Unfairly dismissed artists and bands? Starting with…U2

A new occasional series where people are invited to write about bands or musicians who they feel have been unfairly dismissed either by this site or more widely! So if you take issue with a This Weekend, or just want to sing the praises of a group or whoever, just email us at the site with your contribution.

Many thanks to Alan Myler for the following:

Where to start with this? U2. Bono, stadium rock, christianity, neoliberalism, lots of things in the mix that don’t add up to U2 being worthy of a TWIBMLT piece. Especially  on a Left wing blog. No arguments from me. But yet, patience comrades, stick with me.

So how to do this? A song from every album? No, boring, too many big songs, too many bland ones too. B-sides? Well i stopped buying their vinyl in the 80s so that won’t do either, and I’m not that big a fan anymore. But once upon a time I was, a huge fan.

In that once upon a time, before U2 became what they are, whatever that is now, they were a young band on the Dublin music scene. I was a teenager, 15 years old. They were teenagers, a few years older. At my age the Dublin music scene was an unknown, other than what I could tune into on a couple of radio programmes, the late night rock shows, hosted by Pat James on Radio Dublin and Dave Fanning on Big D, or had he moved to the new RTE Radio Two by then, I can’t recall? Pat James in particular was someone I listened to every night, not so much Dave Fanning as I had to get up for school the next day and teenagers do need their sleep. It was a music scene that also revolved around secondhand record shops, and maybe working up the courage to make one’s way through the punks and mods and other scary characters outside Advance Records where the Stephen’s green Shopping Centre is now. And weekend afternoon gigs in the Dandelion. If teenagers are impressionable, and Bono later claimed that the band’s visit to see the Ramones playing in the cinema in Cabra was what gave them what we’d now call their passion to do what they went on to do, well my own awakening to the power of live music was in the late summer of 1979 in the shed in the carpark in the Dandelion market, when in the space of a couple of weeks I experienced D.C. Nien and then U2 in the company of maybe a hundred other teenagers. A lifechanging experience. All of this only by way of setting the context for this post.

So, I’m going to be completely authentic here and list a few songs from U2’s past, before they got their CBS Ireland record deal that gave them their first couple of single releases here in Ireland, before their international deal with Island. Authentic because I have actually spent the past few weeks listening to these tracks again. Some of them appeared on the first album Boy. But many of them didn’t make that cut, and while I like the Boy album even now, it might even be my favourite album of theirs, and while I was  so excited to listen to it when it was first released in the early winter of 1981, well I   was also a bit disappointed then and to this day still that the early tracks, upon which my lifelong relationship with the band and their music was started, well just disappointed that those early songs were left behind, when in retrospect some 40 years later I would consider the rawness and relative lack of sophistication to be what marked them out as being special and allowed them to still be a musical force of sorts 40 years later. A more reactionary force now perhaps, and though we may have wandered apart from each other over those years I do still buy their albums.

So let’s kick off with a slow number. This one is from their first demo tape which was recorded in late 78 I think. It made it onto the first album, Boy, but in a much reworked form that even from the first listen I considered inferior to the original. Possibly the weakest track on that album, but in their live performances up to that point it was a crowd favourite for sure. The title is taken from a chapter in Lord Of the Flies, and whatever the lyrics light be about I’ve never been quite sure, other than them being a sort of teenage angsty poetry of sorts. The song is Shadows And Tall Trees, and if you don’t love the guitar sound in this one there’s something wrong with you.

Next up is one that also made it onto Boy, and was previously the B-side of their second single. This version is from their second demo, recorded in early 1979. The song is Twilight. The lyrics deal with growing up, teenage, that awful time between childhood and adulthood. Teenagers these days have anxiety and mental health disorders to beat the band but back then we also had to deal with boredom, alienation, social isolation, the whole beans. We’ve all been there I’m sure to one extent or other. So these types of topics, while dealt with in superficial ways in the lyrics of this song and many others, well they resonated back in the day. But for me what makes this song memorable is the bass line that weaves in and out, the way the song builds up to a crescendo, the vocals, the guitar, the whole mixed up cacophany of it all. I pogoed to this back in the day in     the Dandelion and I’d do the same now in the kitchen writing this if my family would let me.

Next up, possibly my favourite song of theirs at the moment. The band often talked in their early days of their inability to play the music of other bands, their lack of musical talent, and how bands like the Ramones and the Clash gave them permission to make music regardless. But they also talked about the influence of Television and the guitar  playing of Tom Verlaine, and to me this comes through strongly in this one. Again, it’s a track that made the cut onto Boy, and much as I like that version I prefer this one from that second demo tape from 1979. The song is Another Time Another Place. Again I’ve no idea what the lyrics are about, and it doesn’t really matter, it’s the guitar on this one that shines out for me. It’s raw, he hits a few bum notes, but again no matter.

So, this one was one of those left behind, a tune with a few different names, The Magic Carpet, Judith, Life On a Distant Planet. It rumbles on, the guitar jangles, Bono’s voice again weaves in and out. I don’t know why they dropped this one, maybe it was the subject matter, being about mental disability, or maybe they just thought it wasn’t that good a song. I’d disagree.

This one is just a boppy pop song that bounces along, sort of like the track Boy/Girl in that sense, nothing too deep. Alone In The Light.

If there was an early sign of U2’s Christian tendencies maybe this one could be it. I still like the catchiness of it though. This recording is off the radio so the quality isn’t great. What’s noticeable though is that the general sound of these early tracks is very different to what the band became once Steve Lilywhite got his hands on them at the time of recording their first album for Island records. I guess it was progress of sorts, but they all but lost the rawness of that early post-punk sound. For a band that has developed and reinvented its sound a couple of times at least during its long career there’s no question that progress has to be a good thing, but it’s just a pity  that  they  didn’t preserve that early incarnation of themselves, that beginning, other than in these leaked poor quality recordings of those original tapes. Anyway, here is False Prophet.

I’ll wrap up this short set with the same track that the band themselves used to finish up live. This one made it onto Boy. It also made it onto the A-side of the first single for CBS. And it’s the song that started me off a month ago relistening to these early tracks.

This one was a favourite with the fan’s for good reason. It has a  cracking  intro.  It thumps along. It is the shining example of the best that the early band were capable of.

This version is from the first single, but there is an earlier version from the early 1979 demo tape that I haven’t been able to find online anywhere, and which is even better to my ears. The reason I went down this rabbit hole again recently, without giving away too much personal information, is that one of my kids is having a tough time being a teenager for the past few years. She was 18 years old in September. I remember being 18 myself, it was a tough time, and this song meant a lot to me at that stage of my angsty years, so I thought it might help my daughter of she knew that I was once in similar shoes, and that this song in some small way helped me get through that. As existential anthems go this one is probably lightweight enough, but in  the limited horizons of Dublin in the late 70s this was as good as it got for me. The song is Out Of Control. I was pleased to hear that she had added it to her Spotify playlist subsequently., albeit the later version from Boy.

So finally, if any of these tracks are new to you, if you like the sound of the band from that era, I’ll point you at the greatest live album never made, the recording made by RTE of the band’s live performance in the National Stadium in early 1980. It contains most of the tracks above, and a good few others that never made it onto vinyl or CD, not officially anyway. Well I’m kidding about it being the best live album, but only a bit.

Like SonOfStan’s description of listening to the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street over and over again until every note is etched into the brain, well this one is the same for   me. I was there at the gig the night this was recorded, having gotten the 86 bus from Leopardstown (yep, I’m a southsider) to the South Circular Road. I was 15 years old, in 5th year in school. It was magical. And it only seems like yesterday when I listen to the recording. How to stay young, eh. Enjoy.

A postscript. There’s a tribute band called Zooropa doing the rounds in Dublin etc. We saw them in Navan a couple of years ago and again in the Church on Mary St last year. They’re a great night out if you’re a U2 fan, openly or in the closet. I’ve no connection  with the band, just putting it out there to share the joy.