U2

All That You Can't Leave Behind

It was the summer of '74

Review Score:

(10/10)
It all started in a dingy Dublin basement flat sometime around 1974. Adam, Larry, Gregory (who was later to rename himself Bono, after the Greek philosopher) and I were sprawled on the stained mattresses that passed for furniture in those impoverished student days when we were all on the dole, trying to amuse ourselves on 15p a week. As usual, we were indulging in our favourite pastime of spitting chewed-up wads of paper at the far wall, trying for both height and distance, with points off for any bits that slid back down the wall.

As I recall, Larry was winning, when Francis (later to rename himself The Edge after a line in a Grandmaster Flash song) burst into the room clutching a sixpack of O'Grogan's cider and was immediately covered in a barrage of moistened wads of paper. We expected him to be well pissed off and give us all a good shoeing with his size 15 Doc Marten's, but he merely smiled strangely and wiped off the spittle.

The reason why he was so unlike his usual maudlin self soon became evident. Glue! He'd swiped a can of Araldite from the hardware shop next to the bookie's and had already inhaled half of it by the time he got back. The silly bugger managed to glue his lips together, and by the time we managed to get it together enough to take him to the outpatient's clinic, the glue had set like concrete and required the complete removal of both his lips.

(This is why you never see him without a beard these days, but if you look closely enough, you can see the scars. He has since had cosmetic surgery but I believe the original lips are still in a jar somewhere, packed with cotton wool and cheap whiskey. Probably worth a small fortune on ebay by now, but I digress.)

It was as part of Francis' rehabilitation that the physiotherapist suggested that he take up the drums. Of course, the boy had no sense of rhythm, but was happy enough sitting on the stool banging away with the sticks grinning like a loon. The crash of the cymbals caused him no end of glee, as I recall. He felt he had found his metier, which was somewhat of a relief after the earlier disappointments with various wind instruments, including a particularly gruesome tussle with the flute just after the operation.

Unfortunately, he really was crap at playing the drums. Just around that time, Larry accidently ran over Roger Whitaker's backing band, the Whiskettes, as they were unloading their gear before a gig. It was horribly quick for the Whiskettes, and not wishing any trouble with the law, we nicked all their equipment, drugs and a couple of stray groupies and legged it back to the flat.

Both the drugs and the groupies were duff, but the instruments turned out to be a revelation. Finally we could get Francis off the drums and find him something harmless to amuse himself with. The bass turned out to be just the thing, as he was perfectly content to stand in the corner and twang away at one string for hours on end.

The rest of us mucked around with the other instruments for a while, and before we knew it had written a couple of albums worth of songs. Unfortunately, when it came time to record them, it transpired that there was no call for either the tambourine or the sitar, both of which I had claimed as my own. They also said they didn't need an interpretative dancer either, so suddenly I was out of the band and pulling pints down at the pub while thay were off on their trajectory towards international rock superstardom.

I'm not bitter, however, and if they ever need a tambourine or sitar on one of their next albums, I know they'll give me a call. Cheers boys!

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