The October album, released on 12
October 1981, came after extended
touring and was unusual for its lyrical
focus on the band’s strong Christian
beliefs.
Of the October album, The
Edge later recalled, ‘Some of it is
excruciatingly embarrassing, because
of the actual youth of the band. We
were so young. It comes over so clearly
how inexperienced we were. But there
are some incredible ideas on that
record, and I’m more amazed at
the quality of these ideas, in the
end, than embarrassed by how
young we sound. October itself was
a really great little piece. I wrote
that initially as a soundtrack piece,
but everyone really liked it and
Bono came up with this great lyric
idea, so it made more sense. But
it doesn’t sound like anything else
on the album or any other album
at the time. Maybe that’s why it
has aged so well... We just got
swept up by this wave of what you
might call punk, or DIY, enthusiasm: do
it yourself, you can do it. Part of that was
this concept that it should be “you”. So
we were determined not to fall in with
the same musical styles that so many
groups that were playing around bars in
Dublin, which was mostly the blues. So,
for a guitar player, it was: “Don’t play the
blues, find other things”. Since we were
a three-piece, I found that I could play
this drone by finding a string that I could
use and play against. Playing melodies
over one continuous tone through the
song was like a real unusual style that I
hadn’t heard before and that became us.
The Celtic aspect must have been in the
back of my mind because the drone thing
is a very Irish thing to do. You find it in
the uilleann pipes in particular. I wasn’t
thinking about it at the time, but it must
have been there as an influence.’Many songs with a religious theme
appeared on the early U2 albums.
Unusually, as Bono himself recalled
in an interview with Rolling Stone
editor Jann Wenner, the band began
their career by writing about God and
only later progressed to writing songs
about sexual subjects: ‘I knew that we
were different on our street because my
mother was Protestant. And that she’dmarried a Catholic. At a time of strong
sectarian feeling in the country, I knew
that was special. We didn’t go to the
neighbourhood schools – we got on a bus.
I picked up the courage they had to have
had to follow through on their love. Even
then I prayed more outside of the church
than inside. It gets back to the songs I
was listening to; to me, they were prayers.
“How many roads must a man walk
down?” That wasn’t a rhetorical question
to me. It was addressed to God.
It’s a question I wanted to know
the answer to, and I’m wondering,
“Who do I ask that to?” I’m not
gonna ask a schoolteacher. When
John Lennon sings, “Oh, my love
for the first time in my life, my
eyes are wide open”, these songs
have an intimacy for me that’s
not just between people, I realise
now, not just sexual intimacy – a
spiritual intimacy.
‘There was also my friend
Guggi. His parents were not just
Protestant; they were some obscure
cult of Protestant. In America, it would
be Pentecostal. His father was like a
creature from the Old Testament. He
spoke constantly of the Scriptures and
had the sense that the end was nigh – and
to prepare for it... I’d go to church with
them too. Though myself and Guggi are
laughing at the absurdity of some of this,
the rhetoric is getting through to us. We
don’t realise it, but we’re being immersedU2 circa 1981. From left: Bono, Larry Mullen Jnr, Adam Clayton, The Edge.“We were determined not to
fall in with the same musical
styles that so many groups
that were playing around
bars in Dublin.”
The Edge