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"We chose the name U2 to be ambiguous, to stay away from categorization." -- Bono |
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"We chose the name U2 to be ambiguous, to stay away from categorization." -- Bono |
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My Fan Year - #38
@U2,
October 16, 2005
If I'm going to talk about being a U2 fan, I should also confess my fascination with Ireland in general. I don't know the roots of this fascination, but I can tell you the exact moment I discovered it. I was in my early teens. I walked into my house one day after school; as I walked in I heard the toll of a massive church bell. My brother -- the one I later stole Achtung Baby from -- was playing a CD a friend of his had lent him. The bell sounded the opening note of the opening song. After the bell came a choir of voices singing in a language I did not know, if indeed it was a language at all. Mixed in with the choir was a rousing melody like something Henry IV would have used when marching to battle, or that Kenneth Branagh would have used when shooting a scene of Henry IV marching to battle. A low drone and echoing drums added an ominous touch to the whole. I was so hooked. Hearing that CD wasn't so much like finding a great new artist as it was like stumbling across a long-lost relative. I begged my brother to tell me what he was playing, so he handed me the case. The black and white photo on the front showed a pixie-faced woman staring at the camera with an unreadable expression. At her feet were two dogs, or possibly wolves. The name of the woman was also the name of the CD: Enya. Of course my researcher instincts were awakened -- it don't take much. I learned she was originally Eithne Ni Bhraonain, that she grew up in Donegal, and that Irish was her first language. So I got a "Beginner's Irish Dictionary" and wrote her a fan letter in what I hoped was a reasonable approximation of her native tongue. (I wonder now what my pidgin Irish must have sounded like. Probably something along the lines of "Dear Mr. Enya, I have liking you music very a lot. Thank thee for learning me Irish! To whom it may concern sincerely, Angela.") I learned her debut CD was the soundtrack to a documentary series on the Celts, and that I would never like her other albums as much as I loved that one. I learned Enya was related to the members of the band Clannad -- my brother had borrowed a couple of CDs of theirs from his friend, too. Suddenly I had a whole set of favorite songs from that band as well -- "Theme from Harry's Game," "Coinleach Glas An Fhomhair," "Siuil a Run" -- songs I desperately wanted to sing. I would scribble out my best guesses on what the words sounded like and hope no one who actually knew Irish would ever hear me: Shool, shool, shool-a-rune It was because of Clannad that I first heard of Newgrange, the Stone Age passage tomb not far from Slane Castle. One of their songs -- with lyrics in English! -- bids the listener to Wait for the sun on a winter's day ...because Newgrange, as I found out, was so made that at the winter solstice the rising sun illuminates the inner chamber of the mound, a nifty piece of 5000-year-old engineering. That was the sort of Ireland I caught glimpses of through this music: a place and a culture ancient, foreign and wild. I heard rumors of it later in songs by Sinead O'Connor and Afro-Celt Sound System, in poems by Yeats and Brendan Kennelly, in visits to the island of Inis Mór and the mountain Croagh Patrick. I heard that Ireland in the voice of someone who made a guest appearance on one of my Clannad albums. He was the singer in a band called U2, but I hadn't really gotten into them. I liked the song he did with Clannad though: "In A Lifetime." Many, many years later, Maire Brennan, the lead singer of Clannad, came through St. Louis on a solo tour. In the middle of her concert she pulled out her harp and announced her next song would be one she sang "with a wee fella back home." When the guys in her band laughed, she turned to them and said, "Well, he isn't terribly tall!" Then they did "In a Lifetime." The guy in the band who had to do the Bono bits couldn't hit all the high notes, but who could? After the concert Maire Brennan chatted with her fans and signed autographs. I tried to tell her, too, how much inspiration I had gotten out of her singing. That time I didn't try to say it in Irish. © @U2/Pancella, 2005.
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