U2 return to their Dublin high school for special gig to mark 50th anniversary
Ireland's biggest band have headed back to their roots.
By Nick Reilly
It was 50 years ago this week since Larry Mullen Jr pinned a message to a noticeboard at Dublin’s Mount Temple High School which famously read “drummer seeks musicians”. The rest for U2, as they say, is history.
To mark that half century anniversary, U2 returned to that very school this afternoon to perform a special career-spanning gig in the playground. Watched on by current pupils and a crowd which included their old RE teacher, Sophie Shirley, they entered shortly after 2PM to the appropriate strains of Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’.
After opening with ‘I Will Follow’, they went straight into a run of hits which included ‘Vertigo’, ‘Beautiful Day’ and even a particularly early track in 1979’s ‘Out Of Control’, from their debut EP U2 3.
Bono hailed Mullen Jr for his role as “the man who pinned the note on the noticeboard” and Adam Clayton was jokingly introduced as “the streaker of the green corridor”.
The school also played host to the first live performance of their new single ‘Silencio’ from recently announced album Carnaval De Luz, while an emotional performance of ‘One’ saw the band joined by a group of teenage harpists, violin and viola players who had learnt their craft via the Music Generation programme, which the band co-funds.
Speaking to Rolling Stone UK earlier this week, the band’s guitarist The Edge admitted it had been an “amazing” experience to go back and see the school earlier in the week before the performance took place.
That sentiment was shared by Bono today as he thanked the school for providing the group’s formative education and paid tribute to the Reverend Jack Heaslip, who worked at the school before becoming the group’s chaplain and spiritual advisor on tour. “He travelled the world with us,” he said, before paying tribute to other previous teachers in attendance.
Addressing the students, he added: “Thanks for showing up. I suppose you’d nowhere else to go.”
It comes as U2 prepare to unveil Carnaval de Luz, their first album of new songs in nine years, on November 13.
The 12-track album, produced by Garret “Jacknife” Lee, who’s been working with U2 since 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, closes with ‘Torn’, featuring the final vocal performance from Dolly Parton, who died last month.
It’s an extraordinary collection of songs,” bassist Adam Clayton tells Rolling Stone UK in interviews for an upcoming feature, “and it’s the culmination of the work that everyone has been doing for 50 years.”