This occurred to me last night as I was listening, intently, to Boy and October for the first time in ages (due to seeing the earlier thread about how Boy was named, absurdly, the best debut album ever).
U2 were a functional band (with manager and some gigs) for all of a year and a half (less than two anyway) when they signed with Island records, an international distributor. When they signed on the dotted line, Larry was 18, as he was when they made Boy.
To compare this with The Beatles, for example, the youngest, George Harrison, was 19 when they made Please Please Me, so that's almost as young as Larry (although Ringo and John were 22). But the Beatles had years of experience, and had played 7 hours a night to violent fans in Hamburg, Germany, going back two-and-a-half years before their debut. They'd already played something crazy like 1000 gigs before they made their first record.
To compare with U2's peers, let's take The Police and R.E.M. When The Police made their first record, they'd all been in previous bands and Andy Summers was a 60s' holdover, so that's a different story -- Sting was 26 or 27, Stewart 26, and Andy 35 or 36. With R.E.M., Michael Stipe was 23, still four years older than Larry and three older than Bono. And Peter Buck was already 26, seven years older than Larry.
Granted, a lot of other groups of the post-punk cauldron were comparably young (Sex Pistols, Depeche Mode), and there's something kind of genuine and touching about the youthful zest of Boy and October . . . still, I can't help wondering what the U2 recorded history would have been like if their first album had come in 1983 or something (when they were still very young). The musicianship on those two albums is a bit amateurish in places (esp. Adam's bass on Boy), and in the early days there was a huge gap between U2 live and U2 on record.
In a way, it's a shame that very young rock bands aren't given time to develop like they were in the post-punk era. U2 were fortunate to spring from that fertile cauldron, when musicanship was not a valued priority.
U2 were a functional band (with manager and some gigs) for all of a year and a half (less than two anyway) when they signed with Island records, an international distributor. When they signed on the dotted line, Larry was 18, as he was when they made Boy.
To compare this with The Beatles, for example, the youngest, George Harrison, was 19 when they made Please Please Me, so that's almost as young as Larry (although Ringo and John were 22). But the Beatles had years of experience, and had played 7 hours a night to violent fans in Hamburg, Germany, going back two-and-a-half years before their debut. They'd already played something crazy like 1000 gigs before they made their first record.
To compare with U2's peers, let's take The Police and R.E.M. When The Police made their first record, they'd all been in previous bands and Andy Summers was a 60s' holdover, so that's a different story -- Sting was 26 or 27, Stewart 26, and Andy 35 or 36. With R.E.M., Michael Stipe was 23, still four years older than Larry and three older than Bono. And Peter Buck was already 26, seven years older than Larry.
Granted, a lot of other groups of the post-punk cauldron were comparably young (Sex Pistols, Depeche Mode), and there's something kind of genuine and touching about the youthful zest of Boy and October . . . still, I can't help wondering what the U2 recorded history would have been like if their first album had come in 1983 or something (when they were still very young). The musicianship on those two albums is a bit amateurish in places (esp. Adam's bass on Boy), and in the early days there was a huge gap between U2 live and U2 on record.
In a way, it's a shame that very young rock bands aren't given time to develop like they were in the post-punk era. U2 were fortunate to spring from that fertile cauldron, when musicanship was not a valued priority.