HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
[SIMG]http://forum.interference.com/gallery/data//585/11632boycvr_thumb.jpg[/SIMG]
By Teresa Rivas
2005.08
"I hope the young kids will like it as well, but I'm really talking to the people who grew up with me. I'm saying here I am now. How are you? How's your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn't the '70s a drag? You know, well here we are. Let's make the '80s good because it's still up to us to make what we can of it."
-John Lennon, in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor about his new album with Yoko Ono, just days before his assassination on December 8, 1980
"The name U2 is ambiguous, it's in between…like the tightrope that we're all treading."
-Bono in a 1980 Island Records biography
1980. The 70s are over, along with disco, gas shortages and bellbottoms. A new decade dawns, one that will be characterized in retrospect by yuppies and Wall Street, acid wash jeans and awakening to the AIDS epidemic. But not just yet. This year is just the beginning of a new era, before the history and the stereotypes set in, when U2 recorded its first full-length album, "Boy." It's before the hoards of screaming fans and the worldwide acclaim. It's the band's first audition tape in its bid to be the greatest band in the world.
Twenty-five years ago the oldest member of the newly christened U2, Adam Clayton, is just 20 years old and the youngest, Larry Mullen Jr., 19. Fans may wonder at the idea of a world without U2—many may have been recovering from “Saturday Night Fever” or were too young to be interested in music at the time. Others (like myself) have to count their age in negative years (-3) in 1980. But fear not, in a world erupting with war, tremendous loss of beloved cultural iconoclasts and an American Conservative Revolution, (sound familiar?) U2 was not about to let it all pass by.
In 1980 violence exploded in the Middle East, with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war in September, though in this case the United States directed it anger at the former, cutting ties with Iran in April after six U.S. embassy aides escaped with Canadian help from the Iran Hostage Crisis at the end of January.
Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and democrat, swept the U.S. presidency for the republicans in November, making way for the "Conservative Revolution" that many young people embraced, with its message of abstinence from the abundant use of drugs and casual sex that many felt debauched the generations of the past two decades.
Ted Turner launched CNN, the first 24-hour news network on cable. Smallpox was eradicated; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genetically engineered organisms could be patented. Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "The Executioner's Song" and Billy Joel the Grammy for Album of the Year with "52nd Street."
Along with John Lennon, the world will lose the French philosopher John Paul Sartre, the most influential mind of the existentialist movement, Alfred Hitchcock, the masterful director known for suspense, and Mae West, the risqué actress of the 1920s and '30s.
"Boy" debuted in October (a month that a certain group of dejected sports fans may remember as the last time the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series) to lukewarm critical reviews. Yet now as the Vertigo Tour seems to have brought the album full-circle, many of U2's opening acts and other popular new artists such as Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads and the Killers credit "Boy" as one of their muses.
To step back, he journey of "Boy" began in 1976 when the four band members got together and began practicing after school and on weekends as Feedback and The Hype. It was during these early sessions, trying to integrate the newly explosive sounds of the Sex Pistols into their repertoire, that inspired The Edge, then just Dave Evans, to later admit that "We were the worst cover version band in the world," according to Laura Jackson's "Bono: His Life, Music and Passions."
Things really began to congeal in 1978 when Edge's brother left the band and the foursome finally decided on a name once and for all, even if the drummer continues to prefer the name The Larry Mullen Band in private. Though it may have lost Dik Evans, the band gained an unofficial fifth member that year as well when Paul McGuinness, impressed by the band's performance and enthusiasm at the Dublin Project Arts Centre, agreed to become U2's manager, although, according to U2.com, he was unsure about the band's talent despite the members' vigor and commitment to one another.
On March 20 of that year, The Evening Press announced that "four Dublin schoolboys" carried off the top prize of £500 at the Limerick Civic Week Pop '78 Competition. In the audience was a CBS representative who would give the band studio time. The brief article names Adam, who said that U2 came to the concert as a "last resort" because no one in Dublin was interested in the group, as the group's leader. It also quotes an ever-optimistic Paul Hewson as saying after progressing from playing "country music to 'doing our own stuff,'" that the cash prize will help the band a great deal financially, providing new equipment. "Now we hope to be able to buy a van," he said, according to Hank Bordowitz's "The U2 Reader."
In a September 1980 article in Melody Maker, as the boys were playing rock 'n' roll for the first time in the studio, the descriptions of their characters are uncanny, almost prophetic, and serve as testament to the fact that no matter how much ego people ascribe to Bono or philandering to Clayton, these four friends have remained first and foremost true to themselves. "[W]ithin the studio the air is one of excitement, nervous tension and bubbling spirits," the reporter wrote. "Bono, our courteous host, is the epitome of this…The rest of U2 are just as refreshing. Larry the drummer is straight, unblinkered, down-to-earth…Guitarist The Edge is quiet yet firm, offset with a sly sense of humor. Adam the bassist carries himself with a nonchalant air, totally at ease with his surroundings and the people around him."
By this time there's little doubt that Bono is the gregarious frontman of U2 and does most of the talking. Little has changed in 25 years and the Bono of checkered pants and unruly pre-mullet tresses could easily be confused with the ubiquitous shades-wearing, multi-millionaire of today. "I see it as a grid and it's very easy to slip through that grid if you wear a suit and tie or if you wear long hair and jeans and are that type of band," "The U2 Reader" quotes him saying of young U2's place in music. "But bands who are individual can't slip through that easy. It is a problem on one hand because it does make it difficult to present the band to people who say 'What kind of band are they? Who do they sound like?' And of course we try not to sound like anything but ourselves. What I am saying is it takes a while because bands like us do get through but they don't slip through the grid. They have to smash it."
Twenty-five years is a while but here's Bono, once again, calling "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" the band's first record in the press. As for the grid, well, I guess we know why U2 built the bomb in the first place.
By all accounts, when U2 was in the recording studio for the first time, the band was as fresh-faced and eager as they looked, though strikingly mature. Many fans will complain that the band has never written a (conventional) great love song but it was evident from the beginning that a spoonful of U2 was not your typical fare.
Under Steve Lillywhite's direction, the band members for the first time felt the pressure of setting down definitive versions of songs they felt they'd played a million times and knew by heart, an especially difficult task for Bono who had to once and for all commit lyrics to the music. Despite fears that Lillywhite, an established name in the industry who'd previously worked with Ultravox, XTC and Siouxsie and the Banshees, would dominate U2's work, he was supportive and encouraging to the band's unique sound--listen for the bottle hitting the floor in "I Will Follow." In the end, the raw talent and training of The Edge and Larry would truly carry the album as Adam and Bono struggled to find their sound and footing while campaigning to bring the band into the spotlight. But they were enthusiastic through it all, reflecting the fact for all the tragedy and fear that had shaped their lives as young adolescents in Dublin, they were just that, young teenagers bubbling over as they embarked on this incredible journey, on life, full of struggling faith, burgeoning love and anger. As Bono said in Niall Stokes's "U2 Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song," "the songs are autobiographical" and the evidence of these issues are evident in the energy of "Boy's" songs. From the emergence of sexuality to the ultimate meaning of life, no subject is off limits to these boys, out to discover every mysterious facet of adolescent life and beyond.
The first song on the record, "I Will Follow," will represent "Boy" on the band's first greatest hits compilation and explodes onto the scene with the real duality that will pervade U2 throughout its storied career, as Bono is quoted as saying in Stokes's book, "'I Will Follow' has both anger, real anger, and an enormous sense of yearning." The allusions to Bono's late mother in the song are unmistakable and suffering such a tragic loss at the age of 14 it's understandable how strongly both emotions must have played into his life at the time. Often Bono has credited his mother's death with his relentless drive, a teenager who started running away from that pain and hasn't looked back since.
"Twilight" follows, a song that the band was surprised to learn made it popular in the gay community. Because of the ambiguous lyrics and multiple meanings of slang in Britain and the United States, a large segment of the gay community lauded the band for its frank discussions of sexuality that weren't rooted in machismo like those of every other rock 'n' roll band. While the band sought to be honest about the confusion that is the adolescent experience, it had no idea how the song had been interpreted by the group who were grateful to hear love from the heart of boys who would gladly admit they didn't have all the answers. "We didn't have a clue what was going on," Clayton recalled in "Into the Heart." "These guys used to turn up at our gigs, dressed in leather gear, with leather gloves on and so on, and we used to think of them as rich punks."
Who was "the black cat" of "An Cat Dubh/Into the Heart" (erroneously listed as two separate tracks on some U.S. editions)? U2 mate Gavin Friday assured Stokes that this song is about sex, in particular the brief relationship Bono had with another girl when he and (future wife) Ali were temporarily split up in high school. Bono likened the emotional tumult of that tryst to a cat playing with a bird it has caught. "It's like someone has taken you, thrown you around the place and then you sleep beside them," he told Stokes, considering that he changed things around a bit for the song but in the end thinks it was he who was the cat. Yet again the lyrics, which may have been improvised, a move Bono blames on Iggy Pop's lead, were ambiguous and universally appealing, but took a back seat to the music at that point, as they would continue to do until at least "The Unforgettable Fire," the singer recalled.
"'Out of Control' is about waking up on your 18th birthday and realizing you're 18 years old and the two most important decisions in your life have nothing to do with you—being born and dying," Bono told Stokes in 1979. Though he has since learned to take it more lightly, it is a song that any 18-year-old can relate to when the existential weight of existence hangs heavy over his head, with all his energy being pulled in every direction. The Edge, in Hot Press, credited this as one of U2's most enduring songs, recently revived on the Vertigo Tour, with the patience to find your own way in a world crowded with cliché guitar solos. "If you want a particular idea, you start picking instruments and amps and effects and what have you. When you start doing that, you start to develop a sound. Then, when you have a sound, you find certain things work better on that and you get into a certain vocabulary of music. And before you know what's happening, you're on the way to a style, a sound and to musicianship."
"Stories for Boys," one of the band's earliest songs which, like almost all of U2's songs, let people read into it what they would. McGuinness was convinced the song was about masturbation. It was also another song that the gay community greatly identified with, as Bono admitted to Stokes. "This was it. For the gays in our audience, this was definitely a love song to a man," he says, conceding to the double entendres easily unearthed in the lyrics. But he also said the song was reactionary, an example of how songs almost wrote themselves through him as a conduit. It's "a reaction against heavy advertising and television images and things like that. I remember seeing heroes on television—people like James Bond and so on—and thinking, 'I'm not very good looking—I'm not going to get things like that' and being unhappy about it."
While Bono's family had a small carriage by the sea when he was younger, "The Ocean" runs deeper than just these idyllic times of his youth, which were soon turned sour when the place was demolished during a property dispute. The lyrics are ripe with the literary influence Bono was steeped in at the time, as he enjoyed authors like Oscar Wilde—hence the Dorian Gray reference, as well as references to James Joyce. A soft but powerful piece, it too would find its way back into the spotlight again for the Vertigo Tour.
In "A Day Without Me," fans may listen to The Edge coming into his own, the echoes of that great distinctive sound to come, but it is a song not born of hope. "There were no jobs to get. It was like we were all going nowhere so we decided to go nowhere together and form a band," Mullen recalled in 1986 of U2's beginning. In such a desperate atmosphere it was no wonder that young people with energy were looking for a way out, and one way was suicide, attempted by one of Bono's acquaintances. The idea fascinated Bono, as he said, "would it make any difference if you did commit suicide?" Hence the vantage point of a graveyard, watching and noting who did and did not come to your own funeral.
"Another Time, Another Place," also encapsulates the duality that pervaded the band's struggle for identity. While it's a song of hope, a song with the hint of heady teenage romance, it is also one of loss—of innocence, of childhood, of direction, that keeps young adults on the cusp of their lives, in limbo.
You wouldn't guess from first hearing that "The Electric Co." was about a mental institution that favored electroshock therapy but, indeed, Bono confirmed that the song referred to the injustice he saw in veritable incarceration of patients at St. Brendan's psychiatric hospital who were riddled with Electro Convulsive Therapy. Yet he said it was a great release to perform the song, which has such energy, on stage, and release that anger, to strike back, saying it had a bit of the character Alex, the violent opera-loving punk from Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange," in the song.
"Shadows and Tall Trees" takes its title from fourth chapter in "Lord of the Flies," a book that greatly influenced Bono and his fellow Lypton Village members who shunned the endless compromise they saw in adulthood. "It's all about war," he said to Stokes. "We're stuck on this island of suburbia and we're turning on each other." It was a fitting end to this album, about the transition from childhood to adulthood, with the hope and fears and beliefs and all that they couldn't leave behind.
At the end of some U.K. editions of "Boy" there's a hidden track, an instrumental that was a demo for "Fire," a song that would appear on U2's sophomore work, "October." But that's an entirely different story.
By Teresa Rivas
2005.08
"I hope the young kids will like it as well, but I'm really talking to the people who grew up with me. I'm saying here I am now. How are you? How's your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn't the '70s a drag? You know, well here we are. Let's make the '80s good because it's still up to us to make what we can of it."
-John Lennon, in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor about his new album with Yoko Ono, just days before his assassination on December 8, 1980
"The name U2 is ambiguous, it's in between…like the tightrope that we're all treading."
-Bono in a 1980 Island Records biography
1980. The 70s are over, along with disco, gas shortages and bellbottoms. A new decade dawns, one that will be characterized in retrospect by yuppies and Wall Street, acid wash jeans and awakening to the AIDS epidemic. But not just yet. This year is just the beginning of a new era, before the history and the stereotypes set in, when U2 recorded its first full-length album, "Boy." It's before the hoards of screaming fans and the worldwide acclaim. It's the band's first audition tape in its bid to be the greatest band in the world.
Twenty-five years ago the oldest member of the newly christened U2, Adam Clayton, is just 20 years old and the youngest, Larry Mullen Jr., 19. Fans may wonder at the idea of a world without U2—many may have been recovering from “Saturday Night Fever” or were too young to be interested in music at the time. Others (like myself) have to count their age in negative years (-3) in 1980. But fear not, in a world erupting with war, tremendous loss of beloved cultural iconoclasts and an American Conservative Revolution, (sound familiar?) U2 was not about to let it all pass by.
In 1980 violence exploded in the Middle East, with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war in September, though in this case the United States directed it anger at the former, cutting ties with Iran in April after six U.S. embassy aides escaped with Canadian help from the Iran Hostage Crisis at the end of January.
Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and democrat, swept the U.S. presidency for the republicans in November, making way for the "Conservative Revolution" that many young people embraced, with its message of abstinence from the abundant use of drugs and casual sex that many felt debauched the generations of the past two decades.
Ted Turner launched CNN, the first 24-hour news network on cable. Smallpox was eradicated; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genetically engineered organisms could be patented. Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "The Executioner's Song" and Billy Joel the Grammy for Album of the Year with "52nd Street."
Along with John Lennon, the world will lose the French philosopher John Paul Sartre, the most influential mind of the existentialist movement, Alfred Hitchcock, the masterful director known for suspense, and Mae West, the risqué actress of the 1920s and '30s.
"Boy" debuted in October (a month that a certain group of dejected sports fans may remember as the last time the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series) to lukewarm critical reviews. Yet now as the Vertigo Tour seems to have brought the album full-circle, many of U2's opening acts and other popular new artists such as Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads and the Killers credit "Boy" as one of their muses.
To step back, he journey of "Boy" began in 1976 when the four band members got together and began practicing after school and on weekends as Feedback and The Hype. It was during these early sessions, trying to integrate the newly explosive sounds of the Sex Pistols into their repertoire, that inspired The Edge, then just Dave Evans, to later admit that "We were the worst cover version band in the world," according to Laura Jackson's "Bono: His Life, Music and Passions."
Things really began to congeal in 1978 when Edge's brother left the band and the foursome finally decided on a name once and for all, even if the drummer continues to prefer the name The Larry Mullen Band in private. Though it may have lost Dik Evans, the band gained an unofficial fifth member that year as well when Paul McGuinness, impressed by the band's performance and enthusiasm at the Dublin Project Arts Centre, agreed to become U2's manager, although, according to U2.com, he was unsure about the band's talent despite the members' vigor and commitment to one another.
On March 20 of that year, The Evening Press announced that "four Dublin schoolboys" carried off the top prize of £500 at the Limerick Civic Week Pop '78 Competition. In the audience was a CBS representative who would give the band studio time. The brief article names Adam, who said that U2 came to the concert as a "last resort" because no one in Dublin was interested in the group, as the group's leader. It also quotes an ever-optimistic Paul Hewson as saying after progressing from playing "country music to 'doing our own stuff,'" that the cash prize will help the band a great deal financially, providing new equipment. "Now we hope to be able to buy a van," he said, according to Hank Bordowitz's "The U2 Reader."
In a September 1980 article in Melody Maker, as the boys were playing rock 'n' roll for the first time in the studio, the descriptions of their characters are uncanny, almost prophetic, and serve as testament to the fact that no matter how much ego people ascribe to Bono or philandering to Clayton, these four friends have remained first and foremost true to themselves. "[W]ithin the studio the air is one of excitement, nervous tension and bubbling spirits," the reporter wrote. "Bono, our courteous host, is the epitome of this…The rest of U2 are just as refreshing. Larry the drummer is straight, unblinkered, down-to-earth…Guitarist The Edge is quiet yet firm, offset with a sly sense of humor. Adam the bassist carries himself with a nonchalant air, totally at ease with his surroundings and the people around him."
By this time there's little doubt that Bono is the gregarious frontman of U2 and does most of the talking. Little has changed in 25 years and the Bono of checkered pants and unruly pre-mullet tresses could easily be confused with the ubiquitous shades-wearing, multi-millionaire of today. "I see it as a grid and it's very easy to slip through that grid if you wear a suit and tie or if you wear long hair and jeans and are that type of band," "The U2 Reader" quotes him saying of young U2's place in music. "But bands who are individual can't slip through that easy. It is a problem on one hand because it does make it difficult to present the band to people who say 'What kind of band are they? Who do they sound like?' And of course we try not to sound like anything but ourselves. What I am saying is it takes a while because bands like us do get through but they don't slip through the grid. They have to smash it."
Twenty-five years is a while but here's Bono, once again, calling "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" the band's first record in the press. As for the grid, well, I guess we know why U2 built the bomb in the first place.
By all accounts, when U2 was in the recording studio for the first time, the band was as fresh-faced and eager as they looked, though strikingly mature. Many fans will complain that the band has never written a (conventional) great love song but it was evident from the beginning that a spoonful of U2 was not your typical fare.
Under Steve Lillywhite's direction, the band members for the first time felt the pressure of setting down definitive versions of songs they felt they'd played a million times and knew by heart, an especially difficult task for Bono who had to once and for all commit lyrics to the music. Despite fears that Lillywhite, an established name in the industry who'd previously worked with Ultravox, XTC and Siouxsie and the Banshees, would dominate U2's work, he was supportive and encouraging to the band's unique sound--listen for the bottle hitting the floor in "I Will Follow." In the end, the raw talent and training of The Edge and Larry would truly carry the album as Adam and Bono struggled to find their sound and footing while campaigning to bring the band into the spotlight. But they were enthusiastic through it all, reflecting the fact for all the tragedy and fear that had shaped their lives as young adolescents in Dublin, they were just that, young teenagers bubbling over as they embarked on this incredible journey, on life, full of struggling faith, burgeoning love and anger. As Bono said in Niall Stokes's "U2 Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song," "the songs are autobiographical" and the evidence of these issues are evident in the energy of "Boy's" songs. From the emergence of sexuality to the ultimate meaning of life, no subject is off limits to these boys, out to discover every mysterious facet of adolescent life and beyond.
The first song on the record, "I Will Follow," will represent "Boy" on the band's first greatest hits compilation and explodes onto the scene with the real duality that will pervade U2 throughout its storied career, as Bono is quoted as saying in Stokes's book, "'I Will Follow' has both anger, real anger, and an enormous sense of yearning." The allusions to Bono's late mother in the song are unmistakable and suffering such a tragic loss at the age of 14 it's understandable how strongly both emotions must have played into his life at the time. Often Bono has credited his mother's death with his relentless drive, a teenager who started running away from that pain and hasn't looked back since.
"Twilight" follows, a song that the band was surprised to learn made it popular in the gay community. Because of the ambiguous lyrics and multiple meanings of slang in Britain and the United States, a large segment of the gay community lauded the band for its frank discussions of sexuality that weren't rooted in machismo like those of every other rock 'n' roll band. While the band sought to be honest about the confusion that is the adolescent experience, it had no idea how the song had been interpreted by the group who were grateful to hear love from the heart of boys who would gladly admit they didn't have all the answers. "We didn't have a clue what was going on," Clayton recalled in "Into the Heart." "These guys used to turn up at our gigs, dressed in leather gear, with leather gloves on and so on, and we used to think of them as rich punks."
Who was "the black cat" of "An Cat Dubh/Into the Heart" (erroneously listed as two separate tracks on some U.S. editions)? U2 mate Gavin Friday assured Stokes that this song is about sex, in particular the brief relationship Bono had with another girl when he and (future wife) Ali were temporarily split up in high school. Bono likened the emotional tumult of that tryst to a cat playing with a bird it has caught. "It's like someone has taken you, thrown you around the place and then you sleep beside them," he told Stokes, considering that he changed things around a bit for the song but in the end thinks it was he who was the cat. Yet again the lyrics, which may have been improvised, a move Bono blames on Iggy Pop's lead, were ambiguous and universally appealing, but took a back seat to the music at that point, as they would continue to do until at least "The Unforgettable Fire," the singer recalled.
"'Out of Control' is about waking up on your 18th birthday and realizing you're 18 years old and the two most important decisions in your life have nothing to do with you—being born and dying," Bono told Stokes in 1979. Though he has since learned to take it more lightly, it is a song that any 18-year-old can relate to when the existential weight of existence hangs heavy over his head, with all his energy being pulled in every direction. The Edge, in Hot Press, credited this as one of U2's most enduring songs, recently revived on the Vertigo Tour, with the patience to find your own way in a world crowded with cliché guitar solos. "If you want a particular idea, you start picking instruments and amps and effects and what have you. When you start doing that, you start to develop a sound. Then, when you have a sound, you find certain things work better on that and you get into a certain vocabulary of music. And before you know what's happening, you're on the way to a style, a sound and to musicianship."
"Stories for Boys," one of the band's earliest songs which, like almost all of U2's songs, let people read into it what they would. McGuinness was convinced the song was about masturbation. It was also another song that the gay community greatly identified with, as Bono admitted to Stokes. "This was it. For the gays in our audience, this was definitely a love song to a man," he says, conceding to the double entendres easily unearthed in the lyrics. But he also said the song was reactionary, an example of how songs almost wrote themselves through him as a conduit. It's "a reaction against heavy advertising and television images and things like that. I remember seeing heroes on television—people like James Bond and so on—and thinking, 'I'm not very good looking—I'm not going to get things like that' and being unhappy about it."
While Bono's family had a small carriage by the sea when he was younger, "The Ocean" runs deeper than just these idyllic times of his youth, which were soon turned sour when the place was demolished during a property dispute. The lyrics are ripe with the literary influence Bono was steeped in at the time, as he enjoyed authors like Oscar Wilde—hence the Dorian Gray reference, as well as references to James Joyce. A soft but powerful piece, it too would find its way back into the spotlight again for the Vertigo Tour.
In "A Day Without Me," fans may listen to The Edge coming into his own, the echoes of that great distinctive sound to come, but it is a song not born of hope. "There were no jobs to get. It was like we were all going nowhere so we decided to go nowhere together and form a band," Mullen recalled in 1986 of U2's beginning. In such a desperate atmosphere it was no wonder that young people with energy were looking for a way out, and one way was suicide, attempted by one of Bono's acquaintances. The idea fascinated Bono, as he said, "would it make any difference if you did commit suicide?" Hence the vantage point of a graveyard, watching and noting who did and did not come to your own funeral.
"Another Time, Another Place," also encapsulates the duality that pervaded the band's struggle for identity. While it's a song of hope, a song with the hint of heady teenage romance, it is also one of loss—of innocence, of childhood, of direction, that keeps young adults on the cusp of their lives, in limbo.
You wouldn't guess from first hearing that "The Electric Co." was about a mental institution that favored electroshock therapy but, indeed, Bono confirmed that the song referred to the injustice he saw in veritable incarceration of patients at St. Brendan's psychiatric hospital who were riddled with Electro Convulsive Therapy. Yet he said it was a great release to perform the song, which has such energy, on stage, and release that anger, to strike back, saying it had a bit of the character Alex, the violent opera-loving punk from Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange," in the song.
"Shadows and Tall Trees" takes its title from fourth chapter in "Lord of the Flies," a book that greatly influenced Bono and his fellow Lypton Village members who shunned the endless compromise they saw in adulthood. "It's all about war," he said to Stokes. "We're stuck on this island of suburbia and we're turning on each other." It was a fitting end to this album, about the transition from childhood to adulthood, with the hope and fears and beliefs and all that they couldn't leave behind.
At the end of some U.K. editions of "Boy" there's a hidden track, an instrumental that was a demo for "Fire," a song that would appear on U2's sophomore work, "October." But that's an entirely different story.
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I'd like to hear that.
