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"It's got a really spongy sound. We've found that when you're men, the slower tempos can be funky." -- Bono, on "Elevation" |
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"It's got a really spongy sound. We've found that when you're men, the slower tempos can be funky." -- Bono, on "Elevation" |
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It's The Hype! ... It's Feedback! ... It Was U2 (Malahide) All AlongOld newspaper clippings from 1978 help revise history - it was U2 who won the 1978 Limerick talent contest.
@U2,
July 30, 2001
The party line about U2 becoming U2 needs to be re-written.
The story which has been passed down from the first generation of U2 fans to the current one, retold countless times in interview after interview, year after year is...we ask your pardon...wrong. As it's been told, the story goes something like this: the band originally formed as a 5-piece band, with Edge's brother Dik included. They were originally called Feedback because -- as Bono has often said -- that's the sound that came through the amps. They changed their name to The Hype, and The Hype entered and won a talent contest on St. Patrick's Day, 1978, in Limerick, which led to their first studio sessions and got the band's name on the fledgling music scene in Dublin. As the story continues, it was shortly after the talent contest victory that Dik Evans left, and The Hype changed their name to U2...the same 4-piece we know and love today. And the rest was history. Good story, but not quite accurate. A newspaper article from The Evening Press (which co-sponsored the talent contest) shows Bono, Edge, Larry, and Adam holding their trophy -- the caption below the picture refers to the band as "U2" and the accompanying article lists them as "U2 Malahide." In other words, Dik had already left the band and the band was already using the U2 name when they won. If you're not a U2 historian, it may not mean anything to you and you probably don't think the news is all that remarkable. In fact, from one eyewitness account, it doesn't hold a candle to the news that U2 won the contest in the first place. Talk about remarkable.... "To be honest, we were all dumbfounded when they won, because truly, they were awful!" So says Fran Kennedy, who, in 1978, was the guitarist in a 4-piece band called the Doves -- one of the bands U2 beat in that talent contest during Civic Week festivities in Limerick. The contest featured 36 bands performing in one night. The bands were separated across several venues around Limerick, and eight were selected for the finals the following night in front of a live audience at the Savoy Cinema. Kennedy, who is now in his 40s and works as a freelance illustrator, doesn't remember any of the songs U2 played at the finals, but does remember a few other things about the four guys from Dublin. "I remember Bono as being quite loud and brash," he told @U2. "He wore a double-breasted jacket with brass buttons and epaulettes. We honestly thought that their [U2's] sound was absolutely awful! They were very basic musicians, not really in control of their instruments. They were little more than beginners at that time." Kennedy says that, while most of the bands competing hung out together, U2 kept to themselves away from the competition. "U2 Malahide as they were called, didn't mix with any of us. They were a little younger than all the others. I don't know why. I think it may be that up to then, they had not met any working musicians. I remember chatting with one of the Village group about U2, [and] we both agreed that they wouldn't be in the top three. They did seem to get sort of special treatment from the judges. Two of the judges, one from Hot Press magazine and a guy from RTE Radio chatted to U2 at the interval. They didn't speak to any of the others." Kennedy's band, the Doves, was a cover band that did songs by the Byrds, the Beatles, the Eagles, Van Morrison and popular chart songs at the time. Their finals performance, Kennedy says, included "Hotel California" complete with a note-for-note duplication of the guitar solo. But he admits that doing covers may not have been the way to win the talent contest. "We didn't appreciate the importance of originality back then," he says, "and we felt that we would do well because we were all pretty good musicians." © @U2/McGee, 2001.
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