U2

Bono was seventeen, watching from the crowd at Dublin's State Cinema in 1977, when Joey Ramone's voice rearranged his sense of what a singer could be. "There was nothing else that mattered to him," he wrote afterward in a Time eulogy, "pretty soon nothing else mattered to me." Four Dublin teenagers who could barely play their instruments had, in Bono's words, "formed our band around an idea of friendship and shared spirit" — a notion he called "preposterous" before the Ramones arrived. On his eighteenth birthday the following year, Bono sat down and wrote "Out of Control."

listen: upstream & heresource: Ramones Heaven — U2 and Bono on the Ramones influence (State Cinema 1977, formation-age quote, "stopped the world" quote) ↗share

1976

Blitzkrieg BopRamones

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1979

Out of ControlU2

listen for"Blitzkrieg Bop" does its work in under two and a half minutes: four hammered chords, a chant built for a room to shout back, no solo, no ornament. The Edge later put U2's debt plainly: Ramones songs were "so straight ahead. It was chord-based and it was fast and it suited us down to the ground." "Out of Control," the song Bono wrote at eighteen, keeps that same stripped urgency — three chords driven hard, Larry Mullen Jr.'s drums pushing rather than decorating, Bono's still-cracking voice riding the top of the mix instead of smoothing into it.

The Edge was a teenager scrounging for a style of his own when he put on Television's Marquee Moon and heard something he couldn't place. "I think they were in the Dorian mode most of the time," he told Guitar Player, admitting he didn't have the vocabulary yet for what Tom Verlaine and his co-guitarist Richard Lloyd were doing, only that it broke every rule rock guitar had taught him. "What I took from Verlaine was not really his style but the fact that he did something no one else had done," he told Rolling Stone. "And I liked that; I thought that was valuable."

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar Player — The Edge on Television's Marquee Moon and the Dorian-mode revelation ↗share

1977

Marquee MoonTelevision

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1987

Where the Streets Have No NameU2

listen forThe title track of Marquee Moon runs past ten minutes on modal, ringing guitar lines that never resolve the way blues-rock trained ears expect, Verlaine and Lloyd trading spare, unhurried phrases instead of trading solos. "Where the Streets Have No Name" takes that same refusal of the obvious lick and scales it up: the Edge's opening figure, built on a repeating dotted-eighth-note delay, chimes the same pattern rather than building toward a riff — the same instinct, texture over technique, stretched from a club-length epic to a stadium's open sky.

In March 1980, U2 turned up at Strawberry Studios in Stockport to see the producer Martin Hannett about their own single, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" — and found Joy Division mid-session, tracking what would become "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Bono never forgot meeting Ian Curtis: "He talked like there was two people inside of him," he said later. "He talked very light, and very well-mannered, very polite, but when he got behind the microphone, he really surged." Weeks later, Hannett produced U2's single himself, the only studio work the two bands' orbits would ever directly share.

listen: upstream & heresource: Louder Sound — Bono on the night he met Joy Division's Ian Curtis ↗share

1980

Love Will Tear Us ApartJoy Division

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1980

11 O'Clock Tick TockU2

listen forHannett's production on "Love Will Tear Us Apart" leaves huge gaps around Curtis's voice: the drums gated dry, the synths hanging in reverb-soaked air, nothing rushing to fill the silence between hits. "11 O'Clock Tick Tock," cut under the same producer weeks later, chases that same spaciousness — the Edge's guitar rings out and decays rather than driving straight through the chord changes, and Bono's vocal sits exposed over a thinned mix instead of buried under a wall of punk noise.