U2

U2 formed in Dublin on September 25, 1976, after fourteen-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr. posted a note on the notice board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School looking for musicians^[1]. Six students showed up to that first rehearsal, and the lineup that stuck was Mullen on drums, Paul Hewson (soon known as Bono) on vocals, David Evans (the Edge) on guitar, and Adam Clayton on bass^[1]. None of them were particularly accomplished players at the time; what they had instead was ambition and, within a few years, a genuinely original sound built around the Edge's chiming, effects-heavy guitar work.

The band signed to Island Records and released its debut album, Boy, in 1980, then spent much of the 1980s expanding from earnest post-punk into the widescreen, socially engaged rock that would define albums like War and The Unforgettable Fire. By the time they entered sessions for The Joshua Tree with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, working out of Dublin houses rather than conventional studios, the band had already built a reputation for urgency and moral seriousness in their songwriting, qualities that would carry into the album's meditations on faith, America, and personal struggle.

That partnership with Eno and Lanois actually began earlier, on 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, the first album the pair produced for the band. Recording at Slane Castle and then Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, the producers pushed U2 away from the direct rock songwriting of War toward something more atmospheric, encouraging Bono to work with impressionistic, sketch-like lyrics rather than tightly reported narratives^[3]. The album's lead single, "Pride (In the Name of Love)," grew out of Bono's reading on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and a 1983 visit to a King exhibit at Chicago's Peace Museum, after the band abandoned an earlier idea to write a song critical of Ronald Reagan^[3]. Bono has said he was drawn to King's story partly because he saw parallels between the American civil rights movement and the sectarian conflict he had grown up around in Northern Ireland, a connection that gave the band's first genuine American hit an unmistakably Irish point of view^[3].

That moral seriousness had a concrete, biographical source. In the mid-1980s, Bono traveled to Nicaragua and El Salvador with the human rights organization Amnesty International, spending time in rebel-held territory during the Salvadoran Civil War and witnessing the effects of US-backed military intervention firsthand^[2]. The trip left him shaken as both a citizen and a practicing Christian troubled by American support for the conflict, and it fed directly into The Joshua Tree's most confrontational track, "Bullet the Blue Sky," as well as into a broader activist streak, centered on human rights, debt relief, and African aid, that Bono has sustained across the rest of his career^[2].

The Joshua Tree, released in March 1987, became the commercial and critical breakthrough that turned U2 from a respected act into one of the biggest bands in the world, propelled in large part by "With or Without You," the band's first number-one single in the United States. The album's success cemented the songwriting partnership between Bono's lyrics and the Edge's guitar textures as one of rock's defining creative relationships, a partnership U2 has continued to build on across four decades and more than a dozen studio albums.