Fifty years can transform a band into a piece of music history, but it can also transform a city into a map of memory. For the U2born in Dublin in September 1976, the two things ended up coinciding: the Irish capital is not simply the place from which Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. left before conquering the world, but continues to preserve within neighborhoods, recording studios, pubs, streets and coastal villages the passages of a career that has never completely severed its connection with home.
The fiftieth anniversary thus offers a different way to travel through Dublin, leaving the more predictable routes at least for a few hours and reconstructing the history of U2 through the geography of the city. It all began in 1976, when an advert was posted at the Mount Temple Comprehensive School brought together a group of teenagers in the kitchen of Larry Mullen Jr.’s house, giving life to the formation that initially took the name of “The Larry Mullen Band”. Half a century later, the school remains one of the most immediate symbols of those origins and of the never completely interrupted relationship between the group and the Northside of Dublin.
It is precisely from the northern suburbs that the journey can begin.
From U2 school to the north coast of Dublin
The Mount Temple Comprehensive School is located in Artane, while it runs nearby Cedarwood Rdthe street where Bono spent his growing up years and which many decades later would also become the title of a song contained in Songs of Innocencepublished in 2014. The story of U2, before becoming an international story, is in fact profoundly urban and familiar, built inside a residential Dublin far from the spectacular image of stadiums filled on every continent.
From here the route can widen towards Dublin Coastal Trailfollowing the northern part of the bay. Clontarf belongs to the geography of the band’s youth and represents one of the points from which to move towards Malahidethe seaside village where, in the attic of Adam Clayton’s family house, U2 met to rehearse at the beginning of their career and where some of the first promotional photographs were also taken.
Malahide today inevitably has a completely different atmosphere, between castle, cafés and walks by the sea, but this very contrast makes the route interesting: places that seem to have nothing to do with the myth of international rock end up being the domestic laboratory of a band destined to become one of the most important in the world.
Windmill Lane, where the U2 sound was born
If Northside recounts the formation of the group, Windmill Lane it tells of the transformation into something much bigger.
The historic Windmill Lane Recording Studios, opened in the late 1970s, are one of the central locations in Dublin’s musical history. The original building no longer exists, but a part of the perimeter wall has been preserved and transformed over the years into a sort of spontaneous sanctuary for fans, covered in graffiti, signatures and messages.
It was in those studios that U2’s first three albums took shape, Boy, October And Warand that producer Steve Lillywhite experimented with solutions intended to characterize the band’s sound, such as recording Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums in the stairwell to exploit the acoustics.
Since the end of the 1980s the studio has moved to Ringsend Rdinside an old converted power station, and today it can be visited through tours that allow you to enter the recording rooms and observe one of the most important places in the Irish music industry from the inside. U2 would return here for later work such as All That You Can’t Leave Behind And No Line on the Horizonwhile other big names in Irish music have also recorded in the same spaces, from the Cranberries to Sinéad O’Connor.
Not far away there is the 3Arenaonce Point Depot, another address linked to the memory of the band and the concerts of the era Rattle and Hum. It is one of those points where contemporary Dublin, made up of Docklands, new architecture and skylines on the water, overlaps with the musical city of the Eighties.
In the center of Dublin, among videos, pubs and old concerts
Entering the city center the map almost becomes a walking tour.
The elegant streets around Fitzwilliam Square appear in the video of Sweetest Thingthe song Bono wrote for his wife Ali as an ironic attempt to make amends after forgetting his birthday. Not far away, in the National Gallery, the portrait of Bono created by the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy is preserved, while in the gardens of Merrion Square the route also crosses the monument dedicated to Oscar Wilde.
The relationship between U2 and Dublin, however, was not only built in the most solemn places. In Baggot Street stood the Baggot Inn, where in 1978 the band obtained one of its first weekly live residencies, when international success was still a long way off and U2 were one of the many emerging groups on the city scene.
In Temple Bar, however, theIrish Rock ‘N’ Roll Museum Experience preserves a section dedicated to the band, within a neighborhood that over the years has become one of the most recognizable places in tourist Dublin but which also continues to tell the story of Irish music.
Along the Liffey you also meet The Clarencethe hotel that for years has been linked to U2 and from whose roof, in 2000, a performance of Beautiful Day For Top of the Pops. Even the name Bono itself belongs to the city’s geography: it derives from the Bonavox sign, the historic hearing aid shop from which his friend Guggi took inspiration for the nickname destined to become famous throughout the world.
The DART towards the sea and the most intimate Dublin
To really understand how much U2 have remained linked to the city, however, you have to leave the center and follow the sea.
The DARTthe railway that runs along the bay, allows you to reach the southern part of the Dublin Coastal Trail crossing one of the most beautiful landscapes of the capital, up to Dalkey And Killineyresidential areas overlooking the coast which over the years have attracted numerous Irish artists and personalities.
Dalkey, in particular, still retains that village dimension in which celebrity and everyday life often end up mixing. Bono has long participated in the cultural life of the area and in the local literary festival, while the pub Finnegan’s over the years it has become one of the addresses associated with his informal meetings, including the one with Bruce Springsteen remembered in the recent history of the place.
And it is perhaps precisely along this coast that the link between U2 and Dublin becomes more evident, because behind the monumental dimension of their career remains a surprisingly intimate geography: schools, neighborhood houses, pubs, rehearsal rooms, studios and towns by the sea.
Slane Castle, the castle that entered the history of the band
To complete the route you need to leave Dublin and go about an hour north, into County Meath, up to Slane Castleone of the most important venues in the history of Irish rock.
U2 played there as early as 1981 as Thin Lizzy’s support group during the first Slane Festival and a few years later, in 1984, they returned to the castle to record The Unforgettable Fire. The sessions began in the grand ballroom and continued in the library, whose particular acoustics contributed to the sound of songs such as Bad.
Today the castle can be visited and allows you to enter some of the environments linked to the recordings, transforming a chapter in the band’s history into a real travel stop.
Fifty years later, U2 are still a Dublin story
Perhaps the most surprising thing, after half a century, is precisely this: one of the most global bands in rock history can still be told through a relatively small territory.
From Mount Temple Comprehensive School to the streets of the Northside, from Malahide to Windmill Lane, passing through the Docklands, Temple Bar, Dalkey and Slane Castle, following in the footsteps of U2 certainly means celebrating fifty years of the group, but above all it means discovering a different Dublin, less built around the most famous monuments and more linked to the stories that have settled in its neighbourhoods.
Because before world tours, stadiums and over four decades of records, there were simply four lads from Dublin rehearsing together. And fifty years later, to fully understand how that story began, we still have to go back there.
