U2 on 50 years and their duet with Dolly Parton

When U2 came knocking, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. didn’t just arrive with new music; the band came bearing gifts, which they proceeded to place over a photo of Bruce Springsteen.

“We just wanna get Bruce Springsteen off your wall,” Bono said. “There’s some new blood coming through! But honestly Bruce, give the young people a break.”

The up-and-coming Irish quartet is celebrating its 50th birthday this year – that’s half a century of hits.

In September, U2 went back to the Dublin school where they first came together. Playing Mount Temple Comprehensive was “kind of amazing,” said The Edge. “We used the music room in Mount Temple as our rehearsal space.”

Bono said he didn’t know what to expect from the students there: “I was nervous going out there.”

“There were a couple of cheeky signs, like, ‘When is Oasis playing?'” said The Edge. “But for the most part they really seem to get into it.”

It was at Mount Temple in 1976 where Mullen pinned a note to the school bulletin board looking for bandmates. “I’d no expectations that anyone would show up, bizarrely,” Mullen said.

The four got together via word of mouth. “Yeah, it’s one of those funny things that the note is legendary,” said Clayton. “And then when we started to talk about it, we realized none of us had seen it, and we’d been told about it by a friend or whatever.”

The band has just released “Carnaval de Luz,” their first album of new music in nearly nine years, created through a process that Bono called “chaotic.”

The Edge reframed that as “nicely chaotic.”

“Very functionally dysfunctional,” Bono continued. “You would be shocked at just how raw it is and how just about to collapse.”

“We’re not precious in any way,” The Edge said. “Until almost the record is in the store, we will try and improve and change and develop.”

Won’t you drive yourself nuts doing that? “Yeah. We do!” The Edge laughed.

The new album marks the return of drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., who had to sit out the band’s 2024 residency at Sphere in Las Vegas with a neck injury that threatened his career. He said he wasn’t terribly confident that he would be able to come back: “I had a congenital fusion, from moving like that for over 50 years, it basically had had enough,” he said. “Yeah, a lot of people were very much on the page of, you’ve had a great life, you know, this is not worth it.”

He risked paralysis if the surgery went wrong. “But you know what? I really wanted to get back and play in any capacity,” Mullen said.

Asked if they were worried that he might not play again, The Edge said, “At some point, if Larry had had to retire, we would have had to have made a very difficult call about whether U2 can go on at all.”

“Maybe we could have got a better looking, more fun drummer,” Bono added.

The band calls “Carnaval de Luz” an album of “defiant joy.” It includes the song “Torn,” a duet with Dolly Parton that would prove to be her last recording

Bono said he approached singing with her on the track “With great trepidation.”

Parton had shared the song with Bono: “She was like, ‘You can take this wherever you want to go, and I might like where you want to take it,'” he said. “But you didn’t know until it came back.”

How generous an act is that for a songwriter? “Oh, no, not just a songwriter; one of the great songwriters who ever lived,” Bono said.

U2 will be back out on the road next year, aiming for another groundbreaking live show. “That’s our promise to our audience, is to try and have a shot at the best night of anybody’s life,” said Bono. “That’s what we want out of our show.”

Half a century on, U2 is still striving to be heard. “Whether it’s relevant or not is really not up to us,” said The Edge. “But whether we want to try and be relevant is up to us.”

Asked what it means to be relevant, The Edge replied, “To be relevant is to speak of the moment. That’s why we write songs. We all believe that we could next week write the best U2 song we’ve ever written. So, there’s a lot to fight for, really.”

“We think we are at our best,” said Bono. “And if anyone out there thinks they’re better … come and take it!”

     
WEB EXTRA: Watch an extended interview with U2, from the podcast “Alchemy with Anthony Mason” (YouTube Video)

To stream the U2 album “Carnaval de Luz” click on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):

Story produced by Jon Carras. Editor: Steven Tyler. 

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