July 1988, a lazy, Bombay monsoon sunday afternoon. It’s raining. The chummery smells of half dried laundry. I remember lying in bed after lunch, reading a book, when suddenly incredible music rents the air in our chummery. I jump off my bed like a scalded cat and run to my chummery mate, Sameer Gupta’s room going “What the hell is that ?????”. Cool as a cucumber he looks at me and goes “Joshua Tree – just got the cassette last night – you know U2?”. I say no, and, we spend the entire afternoon listening to Joshua Tree on loop. I am hooked forever!! 

The great thing about Bono and U2’s music has always been that not only is it fantastic music – it is led by a strong social and moral compass and has a thread of gospel music running through it. The incredible album opener, ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ was Bono’s message about inequality and imagining a place (heaven?) where everyone is equal- in 80s Belfast, it was possible to know someone’s religion, social status, even their personality just by knowing the name of the street they lived on.  And that video – recording the song on a rooftop in a poor part of LA – was about democratising their music. “With Or Without You” is my favourite song on the album. It’s a haunting love song, about Bono’s troubled relationship with his wife of five years, and the tension of being an itinerant rock star and being a spouse in a committed relationship – and, not being able to “live with or without her”! 

U2 began in Dublin at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in 1976, during the Troubles, when 14-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr posted an advert for musicians to form a band. Singer Paul Hewson, guitarist Dave Evans, his older brother Dik, bassist Adam Clayton and two further friends of Mullen’s, Ivan McCormick and Peter Martin, all applied. They started out as Feedback, but within a year, they were down to a foursome – Hewson (Bono), Evans (Edge), Mullen and Clayton. And incredibly for the music business, for over 30 years, they have been the same line-up! Thank God, too !!

 “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is pure gospel. The lyrics are vague – a very Bono trait – letting the listener fill in the blanks and make the song their own. I’ve always thought of it as a restless search for self or maybe a search for God – an anthem of doubt and empathy with everyone who’s still on that journey, with all of life’s challenges. Irrespective, the haunting melody, the Edge and Clayton singing like a choir – it was so unlike U2, that the entire world did a double-take, taking this song to their second #1.  

The album has other fantastic songs – “Bullet The Blue Sky” (about the disastrous US intervention in Nicaragua), “In God’s Country” ( no it’s not about Kerala!) and “One Tree Hill” (an ode to Bono’s young Kiwi assistant Greg Carroll, who died in a motorcycle accident – One Tree Hill is a small hill in Auckland). “Joshua Tree” was recently voted the best album of the 80s – just above Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms”. I will disagree with that as you know – but not vehemently!