The first-ever Irish musician to score a US number one
There’s a long-running joke that a lot of people in America overstate their Irish heritage.
Displayed perfectly in Paul Mescal’s recent SNL skit, where tourists arriving from the eastward Atlantic proclaim their dated lineage as a reason to pronounce themselves Irish in the hope of being worthy enough of clutching a pint of Guinness and being granted permission to say “craic”.
But truthfully, there is a longstanding cultural relationship between the two countries that often inspires this desire to be seen as Irish. It all dates back to the 1840s Great Famine, which saw millions of Irish settle in the US and begin settling in some of the country’s major cities: namely Boston, New York and Chicago.
Over a century of Irish art, specifically music, is woven into America’s social fabric. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the 1980s that an Irish artist finally scored a number of hits on the American Billboard Top 100. Not even the greats, Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher, could top the chart mountain during their pomp and were instead ousted by a commercial powerhouse in U2.
Bono and his men topped the charts twice in 1987 with ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ and ‘With or Without You’ from their seminal album The Joshua Tree. Only two artists have joined U2 since that year. Sinéad O’Connor landed the top spot in ‘90, where she stayed for four weeks with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Then it took 34 years for another artist to join them, when Hozier topped the charts in ‘24 with ‘Too Sweet’.
How did The Joshua Tree allow U2 to storm the American charts?
Simply put, the album saw the band engage with the country on a narrative level. While music was in a state of limbo during the ‘80s, caught between the mass commercialism of art fuelled by hyper-capitalism and a dying essence of rock and roll, the Irish band pointed their lens towards America as they sought to diagnose this new cultural problem.
“There was a lot to despise about America back then,” Bono explained. “There was shameful conduct in defence of their self-interest, they were bad times. I described what I had been through, what I had seen, some of the stories of people I had met, and I said to [U2 guitarist] Edge: ‘Could you put that through your amplifier?’”
The band’s drummer, Larry Mullen Jr, backed up Bono’s point and explained how the record “was in some ways an acknowledgement of the influence that American culture had on U2. America was having a bigger impact on us than we would ever have on it.”
There was a grandiosity to the record that mirrored America’s social state, appealing to the arena audiences the sound garnered, while threading it with a sense of narrative intimacy that was inspired by the band’s Irish history. It was a joining of cultural worlds, wrapped up in a glossy American bow to help revitalise rock and thrust the band into American stardom.
