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tuwie said:
thanks for sharing these quotes, guys.
with each one, i love U2 more and more (if that's even possible!)
i seriously can't wait to get the book.
one thing i noticed that was pretty darn awesome was that larry said their first meeting was September 25th, 1976. I think it's no coincidence that the book is coming out on september 26th 2006. (because new releases don't come out on mondays). 30 years. coincidence? i think not =)
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I knew it, I knew this book was for the anniversary, u cant let 30 years go by and recognize such an accomplishment!
 
I just loooooove the fact to that its written in their own words, not someone assuming stuff......YAY!! HAPPY 30th ANNIVERSARY TO THEM!!! (I sometimes get scared when I realise I'm as old as the band (well 2 months older to be exact....)
 
haha, don't know if it was bragging or feeling young and insignifcant worshipping guys that are old enough to have got a band together the year I was born......hehe :hug: But damn, that ain't gonna stop me! :drool:
 
Nice long excerpts here, as well as some great pictures:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8802-2359599.html

AdamU2byU2.jpg


BonoU2byU2.jpg


EdgeU2byU2.jpg


LarryU2byU2.jpg
 
gluey said:
haha, don't know if it was bragging or feeling young and insignifcant worshipping guys that are old enough to have got a band together the year I was born......hehe :hug: But damn, that ain't gonna stop me! :drool:
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Well...ahem....I am the perfect age for all of them. :wink:

go check out plebans photos.:kiss:
 
I could see how Bono could be a ladies man he was really cute when he was in high school. He would definately be the guy that would turn my head walking by in the hall. :drool:
 
Thanks, Kelly and Flavia, for the kind words.:wave:

I'll type some more exerpts in the next couple of days, as time allows. There's no shortage of great material, but the trick is finding something that's got some "punch" to it but that isn't a bejillion words long.

Next up, some more Edge, then Mullen and then Clayton (if the book hasn't come out by then, LOL!) And probably some more Bono, too. :wink:

And thanks, Ms. Purrl, for that link. Just a note to everyone: That last quote from Adam is actually only three sentences long. The rest, including the "I thank God" part, is from Bono. (Of course.)
 
Cassandra said:
tuwie, I don't think it's a coincidence either. I just got my copy yesterday at the Strand bookstore here, it was the last copy and at half price too! After going through the book several times just looking at the pictures, I've decided that I'm not going to read through the book in chronological order, but look through the index and find a subject to read about. Great book!
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So YOU'RE the one that beat me to it, I just popped in there today to see if they had any, and nada. :sad: :wink:
 
I have a question about the deluxe ed . according to amazon uk ,
only 5,000 to 10,000 copies will be printed . I ordered my copy on
amazon as did many others , do you think to is possible that some of us will not receive our copies if sales exceed 10,000 ? :ohmy: Very worried .
 
biff said:
There's no shortage of great material, but the trick is finding something that's got some "punch" to it but that isn't a bejillion words long.
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I had to laugh at this quote from Bono:

"When it was time for me to go to secondary school, my mother took me down to be interviewed by the headmaster of St Patrick’s grammar school. It was linked to St Patrick’s cathedral and it was well known for its boys’ choir. I spent a year there, not being happy, and basically they asked me to leave. I was caught throwing dog shit at the Spanish teacher. I did not have a high opinion of her, and I suspect the feeling was mutual."

I'll bet he was a terror! :yikes:
 
Biff, you're doing a wonderful job finding and posting all these amzing snippets from the new book. Thank you SO MUCH for your efforts. These quotes are truly a great read, and every single one makes me want to own the book even more. I can hardly wait to get hold of a copy. I just wanted to ask you what the book has to offer in the picture department. I've already seen the pictures of the four of them in their early pre-Boy era. Does the book feature a lot of photographs, too? Are there a lot of previously unseen pictures in it? Not that I wouldn't buy it, if there weren't, but... I am just curious...Thanks.
 
AntonCorbijn said:
Biff, you're doing a wonderful job finding and posting all these amzing snippets from the new book. Thank you SO MUCH for your efforts. These quotes are truly a great read, and every single one makes me want to own the book even more. I can hardly wait to get hold of a copy. I just wanted to ask you what the book has to offer in the picture department. I've already seen the pictures of the four of them in their early pre-Boy era. Does the book feature a lot of photographs, too? Are there a lot of previously unseen pictures in it? Not that I wouldn't buy it, if there weren't, but... I am just curious...Thanks.
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The book is actually pretty overwhelming. There is a massive amount of text and an equally huge number of photos, a very great many of which I had never seen before.

And you're very welcome!:wave:
 
biff said:
Okay, here I am back at it.

By special request, for the Edge-ophiles:

"I was a very cute toddler; I've seen the photographs. But then at around the age of five something started to happen that radically changed my appearance. We are not talking here about some accidental injury or anything medical, but a gradual transformation. And I don't mean to suggest that I became one of the obviuolsy ugly kids, more that my appearance started to inspire a certain mild alarm in adults who caught sight of me for the first time, and to elicit sympathetic and vaguely disappointed looks from my parents. My head grew, quite quickly, to an unfeasably large size. It was not a disagreeable head, in certain contexts it was quite handsome, but from the age of five as a result of this unusual development I started to look unnervingly like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine. Along with the head came the teeth, or specifically my two big front teeth. When they first appeared sprouting out of my gums, I knew there was something up. Their size was obvious from the beginning, and they grew in with a kind of terrible inevitability. No matter what form of mouth management I employed there was just no hiding them, so by age seven the full 'Mad magazine' look was complete. This was made all the more difficult by the fact that my best friend Shane, a person from whom I was pretty much inseparable from the age of two, was a dead ringer for a young Paul Newman, complete with cornflower-blue eyes and perfect teeth. He knew it, as did everybody else. A year older than me, Shane was superpopular, a great athlete and in many ways my nemesis. I went through some very formative years as the proverbial ugly duckling with my mate Shane a constant reminder that I was nothing special. The upshot was that I grew even more shy and awkward. I think that kind of experience is either the making or the breaking of you. And in my case having a very supportive home life helped a lot, but I didn't see that at the time....
My sister, Gillian, was born in 1963 into our male-dominated household. It took us a while to get used to her. I think my nose was put seriously out of joint when she arrived. I was the apple of my mother's eye up until that point, or certainly until I started to grow the large head....
My brother and I always had a very close rapport, and very similar sense of humour and general outlook. We hung out together, created various types of homemade explosives, petrol bombs, built bonfires, went on joyrides with our friends in dumper trucks borrowed from local construction sites, all the usual sort of stuff. And if people didn't quite understand us, we understood each other. We were a bit of a handful but very good-natured. It was the combination of curiosity, wildness, lack of strict parental control, and access to a fully stocked school chemistry lab that led to our experiments, anything really to break the tedium of the Dublin suburbs of the 1970s....
My best friend Shane was in my class at St. Andrew's. I was a year younger than the rest of the class and it was decided during my final year that I wasn't old enough to graduate. Shane went ahead into the big school and we sort of lost touch with each other. I met him one day soon after he had started at Mount Temple and he told me about this wild kid in his class called Paul Hewson. He seemed to share our interest on high explosives; there was some sort of story involving a small fire and some riveting caps taken from the building site that was to become our new school. So I heard about Bono a couple of years before I even met him. You could say his reputation preceded him."


There's much, much more about his childhoood, and a really funny picture of himself and his friend Shane looking exactly as he described them both: one impossibly handsome, the other an Alfred E. Neuman dead-ringer. Hilarious! He's very droll, and very articulate.
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Ok I seriously *tried* to stay away from this thread......I COULDNT!!! I was/am waiting for my book to arrive but i too k a sneak peak and OMG....this story ios GREAT!!!!!>>I cant ait for the book...I might as well get a bit of taste with these postings...THANK YOU....I'll read on now...:wink:
 
biff said:
About some early performance disasters:

Larry: "We played a gig during a break at a school disco, in the basement of the old school building. It used to get really hot and sweaty down there, and the walls would drip with condensation. As we were playing, The Edge decided to run up the wall. He slipped and fell flat on his arse. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry."

Edge: "In a moment of pure adrenalin, I tried to run up the wall, not realizing that this move might have been OK earlier on in the day but was now lethal, as the walls were dripping with sweat from a few hours of heaving disco. So I take a run at it and try to step up the wall but fail to get any traction whatsoever and my shoe slips and 'whack!', I end up flat on my back in the middle of the stage, still playing, in agony but pretending that it hadn't hurt at all.
We had lined up a gig up at the Nucleus, a little club in Raheny, but we played so badly at the school disco that the DJ who worked the the Nucleus, who was also from Mount Te
mple, wouldn't put us on. He insisted on coming to an audition. We played him some songs and very begrudgingly he put us on at the Nucleus. Before the show we decided to go and get drunk, because we knew that was what you did when you were in a rock band. So, as appalling as we normally were, we were just indescribably bad, and the sound was atrocious. We were in this tiny little prefab scout hut and we couldn't afford a proper PA. We recorded the show and a couple of days afterwards we listened to it in utter disbelief at what we were hearing. Bono was just bellowing and all you could hear was this really distorted noise that sounded like the early Stooges. Unfortunately I thnk we were playing an Eagles song. That was the same occasion Bono introduced 'Jumping Jack Flash' and my brother started playing 'Brown Sugar', getting his Stones mixed up. It was truly oine of the absolute low points. Everyone was out of tune. On the recording you can hear the DJ leaning in when we're halfway through the set saying, 'Would you ever just stop? Please stop! They're all sitting outside.' Listening back to that show, it was the first time I thought, 'Oh God, no! This isn't going to work.' We were so hopelessly inconsistent. One show would have that moment of promise and coming together then the next three would be utterly crap."
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OMG!!!! :lmao:
 
Here are some quotes concerning the spiritual crisis the band faced during the recording of October:

Larry: "The recording was hard graft. We also had a problem with the Christian meetings hanging over our heads. Some in the Christian meeting felt we should give up the band and go and do something more spiritually edifying. Edge in particular was questioning everything. I felt that the meetings were starting to get scary, people were becoming really radical. Myself and my father had come to blows over the whole thing. He had studied theology and thought that we were simplifying something that was complex. We would go at it for hours. So we just stopped talking about it. Shalom continued to get more and more intense, there were frequent prayer meetings and considerable pressure to attend every one. It was as if your were awarded stripes for being there, and if you didn't show up, somebody was asking why. It was starting to feel all wrong."

Edge: "It was a little bit of a difficult time as we tried to reconcile completely contrasting imperatives. On one level to try and be as true on a spiritual front as we could be, and then on the other level to be in the best rock 'n' roll band we could ever be in. So there was an element of uncertainty going forward."

Larry: "The idea was to create a Christian community, where people would live and work under strict standards. When you're young and impressionable it all sounds ideal. But there was something terribly wrong with the concept. It was a bit like the bigger the commitment you made, the closer you were to heaven. It was a really screwed-up view of the world and nothing to do with what I now understand a Christian faith to be. There was huge pressure to follow that path and what made it even stranger was that rather than it coming from the church leaders, it was coming from our friends. I learned a lot though and I also gained a faith I didn't have before, and that's still with me."

Bono: "Edge left the band. But he didn't tell the band, he just told me, and I wasn't interested in being in the band if he wasn't. He was saying: 'This is great, what we're doing, but there is another world out there and that's what I want to be part of. And the real cure to the world's ills does not lie in a post-punk band but in developing yourself spiritually and finding your place and finding God's purpose for your life.' He was feeling at this point in time that he couldn't serve both God and man. I decided I couldn't either, so we both quit."

Edge: "It was a very, very clear fork in the road really. I wanted to take stock, to find out if what we were doing was in fact going down the wrong road. We were listening to all this negativity from people who were supposed to be our friends, telling us we can't continue in this band, it's not right. I said to Bono, 'Look, I'm quite happy to give this up if it's not the right thing for us but I need to find out. Are these people a little nuts or do they have an insight that I've been missing?' Bono understood my position and thought this was the right way to deal with it, hit it head on. He wasn't interested himself in going ahead if it wasn't the right thing. So I took a bit of time to get it straight in my own head who was to be trusted. I thought that the answer would become very clear, and it did."

Larry: "Edge left the band, I left the meetings."

Bono: "Giving up the band was very hard to do, because we both loved what we were doing. But something very powerful happened there. Sometimes you have to let go of what you love to really have it. Without being too melodramatic, it's like Abraham waits all his life for a son, and then God tells him to go down and sacrifice Isaac. It's one of the wildest episodes in the scriptures. But it seemed that when we got it back it was going to be even more powerful. The sort of spiritual ideas that were going around at that time were very profound but very heavy. Christ saying: 'He that loves his life shall lose it.' I mean, this is pretty extreme. This suggests that if you really want to live, you can't hold on to your life too tightly. You have to let go, you have to surrender. I'm not sure I understood that back then but, in my zealotry, I didn't want there to be anything in my life that came between me and God, including music. Because, of course, you can make anything an idol: it doesn't have to be money or it doesn't have to be fame - anything can get in the way. Smugness, for instance. Years later, I had a better understanding. You can hold on to something so tight it's like you've already lost it. And that's one of those deep spiritual insights that took me a long time to discover. It makes you very weak to want something so badly. When you let it go you're much more powerful. And something happened around that time, where we let go of the thing we'd wanted all our lives, the thing that had given me a way to face the world again, that made sense of me. That album, in a way, was where U2 said: 'We will go wherever we have to go. We will break all the rules of hipness. We will be as raw emotionally as we have to be, in order to be honest. Even after that, we were giving up the band. It was really pushing it as far as we could to prove that we couldn't be bought off by ambition. And I think it's an amazing thing, we nearly succeeded in derailing the band, but at the same time we regained it more fully."

Edge: "I felt very clearly that this band had something unique and special, and it was completely bogus to suggest that you couldn't have a legitimate spiritaul life AND be in the rock 'n' roll business. That was a dangerous piece of nonsense. That's not to say that the people involved in Shalom were in any way bad people, it's just that, in a group dynamic, ideas sometimes gain credibility when they really shouldn't. It was a necessary thing to get through.
It was the beginning of our extricating ourselves from that system of peer support. I'm sure it was a big relief to Adam when we started to drift away from that very close-knit group and trust our own counsel."



[They began to distance themselves from the Shalom community, but their own U2 community became increasingly more intimate]:

Edge: "We rented a little place on the beach in Howth, on the north side of Dublin. As soon as we got off the road [after the October tour] we started going there and working up ideas. The band were basically sponsoring a little house for Bono and Ali that we could also use as rehearsal space. No one minded, because they were skint and, like the rest of us, either living at home or in some dodgy flat."

Bono: "It was an old mews house; it might once have been a stable. It had three rooms, the band took the living-room, myself and Ali took the bedroom and we all shared the kitchen. It was an idyllic spot with the waves crashing on the walls of the house. I remember it as a really great time, songwriting and just being in a band."

Adam: "What must it have been like for Ali to have us in there? Amazing that she put up with us."

Bono: "In the interests of decorum, I would like to point out that Ali and I did not move in until we were legally wed. You know, I'm a bit of a stray dog. I would not have been in the queue to get married had I not met someone as extraordinary as Ali. I always felt more myself with her than with anybody. I met a beautiful couple on that tour and I was talking to them about the love of my life, and they were saying, 'Are you going to get married?' I said 'Well gosh, I never thought about that.' And they told me, 'If you've got that sort of thing, you should never let it go.' And I took their advice.
Adam was my best man. For all the crackle and pop of his lifestyle, Adam always had a kind of wisdom. He was the perfect gentleman, who believed in love, but at the time he seemed to believe in love with a lot of people. But I'd been having conversations with him about it and he always seemed to suggest that if you can find everything in one person, then you should seize the day. I also asked him because maybe I didn't feel as close with him as I did with the others."

Adam: "I thought it was an incredibly brave thing to do. At that point there wasn't really much money around and we were going to be away often, so I didn't really know how he was going to pull it together. But I'd known Alison for as long as I'd known Bono. It's been a very beneficial union. I think Bono without Ali would unleash an energy upon the world that might have as much negative effect as it has positive."



Whew! That's it for now!
 
I absolutely love the way they spoke about their faith! What a powerful witness. They're right, as long as they put God first (which they clearly have) they have freedom to act however they feel He's led them too, which once again they have. God Bless You!!


"What no man can own...No man can take.": Yahweh-U2
 
Wow. I cannot wait to get this book!! I pre ordered the deluxe one but I think I'm going to have to buy this one when it comes out in stores because I can't wait that long to read it! :lol:


Biff :bow:
 
thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou
thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou
 
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