BOY
(1980)
.::
I WILL FOLLOW ::. [back
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Do
you have any idyllic childhood memories?
[Bono:]
None at all. The little pieces that I can put back together are,
if not violent, then aggressive. I was introduced to this guy, James
Mann, who, at age four, had the ambition of being a nuclear physicist,
and one of the guys bit his ear. And I took that kid's head and banged
it off an iron railing. It's terrible, but that's the sort of thing
I remember. I remember the trees outside the back of the house where
we lived, and them tearing those trees down to build an awful development.
I remember real anger.
What
of your mom and dad and the way they got on?
To
be honest, I don't remember that much about my mother. I forget what
she looks like. I was fourteen or fifteen when she died, but I don't
remember. I wasn't close to my mother or father. And that's
why, when it all went wrong -- when my mother died -- I felt a real resentment,
because I actually had never got a chance... to feel that unconditional
love a mother has for a child. There was a feeling of that house
pulled down on top of me, because after the death of my mother that house
was no longer a home -- it was just a house. That's what "I Will
Follow" is about. It's a little sketch about that unconditional love
a mother has for a child: "If you walk away, walk away I will follow,"
and "I was on the outside when you said you needed me / I was looking at
myself I was blind I could not see." It's a really chronic lyric.
(from
"U2's Passionate Voice" by David Breskin, Rolling
Stone, October 08, 1987)
Bono:
I didn't really begin spending a lot of time on lyrics until halfway into
the '80s, so this and a lot of the early songs were written very quickly
-- in just minutes in many cases. Thee idea here was really just a
very personal feeling, a song about unconditional love: "If you walk away,
I will follow." It would be high up on my list.
(from
"U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate
One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow'
To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los
Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
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TWILIGHT ::. [back
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Bono:
"The sexual side of Boy was, in its time, quite revelatory. People
can talk about sex on a bland level, or about S&M, leather gear and
impulse sex. But that's actually very conservative, not at all radical.
In 'Twilight,' a boy was being confronted by a man who was a homosexual,
and I was trying to explain in the song that it wasn't how it was written
in the book:
My
body grows and grows
It
frightens me you know
A
teacher told me why
I
laugh when old men cry
"Nobody
realised that I was talking about menopause. It was a riddle.
I can remember being told in school about the change in life and how distressing
it can be for old men when they stop functioning. I can remember
my nervous laugh... So on that side of Boy a lot of people didn't
realise exactly how much of myself I was giving.
(from
"Love, Devotion & Surrender" by Tristam Lozaw, republished in U2 Magazine,
No. 11, June 01, 1984, original publication unknown)
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AN CAT DUBH ::.
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[Bono:] "You
can see the sordid side to Amsterdam. At first sight it's beautiful,
innocent, even a naive city. There's shop window prostitution and
it's the European centre for the drugs market. It's like one of the
songs on Boy called 'An Cat Dubh' which describes the cat as a symbol of
temptation. At first beautiful, the shape, you know, seductive.
In the daylight it destroys a birdnest. Not for food, but for enjoyment
and at the same time it comes up to you and strokes the side of your leg.
Amsterdam is like that. It's beautiful, it's people are beautiful,
but..."
(from "U2's First European
Tour" by Mike Gardner, republished in U2 Magazine, No. 5, November 1982,
original publication unknown)
["An cat dubh" is Gaelic
for "the black cat."]
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OUT OF CONTROL ::. [back
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Bono:
"'Out Of Control' is about waking up on your eighteenth birthday and realising
that you're 18 years old and that the two most important decisions in your
life have nothing to do with you -- being born and dying. The song
is from the child's point of view and it's about a vicious cycle.
He becomes a delinquent but the psychologist says 'it's in his childhood.'
No matter what he does -- it can't be because he wants to, it's always
because of what went before and there's no decision in anything.
Then again, that's slightly spiritual -- the question what is happening
if you've no freedom?
(from
"Boys in Control" by Niall Stokes, Hot
Press Vol 3 No. 9, October 26, 1979)
Bono
wrote Boy's "Out of Control" immediately upon rising from a troubled sleep
on his eighteenth birthday: "I said, 'Well, here we are. I'm eighteen,
and the two most important things in my life -- being born and dying --
are completely out of my hands. What's the point? At that point
in my life I had a lot of anger and discontent when I couldn't find answers.
It was violent, but mentally violent." [...]
(from
"U2" by Fred Schruers, Musician, May 01, 1983)
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STORIES FOR BOYS ::. [back
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Bono
explained the words of "Stories For Boys," which concerned the unreal world
of comic books, to me. It said a lot about U2's attitude:
"I
can remember as a child, looking in the mirror and thinking, 'I don't look
like that!' That's wrong. You're bombarded with all these images
in the comics and nobody's like that. But the effect is of total
disillusionment with yourself. You put on a mask and hide from yourself,
from your own soul, from what you've got to offer. It's a reaction
away from the individual and we stand for individualism."
(from
"The Unforgettable Band: A U2 Overview" by Kris Needs, Creem
Collectors Series - U2, August 01, 1987)
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.::
THE OCEAN ::. [back
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[...];
Bono is still driven by a vivacious urge to express, but now he is more
directed, more sure of exactly what he is trying to say. He believes
what he has to say is important, but he avoids a tendency towards self-importance.
When I accuse him of crusading in "The Ocean" with the lines "I thought
the world could go far / If they listened to what I said," he denies that
implication, though conceding that it is a 'touchy comment.'
"It
is just a complete teenage thought, it is the thought of every teenager,
it is the thought of everybody in a band who thinks he can change the world.
There is another verse which got left out, it's on the sleeve, 'When I
looked around / The world couldn't be found / Just me by the sea,' which
is the resignation that no matter what you do, people are going to go their
own way."
(from
"Growing Up in Public" by Neil McCormick, Hot
Press Vol 4 No. 15, December 17, 1980)
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.::
A DAY WITHOUT ME ::. [back
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[Bono:] "I want to see the long-term effect of groups like ours or the Jam. Our emotions aren't just glossy, throwaway things. Some people saw 'A Day Without Me' as escapism, but it was about suicide. I don't expect people to dig into our material with a knife and fork but..."
(from
"A Dreamboat Named Desire" by Richard Cook, New Musical Express, February 27, 1982)
[I
haven't been able to find any direct quotes on this, but reportedly:]
Bono
wrote "A Day Without Me" (on Boy, their debut album) partly in reaction
to the news that Joy Division's Ian Curtis had taken his own life.
(from
"U2" by Fred Schruers, Musician, May 01, 1983)
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THE ELECTRIC CO. ::. [back
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[...]
Since then [referring to ADWM and Ian Curtis], a school chum of
Bono's, having survived electro-convulsive therapy in a Dublin institution
(Boy's "The Electric Co.") has "had a go at himself with an electric saw.
He told me that there's only two ways out of the place -- either over the
wall or just to cut his throat." [...]
(from
"U2" by Fred Schruers, Musician, May 01, 1983)
[Bono:]
Song called The Electric Co... Children's television show. Song about
a medical treatment... Known as ECT... It's where you go when you don't
know... [...]
(live
at Stadthalle, Offenbach, West Germany, January 29, 1985; transcription
by Michael Reiter)
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.::
SHADOWS AND TALL TREES ::.
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U2 stands for hope -- another singular trait. A lot of groups represent some form of nihilism, escapism or despair; how many can honestly state the opposite case?
"It is a celebration," Bono says. "'Shadows and Tall Trees,' on the album, begins a pensive mood, as the character -- who is me -- looks around him. He sees this pattern developing, the repetition of everyday life. It really gets to him, really irritates him, as he realizes 'Mrs. Brown's washing is always the same.' I was listening to housewives talking; in Dublin there's this expression -- 'I know, I know' they say to each other, 'I know' -- but I realized that's very beautiful in many ways. It's often the everyday things that are beautiful."
(from
"U2" by Tim Sommer, Trouser Press, July 01, 1981)
[Bono:] The way I saw "The Fly" was like an obscene phone call from Hell, but the guy likes it there. He's like calling home, saying, I like it. It's a deranged kind of character. We have all these kind of people that we are, and there's some that you just don't want to let out in public. He's one of them.
[S. Bailie:] In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, there's a similar voice -- it's the primitive God, who represents "the infinite cynicism of adult life," which he uses to corrupt the castaway schoolkids...
[Bono:] That book blew my mind. There's a song on our first album, "Shadows and Tall Trees," which is a chapter from Lord of the Flies. The whole thing of Boy was partly about that.
(from
"Rock And Roll Should Be This Big!" by Stuart Bailie, New Musical Express, June 13, 1992)
[The
following might be from "Into the Heart" by Niall Stokes:]
[Bono:]
"I remember thinking about that comparison between Lord of the Flies and where we
were in Cedarwood, between Ballymun and Finglas. It was a quiet little
street in one sense but my memory of it, growing up, is of being stuck
between cowboys and indians, rumbles between the top end of the street
and the bottom end of the street, between bootboys and skinheads, and so
on. That's the way it was. And I remember thinking the shadows
and tall trees are different here -- but it's the same story, isn't it?
It's all about war. We're all stuck on this island of suburbia and
we're turning on each other."
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