Bono: ‘The new U2 album is called …’

When U2 appear on the final episode of the new Irish Times podcast Drummer Seeks Musicians: The Making of U2 (available now through the player above and on Spotify and Apple) there are no expectations of a world exclusive. The interview is an opportunity for them to reflect on their origin story in the week that marks the 50th anniversary of them forming a band. But towards the end of the interview, their loquacious frontman Bono lets something slip: “So am I allowed to say the name of the album or not?” he asks, as his bandmates Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and the Edge look on. “Please say it,” I implore. “I can’t say it. I’m going to say it,” says Bono, with a Beckettian flourish. READ MORE“The new album is called Carnaval de Luz.”Carnaval de Luz, for that is indeed the name of the new U2 record, will be the first studio album of original material since the band released Songs of Experience in 2017. Street of Dreams, the band’s first single from the album released during the summer, was an uplifting, joyful call for community action. Earlier this year, they released two well-received EPs called Days of Ash and Easter Lily. “The song, that recording and this album we’ve made, we’ve caught it again. And it’s strong stuff,” says Bono, as he announces the album name. By “it” he means that particular brand of U2 magic that has led to them selling more than 170m records and winning 22 Grammy awards over the past half a century. “As people who’ve heard Days of Ash and Easter Lily will hear, this is really the prequel, to both of them.”The four members of the band are talking via zoom, for Episode 3: Sing A New Song, the finale of three-part podcast Drummer Seeks Musicians. There’s Adam in a peachy pink shirt on the left near the camera, Bono farther back in tinted blue shades holding an iPad on his lap, Larry in black sitting beside him with the Edge, in a baseball cap, close to the camera and to his right. I am in The Irish Times podcast studio. I first started working on this podcast nine months ago and I’ve been chasing an interview with them since then. I’d given up hope but now they are here. It’s a beautiful day.This is a massive week for the Dublin band. This Friday, on September 25th, it will be exactly 50 years since the four of them, along with a couple of other hopefuls, crammed into Larry Mullen’s kitchen at 60 Rosemount Avenue in the Dublin suburb of Artane for that first band rehearsal. A few weeks earlier, 14-year-old Larry Mullen had pinned a note on his school bulletin board at Mount Temple Comprehensive on the city’s northside: “Drummer Seeks Musicians to Form Band, contact Larry Mullen third year.” The rest is rock mythology. That day they became Feedback, then The Hype before becoming U2, a band that would go on to become one of the biggest in the world.The note is mystical for a reason. Few of the classmates or teachers I spoke to for the podcast remember seeing it, apart from their religious education teacher, Sophie Shirley, now 80. She knew all Larry wanted was to be a drummer in a band because he told her so one day in the classroom. “When I saw the note, I thought to myself, Larry’s doing something about it,” she tells me in Episode 1. Larry Mullen definitely remembers the note. It was a sort of lifeline for him at the time.“I was hard to educate,” he says now reflecting on his 14-year-old self. “I didn’t fully get the academic thing … so when I put the notice up … it wasn’t like I was looking for a bit of fun. I was doing it because of the only thing I could do.” At this point, Bono leans over and asks Larry what he might have ended up doing if he wasn’t in U2. I suggest he’d have made a good guard. They all crack up. “Definitely, health and safety”, says Bono. “I like to think of myself more as a firefighter,” Larry counters. Edge, who was 15 then, says he is very grateful for the note. “Actually, the weird thing is I never physically saw the note because it was my music teacher, Albert Bradshaw, [who] told me … I let it slip that I was playing electric guitar. And weirdly enough, another one of my schoolfriends was a drummer, David Barnett, he was in a garage band. And I went to see him play and I was like, this is great fun. I’d love to be in a band like this … the next week I heard about Larry’s note.”What about Adam? “Well, I’m questioning the authenticity of this note as none of us actually saw it. So I’m not sure this note ever existed, but if you need it for narrative, that’s fine.” (I do need it for narrative. The first episode of the Drummer Seeks Musicians podcast is literally called The Note.) The podcast is also about the school, Mount Temple Comprehensive, the place where they all met. After deep-diving for months into the U2 story I have a theory. I don’t think U2 could have happened anywhere else other than in this radical, liberal, experiment of a school on the northside of Dublin. Edge appears to agree. “It’s the fact that our school was one of the first multi-denominational coeducational schools,” he says. “We were all being educated together, rubbing shoulders with kids from completely different backgrounds and I think as much as it was a bit of an experiment … from our perspective it was an absolute godsend.`”The other thing I’ve been trying to figure out with the podcast is why they are all still together, as friends and musical collaborators, after 50 years. Larry credits a kind of “outsider” energy – they were four misfits, he explains, that had each other and nowhere else to go. “It always felt like we were kind of drawn to this thing … in some ways we were thrown together, we were not in the same classrooms together. We were in different years, very different experiences and very different reasons for being in school. We all came there for different reasons. So we are a disparate bunch of individuals. We were back then and we are now.” I ask Adam Clayton what is the glue that has kept them together all these years. “Well, I think it’s other people’s tolerance of me, to be honest,” he smiles. “You know, we stayed in Ireland, we stayed close, we raised our families. It was like, why would we split up? Why would we? It’s just much more interesting to get up each day and go around and see your mates and make music.”It always comes back to the music. “I suppose it’s always the thought that just around the corner lies the perfect song or the perfect performance … it’s mad to say but that’s still the drug of choice in our band,” said Bono. “It’s just that feeling when we’re in the room … something happens that couldn’t happen in any other room. “I think it’s about the spirit of co-operation and realising that we’re better off working with each other than we could ever be on our own … I’m not a full artist without Edge, Adam and Larry. We needed each other to be whole.”Drummer Seeks Musicians: The Making of U2 is available on irishtimes.com and wherever you get your podcasts.