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Monday, February 25, 1980. The night before U2 played the National Stadium, Bono, the Edge and Larry Mullen Jr. turned up for an interview on Pat James's rock show on a Dublin pirate radio station, 257. They were tired, having done a quick sprint around the country to promote their new single, "Another Day," the tour preceded by a month of intensive rehearsals in which the band worked up no fewer than 15 new songs. They were also anxious, aware that the Stadium gig, their biggest to that point, could either be their peak, leaving them with nowhere further to go, or could allow them to take the next vital step in their career.

As the interview neared its end, a member of a fellow northside band phoned in with a question that Bono read out: "Do U2 think that their music ability or their publicity got them to where they are now? From a future rival: Albatross." The responses of the band members, though brief, revealed some basic differences in approach and temperament.

The Edge calmly undertook to talk to the caller if he or she went along to the Stadium the following night. Bono diplomatically said that he had heard of Albatross and that they were apparently quite good. "It's my opinion [that] beyond musical ability there's something that makes a band special, and that's spirit," he added. "I don't make the claim that right now we're God's gift to music, but I think the group is going to achieve heights that people actually aren't aware of." Mullen was annoyed and blunt. "That [question] is fairly interesting," he said, "because it's that snotty-type vibe: 'Can they play music or was it all just a lick-arse publicity-type thing?' And that's the load of crap you get."

The following night, about 1,500 of us paid the modest admission price of £1.50 each to see U2, filling the stadium to about two-thirds its capacity, thereby providing a measure of the band's following, creditable for an unsigned local act but nowhere near enough to sustain the band. They opened with one of their new songs, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock," and included a couple more in the set, and while those who had followed U2 through the previous months of phenomenal progress had seen better shows, by the end the band had done enough to convince Bill Stewart to sign them to the label he represented, Island Records.

It was the end of a testing period during which U2 was turned down by every record company they had approached, sometimes in the most galling of circumstances. CBS said they might sign the band if they replaced the drummer, but finally rejected them because they were unlikely to turn a profit in the first year. A&M turned them down in favour of a lightweight British pop band called Expose, who promptly vanished. In the cruelest cut of all, Riva Records, owned by Rod Stewart's manager, rejected them in favour of fellow Dublin band the Lookalikes, an anodyne pop rock outfit replete with hidden shallows.

Signing to Island was also a vindication of U2's singular approach. Part of a wave of bands that came after punk, more interested in interiority than in provocative gestures, more interested in simple, direct expression than in polishing their technique or image. Indeed, they had whittled away at their early technique, paring it back to the essentials: the first song they recorded, "Street Missions," one of three tracks on their first demo in 1978, featured a 90-second solo, an indulgence never repeated thereafter. More than any other band in Dublin at the time, U2 palpably wanted success, but they wanted it on their terms.

Sunday, July 12, 2009. In the Stade de France, north of Paris in the suburb of St. Denis, the stage for U2's 360° tour stands like a vast cage, 164 ft. high, forbidding despite its brightly coloured fabric covering. With the exception of the Elevation tour in 2001, the relative simplicity of which allowed the band to bring a powerful sense of intimacy to even the biggest venues, such as Slane Castle, U2 have always made each tour more of a spectacle, and more of a technical challenge, than the preceding one. With U2 360°, they have brought this process to what must be its apotheosis. The cone-shaped expanding video screen dome alone, the centerpiece of the stage, contains no fewer than 888 individual screens, covering an area of 3,800 sq. ft., and extending to a height equivalent to a seven-storey building.

During the opening shows of the tour, Bono has been talking up the 360° stage as a means of getting closer to the audience. Primarily, however, it is manifestly a means of selling a greater number of tickets for each show, even if that requires a large part of the audience to watch U2 from behind, itself an indication of the band’s priorities. The stage is like nothing you have ever seen, unless you have some footage of Pink Floyd in their mid-1970s heyday. All U2 need to complete the effect is a large flying pig.

The biggest band in the world since The Joshua Tree vaulted them aloft in 1987, U2 have always been a group for whom scale represented significance and cultural traction. It is not enough for them to put out an album that sells well. They have a need to be number one that at times seems pathological, not least earlier this year, when they had to cattle-prod their current album, No Line on the Horizon, to the top of the U.S. chart by such means as selling it for $3.99 on Amazon during its first week on release.

The album has gone on to do relatively poorly, struggling to sell a million copies in America, the market on which U2 has focused from the start, in a dogged strategy first employed by the Police. Any album that sells in seven figures is hardly unsuccessful, but such is U2's need for brute commercial might, with albums and tours symbolically reinforcing each other’s sales, that any wobble threatens the edifice, as happened in 1997 with the Pop album and PopMart, and retreated into a phase of retrospection from which they have only recently shown signs of emerging.

Saturday, September 15, 1979. In a large concert garage in the Dandelion Market, latterly rebranded as the Gaiety Green, U2 peformed to a couple of hundred people at most. They didn't sound perfect by any means, the spiky guitar figures detached from a rhythm section struggling to keep time, but there was a palpable greatness about them, and, in particular, about Bono, who appeared physically to fight his awkwardness in order to communicate with the audience. At one relatively calm point in the set, he brought up an older woman, Elsie, a regular at the gigs, onto the low stage and danced slowly with her, the strangeness of the moment made poignant by the sense of openness and inclusiveness that it implied. It was not just unlike anything else one might see at a gig in Dublin; it was like opening a door into a parallel dimension of reality.

For those of us too young to attend their Jingle Balls shows in McGonagle's earlier that summer, or their gigs with the Blades in the Baggot Inn, the Dandelion gigs were a chance to see a group that for months had seemed the only new band of any significance in Ireland. When Bono showed up with U2's mesmeric second demo on Pat James's show the previous February, it was a startling introduction not just to an entirely new voice but also to a new sound.

Bono had been to London a little earlier, bringing copies of the demo to people whom the band thought might be interested in it, and he had been to a couple of gigs, among them one by Thin Lizzy, which he reviewed in forthright, unfavourable terms in Hot Press. That frankness, and the freshness with which he talked about the possibilities of a new kind of rock, were spellbinding; and that, more even than the seductively mysterious quality captured on the demo by Dave Freeley, the engineer in Eamonn Andres Studios, singled U2 out as unique.

Part of what made them so formidable was their ability to learn and accordingly to change. Even in the course of the half dozen Dandelion gigs that they spread out over the summer of 1979, they improved visibly, seeming to bootstrap themselves from one level of achievement to the next, like a self-organising system able to adapt itself to any circumstances in order to grow.

They appeared to have, in limitless quantities, what the photographer Martin Buber referred to as will and grace, their discipline and rigour performing in the service of the one thing they did not seek to control. Few could have envisaged the peaks the band would attain, but such was the sense of destiny that attended to U2 in that summer, 30 years ago, that everything that they have made happen in the intervening decades has seemed, at one level, a natural unfolding.

At another level, it has seemed no more than the just reward for a band of tireless, monomaniacal control freaks. The bright side of U2 is their surrender to something that even they do not understand, the mysterious dynamic at the heart of the band. The dark side is the ruthlessness of their approach, which somewhat resembles the remorseless, nihilistic drive of the American neo-cons, summed up by the unnamed Bush advisor who in 2002 drew a distinction between his administration and others who merely studied what he called discernable reality. "We're an empire now," the journalist Ron Suskind quoted him as saying, "and when we act, we create our own reality." It is a similar type of overwhelming will to power that has enabled U2 to do what they have done, yet has also sabotaged them.

In Paris, as with the other tour dates so far, U2 opened their set with four songs from the new album ("Breathe," "No Line on the Horizon," "Get on Your Boots" and "Magnificent") and went on to play two more ("Unknown Caller" and "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight)" in their main set of 20 songs. Between them, the new pieces exemplified the recent predicament of a band seemingly unable to write structured songs, settling instead for riffs and word-salad lyrics arranged across featureless landscapes. Other bands might have acknowledged the bigger picture, throttling back on the new material for their tour, instead of pushing an underperforming album unduly hard; but for U2 the bigger picture is whatever they say it is, a strategy that may be empowering for a time but which, ultimately, is self-defeating.

The show finally kicked into life with "Beautiful Day," followed by "Mysterious Ways," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Angel of Harlem" and a version of "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" with the Edge on acoustic guitar. U2 have always made a virtue of the relative modesty of their musical palette, and when they get it right the effect is powerful, giving their songs an instantly iconic quality, even if relatively few of them have migrated into the popular consciousness in the way that, for example, many of Shane MacGowan's have. After the dull thud of "Unknown Caller" came the first thrill of the night when they played "The Unforgettable Fire," the title track of their breakthrough album from 25 years ago. When they played it in Croke Park in 1985, its unadorned presentation suited the youthful asceticism to which they then still adhered. In the current show, U2 have not only reinstated a linchpin song to their set but have unleashed its operatic qualities, the drama of the music and the light show working together in a way that transcends mere spectacle. An inspired choice, it draws together different strands of U2 in a way unique among their songs, with its mature reflection of their formative, intense Christian period, and its resonances with the spiritual concerns of their current work.

Monday, January 25, 1982. Jury's hotel, Cork. "This is a time that's very precious to us," said Bono, "so think about whether you want to come along and ring me in 10 minutes." I thought about it, then rang him and went along to his room to join himself, the Edge and Mullen for their morning prayers.

After Bono opened the door and welcomed me in, what struck me was the radiant, beatific happiness of Edge and Mullen, quite unlike their everyday expressions. We stood in a circle in the middle of the room and prayed, Bono to my left, Edge to my right, our arms around each other, the morning sun streaming through the net curtains, reinforcing a sense of joy and peace that filled the room in a way so extraordinary that it has remained with me ever since. It was the only time I prayed with the three chaps by themselves, and while it was no glimpse inside the furnace door, it gave me an appreciation of the phenomenal source of power at the centre of U2.

That evening, at Bono's invitation, I went along to the weekly meeting of the Shalom prayer group, to which they belonged. He had advised me not to be alarmed if people around me started speaking in tongues or fainted. "When you get 40 Christians in a room, it can be intense." The meetings took place in a flat over Ron's newsagent's in Fairview, and a couple of dozen people were already there by the time I arrived. A beautiful young woman with blonde hair came over, kissed me and said welcome. The room filled up to the point where it was something of a squeeze; Bono had not been exaggerating when he spoke of 40 people in the small flat. Almost as soon as the prayers began, people began speaking in tongues. One person fainted, and then another, and then beautiful young woman who had greeted me passed out, falling to the floor in a graceful, balletic crumple. To say that this scene was unusual in the Dublin of the early 1980s would be a tremendous understatement. Not unlike the Dandelion gigs, it was like a wormhole, a glimpse into an alternative reality more intense than almost anything a teenager such as me might experience in the normal run of existence, and, therefore, more intoxicating.

I went along to the Shalom meetings for a while but, to say the least, never had the epiphany necessary to sustain the experience. The meetings lost some of their pressure-cooker quality when they shifted to a room in Mount Temple comprehensive, U2's alma mater, and the move highlighted the somewhat overbearing peer pressure of the prayer group. While my lifestyle was conspicuously vice-free at the time, I didn’t care to be told how to be told by others there, so I stopped attending and instead embraced a life of agnostic curiosity, glad to be moving on but grateful for the brief Shalom experience, if only for getting me into the habit of reading the Bible.

In Paris, after "City of Blinding Lights," they launched into "Vertigo," a generic song of a type that stretches back to the U2-by-numbers "With a Shout (Jerusalem)," on their October album, but one that sounds fantastic live precisely because of its narrow parameters. After "I'll Go Crazy," they returned to 1983 and 1984 for "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "MLK," Bono's voice coping noticeably well with the songs' sharp contrasts, soaring and quietening cleanly and sweetly, although it was a mite disconcerting to see him consulting a teleprompter for the lyrics to several songs. Six shows into the tour, with a set that scarcely changes from one night to the next, he could usefully have memorized the lyrics to songs that, after all, he helped write.

They finished with "Walk On," "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "One," before Bono urged the crowd to take out mobile phones and sign up to the advocacy organization of the same name, which he co-founded, the number of which appeared on the giant screen. When only a sprinkling of phones lit up, he suggested that we take out our phones anyway, to show the power of one. It was an odd moment, one of a few in the show that gave it the sense of a sanitized branded experience rather than a rock show, something tweaked and streamlined to generate the optimal consumer reaction, rather than something primal, unpredictable and possibly not even respectable, as a rock gig should be.

October, 1988. As a rookie news reporter writing a piece about U2, I needed to clarify a couple of matters of fact with Bono. He was busy writing lyrics and had his phone off the hook, so I scribbled a note, apologising for the intrusion, drove out on my motorbike to Bray, and stuck the note in his door. Shortly after I got home, he rang, sounding a little tipsy. "I've been drinking," he said, "Jack Daniel's sour mash whiskey." He was writing a song for Nina Simone, he said, called "Love is Blindness." Nina Simone didn't get to record it but the song turned up three years later as the closing track on Achtung Baby, the album for which U2 will likely be remembered even if all the others are forgotten. Bono answered my questions and made a few points of his own, repeatedly returning to one, namely that U2 was not a ruthless corporate entity, as some had characterised it. "It's not like Eamon Dunphy says it is."

Dunphy's biography of U2, Unforgettable Fire, had been published the previous year, to a flurry of mild controversy. The band distanced themselves from what they considered a rushed book, while its author bristled against what he considered U2's controlling tendencies. In researching the book, Dunphy had several skirmishes with Bono, whom he came to regard as akin to a union shop steward, someone who exercised his will by attending indefatigably to the smallest details of any situation, micromanaging in a way that his fellow band members lacked the energy to match. Bono, for his part, came to see Dunphy's chronic back pain as a key to his mercurial personality.

In some ways, they were a good match, highly intuitive individuals, competitive by nature, who had an instinctive strategic grasp. Dunphy's trump card, in a world increasingly in awe of Bono, was an utter disregard for his celebrity. He respected Bono's constructive qualities, and had a high opinion of Ali, his wife, but regarded the singer as a ruthless careerist whose weak point, oddly enough, was what Dunphy perceived as an infatuation with celebrities. "He's a star-f****r," he told me at the time. "I used to see his type outside the players' entrance at Millwall all the time."

Almost alone among the journalists who have observed Bono in close quarters, Dunphy remained immune to what some consider his charm, and which others consider a colder form of manipulation. To the extent that one can judge somebody from observing the most meagre flakes of their life, Bono seems a genuinely likeable individual, self-willed but funny and generally warm. My dealings with him as a journalist have been few, fleeting and wary, but back in his pre-stardom days, when I was a youngster with nothing that might be of interest to him other than a profound love of his band, he was always decent and nice to me. Decent and nice count for a lot in this world, or at least they should. While Bono has a big heart, however, he also has a thin skin, as his increasingly cranky public differences with Mullen have confirmed.

September 2002. While doing a piece about Guggi, the painter, Bono's friend from the age of three, I asked if they and their other friend from Cedarwood Road, Gavin Friday, would do a photo shoot together. The idea was to get a cover shot that played on a well-known 1980s image of Depeche Mode taken by Anton Corbijn, with Guggi flanked in the background by his well-known friends. Somewhat to my surprise, they agreed. On the appointed day, Bono arrived nearly two hours late to the photographer's studio in Dublin 2, in good form after his lunch. At one point, as the photographer twiddled some settings on his camera, Bono asked with mock pomposity if he could hurry it up a bit. "I'm not used to being the drummer," he added, sending a ripple of knowing laughter around the room, partly because the remark implied the hierarchy within U2, partly because Mullen's occasional tetchiness with Bono was far from secret.

Although U2 started out as the Larry Mullen Band, with the drummer nominally in charge, the roles within the group quickly solidified into a form that has endured to this day. Bono and Edge do the artistic heavy lifting; Adam Clayton drifts in and out; Mullen exercises the power of veto. It is a power that has proved useful on occasion, for example in the late 1980s, when U2's Mother label, which released records by local bands, ran into problems. Bono, U2's point man on Mother, stepped aside, and Mullen took over, resolving difficulties brought about by the singer's reluctance to say no to people. As Mullen then told an interviewer he has no problem saying no. Within U2, however, that quality has proved an occasional irritant.

Though Bono and Mullen have played out their version of sibling rivalry in private for decades, latterly their conflict has taken a lurid but fascinating turn, with the handbags-at-dawn incident on the Late Late Show followed by more sniping in an interview conducted by Brendan O'Connor, who spoke separately to all four band members.

Most notable about both episodes was the way Bono responded to comments by Mullen. When the drummer aired his views on Bono's friendship with Tony Blair on the Late Late Show, the singer responded not with a counter-attack but with an ad hominem attack, repeating a line coined months earlier, to the effect that Mullen thinks that even Dunphy is a war criminal.

Similarly, when responding to Mullen’s comment to O'Connor that he does not read the lyrics to U2 songs, Bono rose to the bait, saying the drummer doesn't understand them, and that perhaps on the next album he would draw pictures instead. There may be a way back from such public abuse, but the haranguing seems increasingly like part of an endgame grinding inexorably in just one direction.

Regardless of the personality differences, the weight of U2's contradictions may eventually collapse the band from within. They espouse Christian values yet showed a conspicuous lack of forgiveness towards Lola Cashman, the stylist whom they pursued through the courts for the return of some hats and sundry baubles. They preach social justice yet, with exquisitely grotesque hypocrisy, they do everything they can to avoid paying the taxes that fund it, blithely stating that they are fully tax compliant, even though nobody accused them of not being so. More than most people, they are in a position to know that there is a difference between doing the legally required minimum and doing the right thing, and that the latter usually comes with a price tag attached.

Bono has said that he cannot speak up about the tax arrangements without betraying his relationship with the band, thereby, of course, already betraying their relationship. Two albums ago, another member of the band spoke privately to friends about leaving the band in two albums’ time. Eventually, one of them will summon the wherewithal to leave the surrogate family nest. Mullen was the first of them to walk from Shalom, thereby demonstrating, to the surprise of some, that he had a mind of his own. Eventually, he may weary of being something akin to a hired hand in his own band.

In Paris, U2 returned to the stage for the three-song encore that has already become a fixed element of the tour. Throughout the gig, the band played fluently, having left behind the hesitancy of their opening dates in Barcelona, but with the encore, they moved into another gear, demonstrating an even greater sense of ease and power.

After the peaks of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" and "With or Without You," they ended the show with the contemplative "Moment of Surrender," the only one of the seven songs they performed that night from the current album that is strong enough to stand alongside the rest of the set. Some of U2's greatest songs lie in their hinterland, in meditative songs such as "A Sort of Homecoming" and "Drowning Man," and "Moment of Surrender" belongs with them, connecting with moods first touched upon in the Eamonn Andrews demo they recorded 30 years ago, and from which they have drawn sustenance ever since. If anything points a way forward for them, it is this.

© Times Newspapers Ltd., 2009

@U2 Calendar

3/22 - 5/10/2010 8th Annual "Build a Well for Bono's Birthday" Drive Begins The goal is $50,000. April 4 2010 08:00 PM - 11:00 PM - Easter with Hollywood U2 No, there won't be an egg hunt. Full Calendar