Show Notes
This week on Musical Musings we begin a two-parter, and the timing is almost too neat: four days from now, on Friday the twenty-fifth of September, U2 turn fifty years old. Fifty years since a fourteen-year-old drummer named Larry Mullen Jr pinned a handwritten note to the noticeboard at Mount Temple Comprehensive in Dublin — drummer seeks musicians to form band — and six boys crowded into his mother’s kitchen in Artane that Saturday afternoon. The same four have been in the band ever since. My guest Ken Cheshire, back on the show after making the case for Toad the Wet Sprocket, has chosen to mark it not with the stadium years but with the beginning: ten songs across two hours, every one of them from the first three albums, Boy, October and War. Nineteen-eighty to nineteen-eighty-three. Four young men who could barely play when they started and had made three classics before the oldest of them turned twenty-three.
Ken’s list has a shape I only spotted while building the run-sheet. Each half is its own complete run through the same three records in the same order, which means the two shows work in parallel rather than end to end — and this first hour is the front door. Four of today’s five were singles or A-sides: I Will Follow, the song Bono wrote for the mother he lost at fourteen; Out of Control, written on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, and the A-side of U2’s very first record because a radio audience voted for it — Dave Fanning played all three contenders on RTÉ and let his listeners decide; Gloria, the roaring opener of an album Bono had to improvise half the lyrics for after his briefcase of notebooks was stolen backstage in Portland, Oregon; and New Year’s Day, the song that took them out of the clubs and onto the world’s radios. The odd one out is the deep cut, The Refugee — the only track across all three albums that Steve Lillywhite didn’t produce. It was produced instead by Bill Whelan, who would go on eleven years later to write Riverdance. Join us at three, and stay for part two, where we go round the back of the same three records.
Broadcast 21 September 2026
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