I was at Compass Point in the spring of 1980 when Rob Partridge, the head of Island press, first told me about U2. A former Melody Maker journalist, he had good instincts for what was happening, any new scene, and he called me up and said, “I think there is a band you will really like. They are Irish, and they’ve got something.” He wasn’t the excitable type, so I took him seriously. When he saw them, Nick Stewart, our new A&R man, thought they were perfect for Island, a noisy rock band like the old days, but young, enthusiastic, and with a little modern punk attitude.
Island had missed out on punk pretty much, except for the Slits, who had a very different vibe and a very particular sense of rhythm and seemed to fit into Island in a way punk bands really didn’t. I never really took to punk as music even though I liked the attitude (to me, it just lacked bass), but there was a sense within the label that we had missed out on something culturally important, perhaps for the first time since we started. It was a time when Island was out of fashion, when we mostly had rock groups, even if we also had Kevin Ayers, Nico, and John Cale, whom Partridge had help bring into Island when he was working in A&R; we also had the wide interests of Brian Eno after Roxy Music, whose early solo singing albums contained amongst much else some punk-like energy and post-punk disquiet.
But the punk groups weren’t going to come to the Island of Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Free, and Nick Drake, which seemed the old days, and even Roxy Music and Sparks seemed the wrong influence.
The new punk groups would start their own labels, or go to labels with their own punkiness, like Stiff. (We did actually distribute Stiff, so we kept our hand in, not losing touch completely.) Then there were bands like the Sex Pistols, who played games with record labels, taking the money and taking the piss.
Paradoxically, even though we were seen as a big, established label at the time, we were actually having our own financial troubles. The gambler in me did like to spend money and invest incoming money in new projects, and the managing directors I put in place tended to be those who had worked for me from the very beginning. After seeing him rise through the ranks, I wasn’t really going to listen to my managing director Tim Clark, much as I respected him, if he told me to stop spending money.
For a couple of years around 1976 and ’77 we were forced to license our records through EMI to raise urgent money, losing our independence for a while. We got it back a couple of years later, when the Marley money started to come through, but it did mean when the bigger punk groups like the Clash were the subject of bidding wars, we actually couldn’t afford them even if we wanted them.
When it came to punk as rebel music, I had Bob Marley bringing the rebel into the label, and that was rebel with rhythm, much more where I was.
I never saw U2 as punk, but they were definitely part of that next wave of groups after punk, who took the energy and attitude, and in U2’s case, added something uplifting and positive, and in its own way something undeniably spiritual. They weren’t exactly post-punk either, as there was something about them, perhaps the fact they were Irish, that held them back from seeming something boldly new. We didn’t respond quickly to the post-punk groups, and Virgin Records, who’d begun distributed by Island, had become the more obvious destination for post-punk bands like Public Image Ltd, XTC, and Magazine—they even challenged us with their own reggae division, Front Line.
U2’s name instantly hooked me even if the music didn’t. I go by names, they mean a lot, and I was quite capable of not signing an act because their name wasn’t right. If I thought there was nothing you could do with a name, I never had any interest. U2 you could definitely do something with—it would look great printed big on a poster, unmissable, and it was something you said every day. You too? You too! There was a little wobble about their name amongst the Island staff backing us to sign U2. They were being called the U2s, but I thought it was a strong name as soon as I heard it.
Rob Partridge and Nick Stewart were trying to find a way for me to go and see them while I was in England, which because of Compass Point and business in New York was happening less and less.
A gig was arranged on June 7 in South London at the Half Moon in Herne Hill; I could go there after Bob Marley’s open-air show in front of fifteen thousand people at the Crystal Palace a few miles away. No one in the audience knew Marley was ill. He had less than a year to live, and some people who saw him perform said he seemed a little tired, a little slow and careful. Bob sang his new acoustic song “Redemption Song,” the first time many people had heard it, just as the sun went down. For many there it was heartbreaking, but they couldn’t really explain why.
After the show, everyone backstage headed into Central London on coaches, but I went off to see U2 with my girlfriend at the time, Nathalie Delon, and one or two others. I did not know it, but I was heading into another adventure, and in the same way Island had Cat Stevens, who brought the spirit of 1960s into the early 1970s, and then Bob Marley later in the 1970s, here was Island’s biggest act of the 1980s. All three of them made religious music, from different places, but music with a message, songs about faith, and truth, and human dignity, which must say something about why I was so drawn to them.
Arriving at the pub, an old haunt of Dylan Thomas’s, I would never have believed I was about to come across Island’s next big signing, but then at the beginning of these things, it’s often beyond your wildest imagination how it will turn out. You don’t expect anything. You just follow your instinct and make a decision at that moment and then let it play out.
They’d played there a few times already that year. There seemed to be more people in my entourage than in the paying audience, but U2 played as though there were a thousand in front of them. They were bursting out of themselves. I was immediately blown away by their passion. I didn’t really feel the music—it wasn’t my kind of thing, too trebly, a bit rinky-dinky. They sounded as young as they were, and seemed overwhelmed by their influences, and their solemn-looking rhythm section barely made a dent in my memory.
The jazzer in Jamaican me needed some bass, the R&B lover wanted some swagger, and at that time I was enthralled by the cross-pollinated rhythms of the New York bands signing to ZE and excited by the rhythms of Compass Point. U2 wasn’t about unusual rhythms, and if I had just heard them on a demo tape, I would have passed. Their early demo tapes would give you about 10 percent of the necessary information.
All was not lost, because I really believed in their self-confidence. It was like seeing a movie where you are not getting it all the way through. It doesn’t seem to be grabbing you, and then at the end you realize you loved it. You want to see it again. There was much more to it than there initially seemed. And how that came across to me was through U2’s energy, something that was really focused. In their energy was their own belief in themselves, which was irresistible.
Their twenty-year-old singer, Bono, seemed particularly driven, like he knew what his destiny was and he was charging towards it from a small stage in an unpromising pub in South London. He had some kind of rhythm, even if it was just how he engaged with an imaginary audience. Very early on in these cramped little venues in front of the smallest crowds, he was already clambering over the equipment and up the lighting rig as if he needed to reach out to the back of a vast venue, and even farther. This was either complete, delusional wishful thinking, or sheer, audacious magnetism, or a bit of both. He was already rehearsing for the big time. It stopped just about short of being too much. He didn’t care if it looked a bit daft. In his head it was magnificent, and he was out to persuade everyone else it really was. They were going through where they were, without any kind of shame, to get to where they were going.
I met them after the show, in similar circumstances to when I met the Spencer Davis Group, in a very cramped dressing room, all of us on top of each other, becoming a part of music history, or perhaps just ships passing in the night. Bono was perhaps so animated because he was still in the process of proving to drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who had formed the group and was clearly the leader, that he was going to work as the lead singer, and to bassist Adam Clayton and the guitarist they were already calling the Edge, quiet but clearly smarter than the usual young rock musician. It was small talk, really, nothing much more than a bit of chitchat, but I realized pretty quickly that they were an intelligent collection of people. I believed in them as people even if the music had passed by me.
I agreed on the spot that they should come to Island. Their manager, Paul McGuinness, made a big impression on me as well. Bands at this stage of their life, playing small, dirty venues, are usually looked after by an eager pal who can’t play an instrument and acts as the driver and equipment humper. But U2 had someone in place who even in this tiny venue absolutely looked the part, reminding me very much of David Enthoven and John Gaydon of E. G. He was clearly in charge of everything but their music.
Bono talks about how when I came to the gig I was dressed in shorts and flip-flops, as if it were a cold winter’s day or something. It was June, but Bono likes to make a story better! He’s got a way with words. Apart from whatever else he is, he is a mythmaker.
The flip-flops made a big impression on him, that the boss of the record label turned up that way. But what made an impression on me was how their manager was dressed almost exactly the opposite to me, the way I would never dress. Even though it was a scruffy venue, a basic bar with a barely there stage, he was in a suit and tie, very proper, very professional, and that really added to the sense that they all meant business.
Just a few words was all it took for McGuinness to make it clear to me that he was very smart, and he also believed in U2 and knew how to sell them. He was committing himself to this project. He was confident. Don’t worry about the size of the venue or the small crowd; this is going to happen.
He told me, “We are not in the record business; we are in the U2 business,” and I knew exactly what he meant. He was announcing, We have stature; we have a future. The professionalism was significant. They had things worked out. We signed them, not for a particularly dramatic amount of money. We might have offered Spandau Ballet more, but there were no other labels interested in U2, and we didn’t have to enter a bidding war. Even Stiff, run by fellow Irishman Dave Robinson, wasn’t keen on releasing U2 records when McGuinness asked him to help, to give them a profile. He liked the idea of them, but he thought their songs were underwhelming.
Later, when he was managing director of Island, feeling I was too soft and old-fashioned when it came to promotion, it was Dave’s aggressive marketing and TV advertising of U2 that pushed them from being minor cult to the edge of the big time.
Paul McGuinness didn’t blink when it came to negotiation, even though we might have been their only option. The reality was, Island was the best label for U2, because it was in an area between major and independent, and I still had the final say about what we signed, based on years of experience.
Some record companies might get nervous if they think no one else is interested, but it suited Island just fine. We had done well signing the rejects and the unwanted, because we often responded to an act not as a record company but as a potential collaborator.
Now that I was a U2 believer and we were signing them, I told everyone at Island that I wanted to give them their head; I wanted us to follow them instead of telling them what to do. I said, “These guys are in charge. This is their thing.” In effect, I gave them the company to use as they wanted to make their vision come true. I gave them a platform. I gave them Island Records. I did not have any influence on them at all. I had nothing to do with their recordings, their graphics, their touring. They did everything themselves. And we left them to it. I just got out of their way, allowed them to be independent spirits. Sometimes that’s what it takes. They had a producer in mind: Steve Lillywhite, who’d worked with Siouxsie and the Banshees, XTC, and Ultravox; engineered a great single for Island by Eddie and the Hot Rods called “Do Anything You Wanna Do”; and just produced Peter Gabriel. He seemed like a good choice, a little older than them but not by too much, and had also fallen for their self-belief and live performance as much as their demo tapes. We left them to it, as I promised, and let them work it out for themselves, none of them yet twenty—but then, neither were the members of Free when they made their first album.
Bono would say he took it as a compliment that I just let them be themselves. It was a good time for me to come across U2, because I was becoming more hands-off in general, certainly outside of Compass Point, and it was perfect to find a band that connected so well with Island but didn’t really need much involvement from me. I just needed to be there, a living symbol of the kind of person they wanted at the head of their label.
Boy, their debut album, did not sell so well. Just like Bob Dylan was known as John Hammond’s folly after his first album, U2 was thought of as Nick Stewart’s folly. There was some talk in Island of dropping them—which to me didn’t seem a very Island thing to do, in terms of how they clearly had a long-term plan, and we had said we were there for them. We had given them this commitment, not something we would often do to that extent, and then at the first sign of a problem we pulled out? There were discussions, my point of view was obvious, Rob Partridge reported on their great press, minds were changed, and we picked up the option. To me it made perfect sense—even if it was a gamble, when had we ever not gambled on what turned out to be the right thing to do?
I had made a new deal with Atlantic to distribute our records, turning the deal on its head—instead of the usual way, where they offered us an advance, I offered them an advance for a much better profit share. An accountant is never going to turn down free money. This was just before Island, in particular U2, took off. That led to Atlantic’s cofounder Ahmet Ertegun, one of my heroes, calling me “the baby-faced killer.”
Now and then I would give the group some advice, offer an opinion. I still had a point of view. I remember after they had used Steve Lillywhite to produce the first three albums—Boy, October, and War—they decided a change would be good. Lillywhite had been like their teacher, and now they needed another one.
I suggested that they might try using Jimmy Iovine for their fourth studio album. He’d worked on Springsteen’s Born to Run and Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, as well as producing Patti Smith’s Easter and her first hit, “Because the Night.” He’d produced their 1983 live album Under a Blood Red Sky from their American War tour and I thought he would be a good match for U2, at an especially important time for them—to make them a bit more wide-screen and international. They seemed on the verge of becoming massive, but, being overthinkers, this worried them as much as it excited them. They feared that they might break through with a basic rock sound they could never escape from, and they wanted to demonstrate they had an artistic fluidity.
I heard that they were going to use Brian Eno as their new producer. This was a real surprise at the time, one I wasn’t sure about at all, thinking of those abrasive and cold no-wave recordings Eno had done in New York a few years before, more than of early Roxy Music. I thought it was commercial suicide, even when Neil Storey and Rob in the press department, with their ears close to the ground, tried to persuade me it was a brilliant idea, however unexpected.
This motivated me to fly out to Dublin to meet the group and talk it through. They listened politely as I explained why I didn’t think it was a good idea. They had clearly made their minds up that they were going to use Eno, who up to that point had been involved with plenty of innovative new music but never with anything close to direct rock success. Where we did meet on Eno was the work he had done with Talking Heads, but that hadn’t sold the kind of copies I thought U2 could. Eno doing with U2 what he had done with Talking Heads wasn’t as bad an idea as him doing to U2 what he had done with Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, but I was still not convinced.
Full of themselves—because that was part of their attraction—they said, “Well, if you are here as the record company concerned about your investment, you should go now. If you are here as a fan of the group, well, we have thought hard about this, and we think this is what we need to do to sound more modern, more serious.”
They politely told me they would use Iovine when the time was right (and they did on Rattle and Hum in 1988, which gave them their first UK number one, “Desire”), but they were very wedded to the idea of using Brian Eno along with Daniel Lanois on what became The Unforgettable Fire.
I was concerned that Eno would take them in an experimental direction, which would have been absurd; but of course they knew what they were doing, searching for their own sound, this ambient abstraction of rock stardom, conceptualizing the idea of a massive rock band without losing any authenticity. It was a dramatic—and at the same time subtle—change for the group, and absolutely the right one. I didn’t see it coming. They did. It was why I trusted them, even if now and then I pointed out what I thought was an error. Once they explained why they were doing it, I left as a fan, understanding what they were doing and looking forward to it.
It turned out they had also needed to persuade Eno, as he wasn’t sure what he could do for them when they first asked him. He needed persuading from the other side. Bono, of course, eventually talked him into it. Bono is a very good talker. Eno had initially recommended that they use Lanois on his own; but when he decided to do it, it was hearing about my fears that he would turn them into art rock, or worse, that made him bring Lanois with him. Then, he reasoned, the album would at least sound great. So I made some sort of contribution to this clever change in direction.
With U2, Eno experimented in a different way, not sacrificing their rock dynamics, but working out how to enhance them through a combination of spontaneity, emotion, and strategy. He was like a kind of intellectual Guy Stevens, a cerebral Jimmy Miller, creating a mood, someone who understood how a recording studio worked and how to get the best out of the group he was working with. He created a landscape for U2 to occupy, and that alone meant they didn’t end up as their worst nightmare, just another high-powered rock band.
Unforgettable Fire went to number one in the UK charts, and in the US it reached number twelve, the highest position for a U2 album so far, and in 1985, Rolling Stone named them Band of the Eighties, the only band that mattered. It opened up America in the way I had hoped, but with the added bonus of a new, adaptable sound for the group, because Eno—with his lapsed-Catholic background, with Lanois’s vast sound—had reimagined them as a spiritual rock band.
And of course the partnership with Eno, with his firm, theoretical approach to the idea of U2 as a kind of commercial art object, became one of their most important relationships. Often Eno played a similar role to me—he was a symbol of their ultimate producer, a talisman, even if his influence was sometimes just a matter of him being there, part of their mental picture, and someone they needed to live up to.
Before they worked with Jimmy Iovine on Rattle and Hum (which led to some of the criticism about a tendency to melodrama and bombast they had originally feared), they were still using Brian Eno (with Daniel Lanois) and his different, slyer thinking about rock dynamics for 1987’s The Joshua Tree—which was again the correct course of action. It won a Grammy for Album of the Year and put them on the cover of Time magazine, certifying superstar status, and was the first of eight straight number-one albums. They were now a group who could change from record to record without changing their central purpose or losing their commercial impact. Four years later, for 1991’s Achtung Baby, they returned to Lanois and Eno, their favored studio partnership, which allowed the group to experiment with pop culture and their place in it, to introduce electronics and other non-rock elements but still sound like they were artists who meant business. Eno was with them for the next album, Zooropa, extending the Achtung Baby experiments, and in 1995 even merged with U2 to become the Passengers (the name they recorded under when Eno was even more involved than usual), making the kind of eclectic, conceptually playful album I had imagined their first collaboration would have been.
For quite a time they always seemed to know what they were doing, and how to do it, and they turned into the kind of group they were acting out when I first saw them in front of a handful of people in an obscure part of London. They just kept on being serious, and smart, and hardworking, often overanalyzing what they were doing but for good reason, finding the best people to work with, and Bono kept on talking, never afraid to fail, and Paul McGuinness kept on dressing the same way, and Island kept following them, at least while I was around.
The only time it went wrong was much later, when they released Pop, in 1997—without Brian Eno—which was an odd, self-conscious title, although slightly better than one they’d had in mind, Pop for Men, and they launched it in a supermarket, which was so out of place. It was the only time that a direction they went in was a failure, with a combination of bad reviews and bad sales. Because everything up to then had worked—all their choices about management, artwork, producers, photographers, designers, tours, titles, songs—when it didn’t work, no one quite knew how to respond. There was no precedent for a really bad set of U2 decisions. There was no model for anybody to say to them, “Hold on. This is a mess….” Because nothing like that had ever happened with them before. They hadn’t put a foot wrong, so it was very disorienting when they did. I guess they recovered. They got it right about what to do when you get it wrong. Maybe it was all part of their plan, even if at the beginning there didn’t seem to be a clear plan other than: let’s go with this plan until we come up with a better one.
Forty years after I first met them, as a fan and a friend, as someone who likes to go with the flow, I still look forward to seeing what they do next and how they’re going to start over again one more time.