Neil McCormick on U2

"I knew U2 before they were U2. I was a witness to their first performance in 1976, when Paul Hewson, Dave Evans, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen got up on four taped-together tables in the school gym and sent an electroshock through all of our lives."
"I will never forget that moment. I can see where I was standing in the big, well-lit room, smell the oiled wood of the floor and climbing equipment, the stale sweaty odour of the changing rooms. I had never seen a live rock band before, I doubt many of the kids in the gym had, I even doubt whether most of the boys in the band had. A chord sounded out, the drums thundered, the bass vibrated, the boy who would be Bono grabbed the microphone stand, stamping on the tables, tipping the mic up as he yelled “I want you – show me the way!” Girls started screaming. I was transfixed, I was transfigured. In that moment, something happened that knocked me off my teenage course, that would somehow lead me here, a 54-year-old man writing about pop music for a living. And it knocked the band off all their wayward trajectories and made them one."
“That gig changed my life,” I told Bono once. “It changed mine too!” he excitedly replied.
"They were Feedback, then the Hype, and then U2, and I witnessed it all, the becoming of a band that would transfigure Ireland, and maybe even the world. I’ll tell you what I think about when I think about U2, the first flicker that comes into my head, dingy sweaty back rooms around Dublin that would be filled with a kind of sonic light by the splintering shards of Edge’s guitar and his astonishing harmonic echo box. We were virgins (not prunes), new to all of this business of adulthood, and it was so utterly overwhelming watching U2 come together in the white heat of rock and roll."
"They have, ever after, been so enmeshed in my life it can be hard to separate their melodies from my memories. But here’s one moment, plucked from the great scramble: a night in San Francisco in 1997, crossing the Golden Gate bridge in a blacked-out people carrier after a sensational Popmart show with Oasis in support, Edge and Liam on the back seat, Bono, Noel and me in front of them, the hour late, the road empty, the sky dark and starry, the bay stretched out beneath, when 'One' came on the car radio, and Noel yelled that it was the greatest song ever written, and Liam started singing, and everyone joined in. And so I drove across the bridge that night with some of my oldest friends and the biggest rock stars in the world, singing “We are one but we’re not the same...”
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