Excerpt from the biography ‘Sex Love and Love’, David Wiseman (unpublished)
This is a passage from about a third of the way through the book about an early gig by the band ‘U2’ I saw in a music pub in North London around 1981, the details of which remain indelibly stained into me to this day. I was living in a legal squat in Kilburn with five or six others at the time and much of the narrative is informed from my diary at the time..
There really was a lot going on in those days, for us all. We lived vicariously day to day and packed a lot in, without spending any money. Money that we didn’t have anyway. A week later I was watching one of the greatest gigs of my life, ‘U2’ at the Moonlight, a gritty pub with a music stage over in West Hampstead. ‘An excellent set’, I’ve written in my 1981 diary, ‘especially the last encore, Father was an Orphan’. The band had just released their first album ‘Boy’ on the 20th October, two weeks before the set they played there and it was already creating quite a stir. This gig really stays with me still; yes, the details have faded but the overall impression of a band with so much energy, so many inventive ideas, stays. I watched it from the front row, about three feet away from Bono, determined to be right up there ‘in the action’, since the previous one I’d seen at the Marquee in Soho, I had been much further back in the crowd and so had felt less involved. I knew from that gig that up there in the front, once the group came on stage, it would be impossible not to pogo-dance all the way through the set, as by this time there were a band of U2 groupies who simply went apeshit from the start to the final encore and to survive you had to more or less submit to the will of the crowd, becoming one living entity. Up there the music, the sound, the raw energy was such that it thrilled you to your core.
So there I was. Those whom have had similar relationships with up and coming bands, seen them performing live in a small setting will understand what I mean, There’s a rush of pure adrenaline that comes from the band, often the lead singer, that hits you in the gut: a wave of sound that carries you to a place that’s not entirely rooted in this world; a euphoric combination, where you became at one with the band, the band became at one with the audience, feeding from the energy: one giant feedback loop of love, for it is all similar to a love affair really, between the performer(s) and audience. At the Moonlight on that night, there seemed to be a particular vulnerability to Bono, his voice at times pleading, asking us for reassurance, unsure of himself, especially within the songs ‘Into the heart’ and ‘I will follow’. ‘How can man do this to fellow man’ he seemed to plead with us. Why do I have to grow up and understand, take in, all of this.. and yet I must’.
The cover of this first album ‘Boy’ was slightly controversial at the time, in the way that it had used the innocence of the very young boy, his large eyes, his vulnerability (indeed the cover was deemed too risque and changed for the album’s American release). And that one gig at the Moonlight stands out for me still, decades later, as something of a masterpiece.
Of course it can’t last: if the group is that good, generally they play to larger and larger audiences and it changes the dynamic of the group live into something that’s less intimate and personal. It’s no wonder that bands burn out. I can’t imagine what giving off that energy must feel like year in and out. I must have really loved U2 then, as by November 27th I was back at the Marquee to see them again, ‘another excellent gig by U2’ I wrote ‘but tinged by Bono’s ‘machoness”. This is an interesting comment, as I’ve put machoness in inverted commas. It is hard to recall exactly now but there was something about his performance on that night that jarred slightly, obviously; perhaps what I was seeing in Bono, was the realisation that he knew by this time that ‘Boy’ was going to be successful, as indeed it eventually was; critical reviews were good.. Paul Morley of the NME had called it “honest, direct and distinctive” whilst Betty Page of Sounds dubbed U2 the “young poets of the year”, though it only reached 52 in fact on the LP charts on its first release in the UK), and that he was going to be ‘big’.
The world was his for the taking. And of course, it was. By March 1987, they would be iconically performing ‘Where the Streets Have No name’ the opening track from The Joshua Tree album, for a legendary rooftop video shoot in LA, next to the infamous Hotel Cecil. But perhaps at the price that that special vulnerability had been lost?
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