Bono and Co still offering salvation 30 years later

World of Politics with Harry McGee  – harrymcgee@gmail.com

The U2 concert in Croke Park last weekend brought back a cascade of memories for me. I was obsessed with the band when I was a teenager and had seen them twice in Galway (Leisureland and Seapoint) when I was 15. I was too young to see the band’s first ever gig in Galway which was in the Claddagh Hall.

This was the early 1980s and band hadn’t broken anywhere yet outside a growing group of dedicated fans. Global stardom was still two or three years into the future. I think the Leisureland gig was the first.

It’s important to try to categorise it because that was really important to us as teenagers. Punk had come and gone. We were in the post-punk phase which was new wave. That was Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Clash and the Cure. Ska was also big at the time thanks to the Specials, the Selector, Bad Manners and the more poppy Madness.

U2 were definitely the Irish new wave band. They were really cool to my 15-year old eyes. The Edge wore monkey boots that had been spray painted racing green. In the Seapoint gig Bono wore a torn vest, with a homemade imprint of his hand on it.  I had taken to wearing a Fedora hat. I bought it on a trip to Dublin in a man’s hat shop called Coyle’s on Aungier Street that is no longer there. We were so enthusiastic that we sneaked in in early afternoon for the sound check. Bono came down to us and asked us had we a copy of Hot Press (which we probably did). He then admired my hat and I promptly gave it to him. He wore it on stage that night which provided my microscopic sliver of narrative action in the life and times of Bono.

For us growing up then, there always seemed a political element to the music. It wasn’t the precise, articulate and deliberate anti-war messages of the 1960s, more of an energy and emotion, raging almost randomly against the machine.

Still, you felt that by following a certain kind of music, you were also invested in something wider, a statement about society, or rather against society. That had different degrees of articulation and extremity. At the most extreme end, there were the remnants of the punk bands such as Public Image Limited (PIL) with their message of anarchy and chaos.

In Britain, which provided us with our pop culture reference points, the messages (such as they were) were directed against Margaret Thatcher. The political background at the time was the widespread mining strikes that caused massive division in the UK. There were also the Greenham Common protests, led by women mainly, against nuclear power.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.