered. So did tenacity, formidable self-belief and a mutual loyalty rare in a business where bands routinely splinter.
Drummer Seeks Musicians, the Irish Times podcast series published this week, vividly evokes the time and place that shaped them. By the standards of 1970s Dublin they were an unusually mixed group in family and religious background, while their school, Mount Temple Comprehensive, stood out for its liberal, co-educational and multidenominational ethos.
RM Block
All of this played its part. So did an appetite for the biggest sound, the widest canvas and the most soaring, anthemic songs, which carried them to an American breakthrough that eluded most of their peers. By the late 1980s U2 were the biggest band in the world. Crucially, they broke with precedent by continuing to live in Ireland. In the 1990s they would reinvent themselves as ironic, electronic chroniclers of a media-saturated age. In all this, they were central to the revival of national self-confidence over those decades. Half a century on, they are still making music, with a new single released yesterday.
Next summer Fontaines DC will become only the third Irish act to headline Slane Castle, after Thin Lizzy in 1981 and U2 themselves in 2001. Their story began among fellow students at Dublin’s BIMM music college. There is no single route to artistic success. What matters is that talent, wherever it gathers, finds the space to flourish.
