Fifty Years Later, U2 Played the Same Wall

There's a photo from 1977 of four teenagers playing against a wall at Mount Temple Comprehensive School on Dublin's Northside, a handful of kids perched on top of it to watch.

On Friday, U2 played that same wall again — older, the paint a different colour, a new generation of students sitting exactly where the last one sat.

The date wasn't a rough anniversary. Mullen had put up a handwritten notice on the school board — Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band — and on 25 September 1976, Adam Clayton, Paul Hewson and Dave Evans turned up at his kitchen table to see if the four of them had anything. Fifty years later, to the day, the band came back to play for 1,000 of the school's current students, opening with "Out of Control" — their actual first single — and closing the set with music from their newly announced album, Carnaval De Luz. For "One," they were joined by 32 string musicians from Music Generation, one representing every county on the island of Ireland.

That night, U2 turned up unannounced on Grafton Street and played to whoever happened to be there — a busking set for a band who haven't needed to busk in over four decades, on the street where plenty of Dublin acts still do.

It's a neat piece of stagecraft, the kind of anniversary move built for the cameras. But the wall photo undercuts the cynicism a little. Fifty years is the gap between a note on a noticeboard and a headline album; it's also just the distance between one group of kids sitting on a wall and another.

Carnaval De Luz is out November 13 via Island Records.