The story of U2

Dublin boys and a note on the notice board

The story of U2 starts with four very different boys in 1970s Dublin. Paul Hewson was born on the tenth of May 1960 and grew up on Cedarwood Road on the city's Northside, in a mixed household with a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. On the tenth of September 1974, when he was fourteen, his mother Iris died. She had collapsed with a brain aneurysm three days earlier, at her own father's funeral. The loss left the teenager adrift and often alone in the house, drifting to friends' kitchens at teatime. That grief never left his writing. Songs across the decades, from I Will Follow and Tomorrow to Iris, circle back to her.[1] [2]

The others came from further afield. David Evans was born in Barking, Essex, in August 1961 to Welsh parents, and the family moved to Dublin when he was a baby. At home he spoke with a Welsh accent and outside with an Irish one, just to fit in. He and his older brother Dik learned on a battered acoustic their mother bought at a jumble sale for a pound. Adam Clayton was born in Oxfordshire in 1960, the son of an air force pilot, and lived in Kenya as a small child before the family settled in Malahide, where they became friends with the Evans family. Adam hated boarding school, but a five pound guitar from a junk shop and then a bass guitar changed everything.[1] [2] [3]

The youngest was Larry Mullen, born on Halloween 1961 in Artane. He started drumming at nine, and joined the Artane Boys Band on his father's suggestion, but quit after three weeks when they kept asking him to cut his long hair. His childhood had its own tragedy. His younger sister Mary died in an accident in 1973, and afterwards his father sent him to Mount Temple Comprehensive, Ireland's first interdenominational school. In September 1976, again at his father's suggestion, fourteen year old Larry pinned a note to the school notice board. Drummer seeks musicians to form band, more or less. On the twenty fifth of September, the replies turned up in his family's kitchen.[1] [2] [3]

That first practice brought together Larry, Paul Hewson, the Evans brothers, Adam Clayton and a couple of Larry's friends who soon drifted away. Larry later joked that it was the Larry Mullen Band for about ten minutes, until Paul walked in and he never got to be in charge again. They called themselves Feedback, because it was one of the few technical words they knew, and they rehearsed in a music teacher's classroom. Their covers were poor, but punk convinced them skill was optional. Paul had already been renamed by his friends in a surreal street gang called Lypton Village. After a hearing aid shop near O'Connell Street called Bonavox, he became Bono Vox, then simply Bono. David became the Edge.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 1977 Feedback played its first paying gig and soon renamed itself the Hype. Dik Evans, older and already at college, drifted out, and in March 1978 the others became U2, a name suggested by the punk musician and designer Steve Averill. At Dik's farewell show he walked offstage midway, and the remaining four came back as U2. On the eighteenth of March 1978 the four piece won a talent contest in Limerick, taking five hundred pounds and a demo session. In May, the Hot Press writer Bill Graham introduced them to Paul McGuinness, who became their manager. That November brought fresh grief for Larry. His mother Maureen was killed in a car accident.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Boy, October and a crisis of faith

U2 spent 1979 building a Dublin following, including a run of weekend afternoon shows at the Dandelion Market. In September CBS Ireland released their first record, an EP called Three, and all one thousand numbered copies sold almost at once. Their first London shows that December made little impact. Then McGuinness gambled. On the twenty sixth of February 1980 U2 headlined the two thousand seat National Stadium in Dublin, and Bill Stewart of Island Records was in the crowd. The next month they signed a four album deal with Island, with an advance of fifty thousand pounds. Their first Island single, 11 O'Clock Tick Tock, was produced by Martin Hannett, the man behind Joy Division, but it failed to chart.[1] [2]

For the debut album Island turned to a young English producer, Steve Lillywhite. He came to see them play a school hall and was convinced there was something special. Boy was recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin between July and September 1980. Lillywhite put Larry's drums in the stone stairwell of the reception area, which meant waiting for the receptionist to go home each evening, and he recorded smashed bottles and cutlery spinning on a bicycle wheel. Around this time the Edge bought an Electro Harmonix Memory Man delay unit, and its echo became the backbone of his sound. Boy came out in October 1980. I Will Follow, written about Bono's mother, became a college radio favourite in America.[1] [2] [3]

The second album was far harder. In March 1981, on tour in America, Bono's briefcase full of lyrics and ideas for new songs vanished backstage at a club in Portland, Oregon. The band walked into Windmill Lane that July largely unprepared, and Bono was reduced to writing words at the microphone while the studio clock ticked at fifty pounds an hour. Lillywhite called the sessions chaotic and mad. The briefcase would not come back for twenty three years. October was released in October 1981 and was full of openly spiritual songs, like Gloria with its Latin chorus. It reached number eleven in Britain, but reviews were mixed and sales elsewhere were thin.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the music, the band was close to splitting. Bono, the Edge and Larry had joined a charismatic Christian group in Dublin called the Shalom Fellowship. On tour they prayed together on the bus and avoided drink, while Adam Clayton, who was not a member, felt shut out and feared they were becoming a Christian rock band. Shalom pressed its members to put faith ahead of rock and roll. Larry left first, later comparing it to joining the Moonies. Then the Edge told Bono he wanted to quit the band, and Bono said he would go too. McGuinness reminded them that a crew and a tour were already booked. They stayed, and eventually left Shalom instead.[1] [2] [3]

There were small signs of hope. The video for Gloria was the first U2 clip played on MTV, which was building an audience for the band in America. On the October Tour they met the Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who would shape their image for decades. They also spent part of 1982 opening arena shows for the J. Geils Band. But by the end of the tour they were out of money and felt their label was losing faith. On the thirty first of August 1982 Bono married his school sweetheart Alison Stewart, with Adam as best man. They could not afford a honeymoon, so Island's founder Chris Blackwell lent them his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica.[1] [2] [3] [4]

War, Red Rocks and the day at Wembley

While Bono was on honeymoon, the Edge stayed behind in Ireland feeling low. After an argument with his girlfriend Aislinn O'Sullivan and a bout of self doubt, he poured his frustration into a guitar riff. It became Sunday Bloody Sunday. An early lyric even named the IRA and the loyalist UDA, but it was cut to keep the song clearly against all sides of the violence. Larry, who had refused to play to a click track, was talked round by a chance meeting with the session drummer Andy Newmark. A local violinist, Steve Wickham, stopped the Edge at a bus stop to offer his services, and his electric violin ended up on the record.[1] [2]

War was released in February 1983 and knocked Michael Jackson's Thriller off the top of the British chart, giving U2 their first number one album. It was blunter and angrier than anything before, touching on Bloody Sunday in Derry, nuclear fear and the Polish Solidarity movement on New Year's Day, their first hit outside Europe. Adam's bass line on that song came from a failed attempt to play Visage's Fade to Grey. The closing song, 40, was recorded in the last hours of the sessions after Adam had gone home, with the Edge playing bass. Live, the two swapped instruments for it, and it became the band's traditional farewell song.[1] [2] [3]

On the War Tour the venues kept growing, and Bono kept climbing, scaling scaffolding and lighting rigs and diving into crowds. His white flag during Sunday Bloody Sunday became the tour's defining image. In Belfast he promised that if the crowd did not like the song they would never play it again, and only a handful walked out. On the fifth of June 1983, in cold rain at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, U2 filmed a concert against glowing red crags and drifting mist. Shown constantly on MTV as Live at Red Rocks, and heard on the album Under a Blood Red Sky, it made them a major live act in America. It was also their first profitable tour.[1] [2]

Afraid of becoming a slogan shouting arena band, U2 went looking for something stranger. The Edge admired Brian Eno's ambient records, and Eno, who was thinking about quitting production, came to Dublin with his engineer Daniel Lanois. Chris Blackwell thought Eno would bury the band in avant garde nonsense and flew to Dublin to talk them out of it, but Bono's persuasion won him over. In May 1984 they moved into Slane Castle to record, playing in its ballroom and library. The Unforgettable Fire, released that October, was atmospheric and loose. Its single Pride, about Martin Luther King, became their first top forty hit in America and their first number one anywhere, in New Zealand.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirteenth of July 1985 U2 played Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, before seventy two thousand people and a television audience estimated at one and a half billion. During a twelve minute version of Bad, Bono climbed down from the stage, went looking along the barrier, and pulled a young woman out of the crowd to dance with her. The detour ate their time, and they had to drop Pride, their biggest hit. The band came off believing they had blown their big chance. Within days it was being called one of the highlights of the whole event, and the Guardian later described it as the moment that made stars of U2. That March, Rolling Stone had already called them the band of the eighties.[1] [2] [3]

The Joshua Tree and the American dream

After Live Aid, Bono and Ali spent weeks as volunteers at a feeding centre in Ajibar, Ethiopia, during the famine, running songs and little plays that taught children about health. The next year they travelled to Nicaragua and El Salvador and saw the effects of civil war and American military involvement. At the same time Bono was discovering the blues. Hanging out with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, he realised U2 knew almost nothing about music from before punk. He felt, he said, like the band came from outer space. Friendships with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison pushed him toward writing proper lyrics about what he had actually seen, and toward America as the album's subject.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a death that hit the whole organisation. Greg Carroll was a young New Zealander the band had met on their first tour there in 1984, and he had become Bono's personal assistant and close friend. On the third of July 1986 he was riding Bono's motorbike in Dublin, on a rainy night, when he was killed in a crash. He was twenty six. The band flew to New Zealand for his traditional Maori funeral, where Bono sang for him. The experience became the song One Tree Hill, named after a hill in Auckland that Greg loved to talk about. Released there as a single, it went to number one.[1] [2]

The Joshua Tree was recorded mostly in two Dublin houses, Danesmoate and the Edge's new home Melbeach. With or Without You nearly got thrown away, until Bono's friend Gavin Friday helped rescue it and the Edge plugged in an Infinite Guitar prototype sent by Michael Brook, a homemade gadget that gave his technician electric shocks. Where the Streets Have No Name was so hard to get right that Lanois walked the band through its chord changes with a pointer and a school blackboard. On the last night, Lillywhite's wife, the singer Kirsty MacColl, put the songs in order. The band told her only which song went first and which went last.[1] [2] [3]

The Joshua Tree came out on the ninth of March 1987, and it made U2 superstars. Record shops in Britain and Ireland opened at midnight, it became the fastest selling album in British chart history at the time, and it spent nine weeks at number one in America. With or Without You and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For became their only American number one singles. Time magazine put them on the cover as rock's hottest ticket, and the album won the Grammy for Album of the Year. It has sold around twenty five million copies. On the twenty seventh of March they played on a Los Angeles rooftop for the Streets video, drawing more than a thousand people before the police moved in.[1] [2] [3]

The Joshua Tree Tour took them into stadiums, but it also brought danger and backlash. On the eighth of November 1987 an IRA bomb killed eleven people at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Enniskillen. That night in Denver, Bono stopped Sunday Bloody Sunday to condemn the bombing and the Irish Americans who romanticised killing. The rant stayed in the film Rattle and Hum, and Bono said he later faced threats from republicans. Rattle and Hum, released in October 1988, was a double album and movie celebrating American roots music, with B.B. King, Bob Dylan and a session at Sun Studio. Desire gave them a first British number one, but critics called the project pretentious.[1] [2] [3]

Dreaming it all up again

By the end of the Lovetown Tour, U2 were bored of their own hits. Larry summed it up: they were the biggest, but not the best. On the thirtieth of December 1989, in front of a Dublin crowd, Bono said this was the end of something for U2 and that they had to go away and dream it all up again. On the third of October 1990 they flew into Berlin on the last flight into the East before German reunification. Looking for the party, they wandered into a small protest against reunification instead. They set up at Hansa Studios, where Bowie had worked, but the city felt grey, the hotel was grim, and the band split into two camps.[1] [2]

Bono and the Edge wanted industrial textures and dance beats, while Adam and Larry wanted something closer to the old U2. At one point Adam held out his bass to Bono and told him to play it himself if he knew what he wanted. Bono and Lanois nearly came to blows. The band seriously considered breaking up. The breakthrough came while jamming an early version of Mysterious Ways. At Lanois' suggestion the Edge played two chord sequences back to back, and within minutes the band had the bones of One. Bono said the lyric fell out of the sky. Its line about carrying each other gave them a reason to carry on.[1] [2]

Back in Dublin, in a seaside house they nicknamed Dog Town, the sessions came to life. Bono put on a huge pair of sunglasses to lighten the mood in the studio and found a character, the Fly, a leather clad parody of a rock star. Real life leaked into the lyrics too. The Edge's marriage ended during the recording, and his heartbreak pushed the album toward personal songs about love and betrayal. Achtung Baby was released on the eighteenth of November 1991. Bono called it the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree. It topped the American chart and has sold around eighteen million copies. One was released as a single for AIDS research.[1] [2] [3]

The Zoo TV Tour of 1992 and 1993 turned a rock concert into a flood of television. Dozens of screens flashed slogans and channel surfing, and East German Trabant cars hung above the stage as light fittings. Bono appeared as the Fly, as the greedy televangelist Mirror Ball Man, and finally as MacPhisto, a faded devil in gold lame and horns. He made prank calls from the stage, often trying to reach President George Bush at the White House. In August 1993 at Wembley, the author Salman Rushdie, then living under a death threat over The Satanic Verses, walked on stage to meet MacPhisto. The band played Stop Sellafield and protested at the nuclear plant.[1] [2]

In 1993 the tour carried live satellite link ups to Sarajevo, then under siege, arranged with the American aid worker Bill Carter, who crossed Sniper Alley at night to reach the television station. One night three women told the Wembley crowd that the band would go back to their rock show and forget them, and that they were all going to die. U2 promised to play there one day. In between legs they rushed out Zooropa, with Johnny Cash singing The Wanderer. The tour's final weeks were dark. On the twenty sixth of November 1993 in Sydney, Adam was too drunk to play after a blackout, and his bass technician Stuart Morgan stood in. Adam soon stopped drinking.[1] [2] [3]

Passengers, Pop and a giant lemon

In June 1993 U2 had signed a six album deal with Island and its owner PolyGram, reported to be worth sixty million dollars. After the tour they slowed down. In 1995 they gave Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me to the Batman Forever soundtrack. Then they made an experimental album with Brian Eno as a full partner, released under the name Passengers. It was a soundtrack for films that mostly did not exist. Larry later said they had crossed the thin line between interesting music and self indulgence. The best thing on it was Miss Sarajevo, with Luciano Pavarotti, which Bono counted among his favourite U2 songs. Adam and Larry, meanwhile, updated the Mission Impossible theme into a top ten American hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pop was a struggle from the start. Larry had back surgery in late 1995 for an injury carried since the Joshua Tree Tour, and while he recovered the others built songs on drum loops and samples. When he returned, the songs would not come together. Worse, the band let McGuinness book the PopMart tour before the album was finished, which Bono later called the worst decision U2 ever made. Pop's release slipped to March 1997 and ate into rehearsals. The first single, Discotheque, came with a video of the band dressed as the Village People. It went to number one in Britain, but the album dropped off the charts fast.[1] [2]

They announced the PopMart Tour on the twelfth of February 1997 with a press conference in the lingerie section of a Kmart in New York. The stage was a satire of shopping, with a one hundred foot golden arch, a giant cocktail olive and a forty foot mirrorball lemon that carried the band to a second stage. More than once it jammed and trapped them inside. Under rehearsed early shows played to half empty stadiums in parts of America. Yet it also drew a crowd of more than one hundred and fifty thousand in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and the band still thought that when it worked it was mind blowing. In 1998 they appeared on The Simpsons.[1] [2]

The night that mattered most was the twenty third of September 1997, when U2 kept their promise and played Sarajevo, the first major band to perform there after the Bosnian War. About forty five thousand people came, and organisers made sure all communities were represented. Trains ran for the first time since the war to bring people in. Bono's voice was failing and Miss Sarajevo fell apart, and he apologised to the crowd. The Edge sang Sunday Bloody Sunday alone. Larry said he would have spent twenty years in the band just to play that show. Bono called it one of the toughest and sweetest nights of his life.[1] [2]

Politics at home was changing too. In May 1998, days before the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, U2 played a concert in Belfast and Bono brought the rival leaders David Trimble and John Hume on stage to shake hands. The referendum passed. That year they also released their first greatest hits album, with a new version of Sweetest Thing, a song Bono had written as an apology to Ali after forgetting her birthday. Its proceeds went to the Chernobyl Children's Project, a cause Ali had worked on for years. The late nineties also brought loss. Bono's friend Michael Hutchence of INXS took his own life in 1997, and Bono later wrote a song for him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reapplying for the job

For their tenth album U2 went back to Eno and Lanois and back to four people playing in a room. All That You Can't Leave Behind was shaped by loss. Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of was Bono's imagined argument with Michael Hutchence, and Bono's father Bob was terminally ill throughout the sessions. Released in October 2000, it was hailed as a return to form. Beautiful Day won Song of the Year and Record of the Year at the Grammys, where Bono said U2 were reapplying for the job of best band in the world. Walk On was dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, and the military government of Burma banned the album.[1] [2]

The Elevation Tour of 2001 moved back into arenas, with a heart shaped walkway reaching into the crowd. That year Bono's father Bob Hewson died after a long illness. After the attacks of September eleventh, the album took on new meaning in America, and U2's October shows at Madison Square Garden became some of the most emotional of their lives. On the third of February 2002 they played the Super Bowl halftime show, projecting the names of the victims on a screen behind them, and at the end Bono opened his jacket to show an American flag lining. Many critics still rank it as the best halftime show ever. That month Walk On won Record of the Year, the second year running for the same album.[1] [2] [3]

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb took two attempts. The first version, made with Chris Thomas, had in Larry's words no magic, so Steve Lillywhite came back to rework it. In July 2004 a copy belonging to the Edge was stolen during a photo shoot in France. Released in November 2004, the album sold eight hundred and forty thousand copies in its first American week, and Vertigo became the soundtrack of an iPod advert. Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own, about Bono's father, went to number one in Britain. The title of another song, One Step Closer, came from Noel Gallagher, who said of Bono's dying father that he was one step closer to knowing whether God exists.[1] [2]

In March 2005 Bruce Springsteen inducted U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. The Vertigo Tour that followed earned three hundred and eighty nine million dollars, but it was nearly cancelled when the Edge's young daughter Sian fell seriously ill, and later dates were postponed so she could be treated. In February 2006 the album won every Grammy it was nominated for, including Album of the Year. In September U2 and Green Day reopened the Louisiana Superdome after Hurricane Katrina with a cover of The Saints Are Coming, part of the Edge's Music Rising charity, which replaced instruments for musicians who had lost everything.[1] [2] [3]

There was also criticism. In 2006, after Ireland capped a tax exemption for artists, U2 moved their music publishing business to the Netherlands. Irish politicians attacked the move, and critics pointed out the contrast with Bono's campaigns against poverty. The band replied that nearly all their business happened abroad and that they paid tax around the world. Bono's activism kept growing all the same. He helped found DATA, the ONE Campaign and Product Red, lobbied President George W. Bush on AIDS funding, was named one of Time's Persons of the Year for 2005, and was given an honorary British knighthood in 2007.[1] [2]

The Claw, a bicycle crash and a free album

Sessions for the next album began with Rick Rubin in 2006 but were shelved. In 2007 U2 went to Fez in Morocco with Eno and Lanois, now credited as co writers, to write what they called future hymns. No Line on the Horizon came out in February 2009 and earned a five star Rolling Stone review, but at five million copies it was seen as a disappointment. The tour was another matter. The U2 360 Tour put the band in the middle of stadiums under a giant four legged structure nicknamed the Claw, the largest stage ever built. On the twenty fifth of October 2009 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, they played to ninety seven thousand people, streamed live on YouTube.[1] [2] [3]

In May 2010, while rehearsing, Bono seriously injured his back and needed emergency surgery in Munich. The North American leg and a Glastonbury headline slot were pushed back a year. When U2 finally played Glastonbury in June 2011, campaigners from a group called Art Uncut inflated a huge balloon reading U Pay Your Tax 2, and security guards wrestled them to the ground. The 360 Tour ended in July 2011 as the highest grossing tour in history, at seven hundred and thirty six million dollars from more than seven million tickets. Those records stood until 2019. In November 2013 Paul McGuinness stepped down after more than thirty years, and Guy Oseary, Madonna's manager, took over.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the ninth of September 2014, at an Apple product launch, U2 announced Songs of Innocence and released it that same day, free, into the libraries of more than five hundred million iTunes customers. Apple's Tim Cook called it the largest album release of all time. Many people were furious to find a U2 album they had not asked for on their phones, and Apple had to build a tool to delete it. Bono defended it at the time, but in his 2022 memoir he took full responsibility. Buried under the row were deeply personal songs, about his mother, about Cedarwood Road, and about the 1974 Dublin bombings that killed thirty three people and that Bono narrowly missed.[1] [2]

On the sixteenth of November 2014 Bono crashed his bicycle in Central Park in New York while trying to avoid another rider. He broke his shoulder blade, his upper arm, the bone around his eye and a finger, and after five hours of surgery he wrote that it was not clear he would ever play guitar again. The Innocence and Experience Tour went ahead in 2015. Its final shows were in Paris, where two dates had been postponed after the terrorist attacks of the thirteenth of November, including the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall. U2 went back to Paris to play the rescheduled shows, and the final night was filmed and broadcast on HBO.[1] [2] [3]

Late in 2016 Bono had what the Edge called a brush with mortality. Only in his memoir did he explain that he had undergone eight hours of open heart surgery to repair a dangerous bulge in his aorta, caused by a heart valve defect he was born with. The scare, and the turn in world politics that year, led the band to rewrite Songs of Experience, released on the first of December 2017. It made U2 the first group to top the American album chart in four different decades. In 2017 they toured The Joshua Tree for its thirtieth anniversary, their first tour built on an old album, and in 2019 they played India, South Korea and Singapore for the first time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Surrender, the Sphere and fifty years

During the pandemic U2 gave ten million euro for protective equipment for Irish health workers. Bono and the Edge spent the lockdowns reworking forty old songs in stripped down arrangements, often with new words. In November 2022 Bono published his memoir, Surrender, which revealed his heart surgery and the discovery, made in 2000, that a man he had grown up thinking was a cousin was in fact his half brother, from an affair of his father's. The companion album, Songs of Surrender, came out in March 2023 and went to number one in Britain. In 2022 the band received the Kennedy Center Honors, and Irving Azoff replaced Guy Oseary as manager.[1] [2] [3]

In the autumn of 2023 U2 opened the Sphere, a new venue near the Las Vegas Strip wrapped in an enormous high resolution video screen. From the twenty ninth of September 2023 to the second of March 2024 they played forty shows built around Achtung Baby. For the first time since 1978 they did so without Larry Mullen, who needed surgery after years of wear on his elbows, knees and neck. The Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg of the band Krezip stood in. Some longtime fans objected to the Las Vegas setting and to playing without a founder, but critics were dazzled, and the run grossed about two hundred and forty five million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

The members' lives kept changing. In December 2024 Larry revealed that he has dyscalculia, which makes counting numbers extremely hard. Counting the bars of a song, he said, felt like climbing Everest, and it explained the pained look on his face on stage. Adam and his wife Mariana announced their divorce in 2024, and he appeared on the BBC's Gardeners' World showing off his camellias and magnolias. In January 2025 President Joe Biden gave Bono the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on AIDS and poverty. And in June 2025, after sixty two years living in Ireland, the Edge finally became an Irish citizen.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2026 U2 surprised everyone with new songs. On Ash Wednesday, the eighteenth of February, they released an EP called Days of Ash, with Larry back on drums. Bono called its songs ones of defiance and lamentation, written about the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by immigration agents, an Iranian schoolgirl beaten to death during protests, and a Palestinian activist killed in the West Bank, as well as the war in Ukraine. On Good Friday came a gentler EP, Easter Lily, about friendship, faith and loss. As of 2026, a new album, Carnaval de Luz, is due on the thirteenth of November. Its closing song, Torn, is a duet with Dolly Parton, her final recording before she died in August 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

On the twenty fifth of September 2026, fifty years to the day after that first rehearsal in Larry's kitchen, U2 went back to Mount Temple and played for about a thousand pupils and staff, with Larry live again for the first time since his surgery. That evening nearly five thousand people packed Grafton Street to hear them play from the balcony of Bewley's Cafe. The numbers behind them are enormous. As of 2026 they have sold an estimated one hundred and seventy million records, won twenty two Grammys, more than any other group, and ranked as one of the highest grossing live acts ever. And they are still the same four people who answered a note on a school board.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around U2

Bono and Ali Hewson. They met at Mount Temple when she was twelve, and after his mother died she looked after him, walking to school with him and cooking for him. They started dating in 1976 and married on the thirty first of August 1982. She volunteered beside him in Ethiopia in 1985, campaigned against Sellafield and for Chernobyl's children, and co founded the Edun fashion label with him. They have four children, including the actress Eve Hewson and Elijah, singer of the band Inhaler.[1] [2]

Bono and The Edge. They are U2's core songwriting partnership. Bono writes almost all the lyrics, while the Edge brings the musical ideas, from the riff of Sunday Bloody Sunday to the demo of Where the Streets Have No Name. From the late eighties they increasingly wrote together without the others, which caused friction in Berlin. Outside U2 they wrote the Bond theme GoldenEye for Tina Turner and the Broadway musical Spider Man, bought Dublin's Clarence Hotel, and made Songs of Surrender largely on their own.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.. U2's rhythm section began as two very different teenagers, one a self taught bassist who bluffed his way in with technical words, the other a marching band drummer. The writer Bill Flanagan said Larry plays slightly ahead of the beat and Adam slightly behind it, like their personalities. In 1995 they took formal lessons together in New York, and together they turned the Mission Impossible theme into a hit. In Berlin they were the pair resisting the new sound.[1] [2] [3]

U2 and Paul McGuinness. The Hot Press writer Bill Graham introduced McGuinness to the band in May 1978, and he managed them for thirty five years. At first the money was split equally five ways, a sign of how close he was, and he was often called the fifth member. He booked the gamble at the National Stadium that won their record deal, and also the PopMart dates that Bono later regretted. He stepped down in November 2013, when Live Nation bought his company.[1] [2] [3]

U2 and Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Eno nearly turned U2 down in 1984, and brought Lanois along as a backup. Together they produced The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, All That You Can't Leave Behind and No Line on the Horizon. Eno pushed the band away from anything too U2 sounding, while Lanois looked after the rhythm section and walked them through songs on a blackboard. Eno later became a full partner on the Passengers album, and he still advised them at the Sphere.[1] [2] [3] [4]

U2 and Steve Lillywhite. Lillywhite produced U2's first three albums, recording Larry's drums in a stairwell and coping with the chaos of October. He had a rule against working with any artist more than twice, but the band talked him into War. He kept coming back to rescue records, mixing The Joshua Tree at the last minute, taking over How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and advising on the sound at the Sphere. His then wife, the singer Kirsty MacColl, sequenced The Joshua Tree.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bono and Gavin Friday. They met as teenagers on Cedarwood Road, when Bono caught Fionan Hanvey at a party he had not been invited to, and they became lifelong friends in the Lypton Village gang. Gavin went on to form the Virgin Prunes, U2's regular opening act. He helped rescue With or Without You when the band wanted to abandon it, co wrote film songs with Bono, and still lives next door to him in Killiney.[1] [2] [3]

The Edge and Morleigh Steinberg. The Edge married his school girlfriend Aislinn O'Sullivan in 1983, and they had three daughters before separating in 1990, a breakup that shaped Achtung Baby. He met the American dancer Morleigh Steinberg when she became the choreographer and belly dancer on the Zoo TV Tour. She moved to Dublin in 1994, they married in France in 2002, and in 2024 they co directed the concert film of U2's Sphere shows.[1] [2] [3]

Adam Clayton and Naomi Campbell. During the Zoo TV years Adam dated the supermodel Naomi Campbell, and in May 1993 she announced that they were engaged. The relationship drew heavy tabloid attention, and by the end of that year it was falling apart while Adam was drinking heavily. After missing the Sydney show in November 1993 he gave up alcohol, and the relationship ended in 1994. He married Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho in 2013, and they divorced in 2024.[1] [2]

U2 and Chris Blackwell. Island Records signed U2 in March 1980, and its founder Chris Blackwell became an important ally. When Bono and Ali could not afford a honeymoon, he lent them his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. He was not always right. In 1984 he tried hard to stop the band hiring Brian Eno, fearing an avant garde mess, before Bono talked him round. In 1996 Bono, Ali and Blackwell were aboard Jimmy Buffett's seaplane when Jamaican police shot at it by mistake.[1] [2] [3]

U2 and Anton Corbijn. The Dutch photographer met the band on the October Tour and became their principal photographer, shaping how the world saw them. He found the lone Joshua tree, shot the desert sleeve with a panoramic camera he did not know how to focus, and photographed the playful, colourful Achtung Baby images that broke with their earnest past. He also directed videos for the band.[1] [2] [3]

Bono and Michael Hutchence. Bono was a close friend of the INXS singer Michael Hutchence. After Hutchence died in 1997, Bono wrote Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of as an imagined argument with him, telling his friend he could have got through. He also helped finish Hutchence's song Slide Away, adding a verse and his own vocal, for the singer's album released after his death in 1999.[1] [2]

Rare facts about U2

• Bono's stage name comes from Bonavox, a hearing aid shop just off O'Connell Street in Dublin. His friends in the Lypton Village gang first called him Bono Vox of O'Connell Street. He disliked it until he learned it roughly means good voice in Latin.[1]
• As a boy, the Edge spoke with a Welsh accent at home and an Irish accent outside. His parents were both from Llanelli in Wales. He later said the double identity helped him be understood and accepted by his friends. He only became an Irish citizen in 2025.[1]
• Larry Mullen added Junior to his name because his father kept receiving his tax bills. As U2 got successful, the tax demands meant for the drummer were landing on Larry Mullen senior. Adding the suffix ended the confusion.[1]
• Larry quit the Artane Boys Band after three weeks because they wanted his hair cut shorter. He trimmed a few inches, but the band asked for more. He refused and walked out, then bought a toy company drum kit with his savings.[1]
• Adam's bass line on New Year's Day grew out of a failed attempt to play Visage's Fade to Grey. It became one of his most recognisable parts. Adam has said the Stranglers' Hanging Around first convinced him the bass was his instrument.[1]
• The studio version of 40 has the Edge on bass, because Adam had already gone home. It was recorded in the last hours of the War sessions. Live, Adam and the Edge swap instruments for it, a tradition that started on the War Tour.[1]
• The violinist on Sunday Bloody Sunday offered his services to the Edge at a bus stop. Steve Wickham asked if U2 needed a violin on their next album. He spent half a day in the studio, and his electric violin became the song's final touch.[1]
• Kid Creole's backing singers, the Coconuts, sing on U2's War album. They happened to be touring in Dublin, so Steve Lillywhite brought them in. Lillywhite called it random to have them on a serious Irish rock record.[1]
• The American sleeve of Boy dropped the photo of a young boy, over fears it would be misread. The original cover showed Peter Rowen, brother of Bono's friend Guggi. Island replaced it abroad with distorted band photos made on a tiny budget.[1]
• Pride gets the time of Martin Luther King's death wrong. He was shot in the evening, not early morning. Bono admitted the mistake and often sang early evening live. The lyric was finally corrected on the 2023 album Songs of Surrender.[1]
• Recording at Slane Castle depended on a water wheel generator on the River Boyne. When the river ran low the voltage dropped and damaged the equipment. The backup diesel generator sometimes broke down or caught fire.[1]
• A mirror the band used to check their looks was left in the Joshua Tree gatefold photo by mistake. Anton Corbijn also struggled with an unfamiliar panoramic camera, focusing on the background, which left the band slightly blurred.[1]
• The Joshua Tree was the first new album released on CD, vinyl and cassette on the same day. Island spent over one hundred thousand dollars on displays, and British and Irish shops opened at midnight for the queues.[1]
• The Infinite Guitar used on With or Without You was a homemade prototype that gave electric shocks. Michael Brook sent it to the Edge. On later tours his guitar technician was occasionally shocked while preparing it.[1]
• Bono first wrote the lyrics of Where the Streets Have No Name on an airsickness bag in Ethiopia. He was volunteering there with Ali. The song contrasts Belfast, where your street reveals your religion and income, with the anonymity he felt in Africa.[1]
• The title Running to Stand Still came from Bono's brother, describing how his struggling business was going. Bono thought it summed up heroin addiction. The song's seven towers are the Ballymun flats near where he grew up.[1]
• Sweetest Thing was Bono's apology to Ali for forgetting her birthday while recording The Joshua Tree. Left off the album, it came out as a B side, then was re recorded in 1998 with a video full of apologies, including Boyzone and an elephant.[1] [2]
• Some vinyl copies of Rattle and Hum carry a hidden etched message, We Love You A.L.K. It was for the band's production manager Anne Louise Kelly, who got another secret dedication on some CD copies of Pop.[1]
• Bono claimed Hawkmoon 269 was mixed two hundred and sixty nine times. It was long thought to be a joke. The Edge later confirmed they really spent three weeks mixing it, but said the name came from a place in Rapid City, South Dakota.[1]
• Rejected titles for Achtung Baby included Man, 69, Fear of Women and Adam. Adam would have been paired with a nude photo of Adam Clayton, which ended up on the back cover and was covered with a black X in America.[1]
• Demo tapes from the Achtung Baby sessions were stolen and bootlegged before the album was finished. The three disc bootleg, called Salome, is considered the most famous U2 bootleg. The Edge said the leak felt like being violated.[1]
• On Zoo TV, Bono once ordered ten thousand pizzas from the stage. A Detroit pizzeria delivered one hundred. His stage prank calls also included sex lines, taxis and repeated attempts to reach the White House.[1]
• The first Trabant light fitting for Zoo TV used a lamp so hot it melted the car in five minutes. The crew switched to a smaller fixture. The painted Trabants later hung in the lobby of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1]
• Adam and Larry played One at Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural ball with two members of R.E.M. The one off group was called Automatic Baby, joining the album titles Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People.[1]
• U2's PopMart Tour began with a press conference in the lingerie section of a Kmart in New York. The location was kept secret until the night before, and the band played the B side Holy Joe there.[1]
• In 1996 Jamaican police opened fire on a seaplane carrying Bono, Ali and their daughters. The plane belonged to Jimmy Buffett, and police wrongly believed it was smuggling cannabis. Jamaica's government apologised.[1]
• Burma's military government banned All That You Can't Leave Behind. The reason was Walk On, which U2 dedicated to the pro democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest.[1]
• An unfinished copy of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was stolen from the Edge during a photo shoot in France. U2 threatened to release the album on iTunes at once if it leaked. It did leak months later, but they kept to their date.[1]
• Bono bought his New York apartment in the San Remo building from Steve Jobs. Jobs had renovated the top floor duplex for himself but never moved in.[1]
• In 2016 the Edge became the first rock artist to play a concert in the Sistine Chapel. He performed at a conference for the Angiogenesis Foundation, a health charity on whose board he serves.[1]
• Adam Clayton's former housekeeper was jailed for stealing about two point eight million euro from him. Carol Hawkins was convicted of one hundred and eighty one counts of theft in 2012 and sentenced to seven years.[1]
• Irish broadcaster RTE traditionally gets to play new U2 albums before anyone else. The band give the DJ Dave Fanning the first play, and RTE 2fm aired all of Songs of Innocence the day it came out.[1]
• Bono voiced a lion, the rock legend Clay Calloway, in the animated film Sing 2. It was one of several screen roles, from playing Dr Robert in Across the Universe to narrating his own Stories of Surrender film.[1]
• Before the Sphere, Live Nation's boss tried to talk Bono out of it, fearing the screen would make fans queasy. Madison Square Garden's James Dolan reportedly paid U2 ten million dollars to build the show, on top of four million per night.[1]
• A spider species, Aptostichus bonoi, is named after Bono. It is a small trapdoor spider in the genus Aptostichus, one of many species named after celebrities.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.