Boy

Boy kicked off with a charging question mark in the form of a pledge called ‘I Will Follow’, before creeping into the adolescent Freud & Jung forest with songs like ‘Shadows And Tall Trees’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Stories For Boys’. And at the centre, the dark fantasia of ‘Into The Heart’/‘An Cat Dubh’, in which The Edge established himself as one of rock’s great minimalists, alternating between sparse atmospherics and blinding shards of light. Elsewhere were meditations on mortality (‘Out Of Control’), teenage suicide (‘A Day Without Me’), and the child’s feeing of being infinitesimal amidst the infinite (‘The Ocean’). “I was amazed at how sophisticated some of that first record was musically,” The Edge remarked some 17 years after its release. “Looking back, the sheer quantity of innovative ideas on that record is pretty amazing.”

No 39 in 2009, as voted for by over 200 Irish musicians.