U2 perform at Mount Temple school in Dublin for 50th anniversary

U2 performed for students at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Clontarf on Friday, returning to the north Dublin school where the band was formed half a century ago.

Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr, played songs to students and staff and journalists, with the set featuring 'I Will Follow', 'Vertigo', 'Beautiful Day', and their new single, 'Silencio'

There was also a rendition of 'One', performed alongside young musicians from Music Generation, as well an encore of 'With Or Without You'.

 

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Bono also took time to speak to students and reflect on the band's beginnings, as well as pay tribute Fr Jack Heaslip, who travelled with the band before his death in 2015.

"This sense that maybe all we needed was around us, just sort of under our feet, if we could see it in our mates, in our schoolmates, in our community," Bono said.

"This island is full of song and music and mischief, and we are so proud to be Irish."

U2 count Saturday, September 25, 1976 as their starting date, when a group of teenagers met at the Mullen family home in Artane. The meeting came about after Larry Mullen Jr, then a 14-year-old pupil at Mount Temple, put up a handwritten notice on the school noticeboard that read "Drummer seeks musicians to form band."

Seven turned up to that first rehearsal, including Mullen. Peter Martin and Ivan McCormick soon dropped out, leaving Mullen, Paul Hewson, Adam Clayton and the brothers Dave and Dik Evans. Early rehearsals took place in their music teacher's classroom at the school.

The band went through a few names before settling on U2. After a brief spell as the Larry Mullen Band, they became Feedback and then The Hype. The name U2 was suggested by Steve Averill of The Radiators From Space.

 

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Their first performance was at Mount Temple itself, where, according to accounts of the band's early days, they played a short set of covers as Feedback at a school talent contest in late 1976.

Their first official gig as U2 came on 18 March 1978, when the band, by then a four-piece, won an Evening Press and Harp Lager battle of the bands at the Stella Ballroom in Limerick, taking a £500 prize and a chance to audition for a recording contract. That night is brilliantly documented in Becoming U2, a new book by Brian O'Connell, published by Hot Press books.

Fans are also marking the date in the city through tribute shows, fan meet-ups, guided U2 walks and a film screening, as organisers expect 1,300 people from 28 countries to descend upon the capital.

Earlier this week, the band officially announced their new album Carnaval Da Luz.