Over a couple of Edge guitar tracks-one a nervous wobble, the other a piercing cry-Bono imagines what Joy Division’s Ian Curtis must have been thinking in the lead-up to his May 1980 suicide. As for Bono, he’s ankle-deep in the sea, thinking about Oscar Wilde. After a couple of fast and direct ones, the band gets nebulous with a skeletal Edge guitar part and faint drum pattern.

One good thing about Boy: It ebbs and flows. The Edge, meanwhile, plays a spy-movie riff appropriate for the lyrics, all about Bono’s obsession with fictional male heroes society has groomed him to admire. The rhythm section carries this one-Mullen with some spirited hi-hat work and Clayton with one of those driving, melodic lines invented by Joy Division’s Peter Hook.

Amid all the raging, there’s a hushed middle section seemingly built for the kind of onstage pontificating Bono would make his thing. It’s a gift that keeps giving, in that “Out of Control” is the most punk-rock tune on Boy and a welcome jolt after the previous two songs. “I can go there.”īono awakes on his 18th birthday and unwraps a great big existential crisis. His riffs are the wispy clouds over Bono’s head as the singer holds fast to the childhood feelings he’s not ready to lose. Together, they explore the mysteries of sex-a topic so scary the song had to be titled with the Gaelic phrase for “the black cat.”Īn extension of the previous track, this sketch of a song features some of the Edge’s sparsest playing on the album. Growing pains abound.īono gets worked up, Clayton supplies remedial thump, and the Edge spins a spider web of a guitar figure. There are pointy post-punk licks, churning metal bits, and even a shrieking solo. Short of a well-crafted pop song, “Twilight” is a solid atmosphere piece allowing the Edge to showcase what, at the time, amounted to his versatility. It’s a big-room showstopper from a striving band not long for clubland.Įven if Bono isn’t singing about pedophilia, as that interloping “old man” in opening verses suggests, the young protagonist in this coming-of-age tune has landed in a dark place. Read on for a track-by-track take on this, a dark and bristly debut from a band now known for bringing bright lights and optimism to the stadiums of the world.įittingly, the first song on the first U2 album is certified roof-raiser stuffed with rumbling bass, insistent guitars, glockenspiel, and lyrics written about something very specific (the mother-child bond) yet delivered in a way that anyone can sing along and insert his or her own meaning. It all came together on 1987’s massive The Joshua Tree, the first of U2’s seven chart-topping albums. With 1983’s War, U2 stepped up its anthem game, while 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire established much of the sonic architecture that’s propped up subsequent works.

63 on the Billboard 200, producing no hit singles, the following year’s October stalled at No. It would take a few albums for U2’s abilities to catch up to its ambition - and for the public to catch on. “There’s a certain spark, a certain chemistry, that was special about the Stones, The Who and The Beatles, and I think it’s also special about U2,” he told Rolling Stone in February 1981, when he was still going by the name Bono Vox. While producer Steve Lilywhite mostly stays out of the way and lets the group careen through its songs - minimalist post-punk numbers with an obvious debt to English predecessors Joy Division - there’s a spirit to these performances that foretells greater things to come. Packed with prickly guitar sounds, strident beats and lyrics about the terrors of growing up and the grief Bono felt after losing his mother at 14, Boy is basically U2’s emo album.

Lyrics u2 a day without me