“This is possible”: The band that convinced Bono to be a musician
For any kid trying to start a band, being a rock and roll star seems like some massive Herculean task. As much as people like the idea of playing music with their friends, the thought of millions of people screaming back the lyrics to your song tends to feel like a pipe dream for anyone jamming away in their bedroom. While Bono was still a hapless teen trying to play rock and roll, he admitted that this band made him believe it was possible for someone like him to become a superstar.
Then again, Bono never adopted the role of a frontman in the same way that someone like Mick Jagger or Robert Plant did. Energy and intensity are one thing, but Bono is more inclined to turn every show into a religious experience, which, depending on who you ask, either comes off as a shamanic exercise or one of the most pretentious things ever to be done onstage.
As much as Bono takes himself seriously onstage, it all came from being lit up by punk rock in the late 1970s. The whole progressive rock movement had made the genre sound incredibly bloated, and even though The Edge loved groups like Yes back in the day, none of them could compare to hearing the sounds of people like The Clash storming their way onto the album charts with a handful of chords and a lot of passion.
Whereas The Clash might have had the more militant political stances, The Jam weren’t shy about wearing their pop sentiments on their sleeve. Looking through their back catalogue, Paul Weller was always interested in making the next great pop anthem, whether that meant trying to string together three chords and twist them around once again or stitching pieces together and creating a Frankenstein version of a pop song.
That didn’t mean they still didn’t have something to say. Although most of the first punk acts were interested in the message first and writing a good song around it, Weller seemed to write the perfect pop song and then try to hide pieces of it midway through, like the infectious ‘sha-la-las’ on ‘That’s Entertainment’ or the bouncy-as-hell bassline that kicks off ‘A Town Called Malice’.
While Bono had a respect for many different flavours of punk rock, he thought that The Jam gave him permission to become a rockstar due to their age, saying, “I was saying, ‘Let’s get back to this roll and roll thing’. People said, ‘Have you heard of The Clash?.’ And then seeing The Jam on Top of the Pops in 1976, just going, ‘They’re our age. This is possible.’”
If Weller was making the blueprint for power pop with The Jam, Bono wanted to take things further. He never admitted to having the best range as a singer. Still, whenever he stepped up to the microphone, he always wore his heart on his sleeve, as if he took every lesson that Weller had given him and channelled it into pure rocket fuel when working on U2’s first hits like ‘I Will Follow’.
While the Irish legends would stray far away from the kind of music that Weller kickstarted with The Jam, it was all done in service to ‘The Modfather’. Because no matter how many times people talk about the power behind ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, it would have never happened had ‘Start!’ not come out first.
