‘So I bought a £5 acoustic guitar from a junk-shop down Dublin quays and I started learning chords and collecting songs. There was a guy in school who had a bit of a band going. He had an electric guitar and the school gave him a room to practise in; there was a bass player and a drummer and the sound was amazing to me. I just loved it.

I don’t know what it was like objectively, four teenage schoolkids struggling to play a song, probably, but the sound of drums and guitar and bass felt primal to me. I started to see that not only did this make me feel good but you got a bit of attention if you did it, too. You could meet girls and these people were considered cool. I suppose that was when I really made my decision that this was what I wanted to do….’

This month starts our book club. We have selected U2 by U2

U2 by U2 is the first book to take a look at the career of U2 through the eyes of the band members themselves. Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and manager Paul McGuiness take turns sharing details from the band’s meager beginnings up to the end of the How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb tour,

The highlight of this book is the photos. Designed like an oversized, multicolored and completely overblown magazine, the photos leap from the page. Some of them are familiar, like the iconic Anton Corbjin black and whites, while others are private snapshots that provide a deeper look into these people than they are willing to share with their own words.

The book is divided by each U2 album. This gets repetitive considering each album recoding process was basically the same thing. The band was under prepared and struggling, then songs began to fall into their lap. Lets start reading and sharing your comments on our forum.

Watch a video introduction to U2 by U2