50 Years of U2

50 Years of U2

The story of U2 begins in the autumn of 1976 at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin. The fourteen-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a note to the school notice board looking for bandmates. The boys who turned up in his kitchen formed a group that first called itself “Feedback” and then “The Hype” before settling on the name U2. Alongside Mullen were singer Paul Hewson, who goes by Bono, guitarist David Evans, known as The Edge, and bassist Adam Clayton – a line-up that has remained unchanged to this day.

After the early albums “Boy” (1980) and “October” (1981), the band broke through with “War” (1983). Songs such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day” combined catchy rock with political themes and made U2 known well beyond Ireland. Their appearance at the globally televised Live Aid benefit concert in 1985 is still regarded as a turning point: in front of an audience of billions, Bono climbed down to the crowd and danced with a girl from the audience – an image that travelled around the world and pushed the band firmly into the international spotlight.

The 1987 album “The Joshua Tree” turned them into a global phenomenon. With anthems like “With or Without You”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Where the Streets Have No Name”, U2 reached number one in more than twenty countries and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The accompanying release “Rattle and Hum” (1988) documented the Irish band’s engagement with American musical history and cemented their reputation as one of the greatest live acts of their era.

Rather than repeat that sound, the band reinvented itself at the start of the 1990s. “Achtung Baby” (1991), recorded in part at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, broke with electronic textures and ironic distance. The accompanying Zoo TV tour turned the rock concert into an extravagant media spectacle with dozens of screens and shifting stage personas. With “Zooropa” and “Pop”, U2 pushed this experiment further before returning to a more straightforward rock sound around the turn of the millennium with “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” (2000) and the single “Beautiful Day”.

To this day U2 has sold well over 150 million records and, with 22 awards, has won more Grammys than any other band; in 2005 came their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Beyond the music, it was above all Bono who shaped the group’s public image. His campaigning for debt relief for poorer countries and his co-founding of the DATA, ONE and (RED) initiatives made him one of the best-known voices in the fight against poverty and AIDS. With this second 2-euro commemorative coin of the year, the Central Bank of Ireland now honours the fiftieth anniversary of a band that has long been one of Ireland’s cultural flagships.