“Never worked”: The one person who walked out on U2
U2 are a metaphorical band of brothers. They’ve had exactly the same line-up since 1978: Larry Mullen Jr on drums, Adam Clayton on bass, Dave ‘The Edge’ Evans on guitar, and Paul ‘Bono’ Hewson on vocals. That line-up is U2 on a cellular level. Despite Bono and The Edge being responsible for the lion’s share of the songwriting, the band agreed to an equal royalties split early on and have stuck to it ever since. You can imagine that going on without any one member just isn’t on the cards for them.
In fact, one can count on one hand the amount of times when someone else has had to fill in for a member in concert with fingers to spare. The most recent was their residency at Las Vegas’ arena eyesore The Sphere, which Larry Mullen Jr sat out to recover from back surgery. This marked the first time in the band’s half-a-century existence they had ever performed without their model-gorgeous drummer. However, they were a lot more ready for this than the first time someone filled in for a member of U2.
The first time was in 1993, while the band were closing out the mammoth Zoo TV tour supporting 1991s Achtung Baby. The band had two nights booked at the Sydney Football Stadium, and Adam Clayton couldn’t make it on night one, on November 26th. At the time, Clayton’s drinking had escalated to a full-on problem, and he’d drank himself into a blackout the night before. He was too unwell to perform, and while that would normally involve rescheduling the show, they couldn’t do that because these shows were being filmed. Whoops.
It’s true. Night two was going to be filmed for a video release and a pay-per-view concert broadcast across the world, so night one had to go ahead as a dress rehearsal. On night one, Clayton’s bass tech, Stuart Morgan, filled in wearing a gas mask, and all things considered, the show went off without a hitch. The entire band was absolutely mortified by the incident, though, and you can tell by watching the DVD they made of the following night.
Perhaps this is typical Bono overhype, but you can see it in his eyes throughout the whole show. They may have Adam back but whether they can continue like this is up in the air. According to Bono, they played that whole show convinced it could be among the last shows they ever play. That wasn’t to be the case though, perhaps they should have seen this coming though as, once upon a time, they weren’t a metaphorical band of brothers but a literal one too.
When the band formed, joining The Edge was his brother Dik Evans on rhythm guitar; however, this didn’t last. As The Edge developed his style on the guitar, it soon became apparent that two guitars were overkill, as he said in an interview with Hot Press back in 1984. In the interview, he said, “As a guitar player, I’ve always done the work of two. One of the reasons Dik left was because two guitar players never worked. I never had that discipline. I was always filling up every spare moment with guitar.”
While Dik probably still wonders what could have been to this day, it shows that the bond U2 shared goes far beyond mere brotherhood. They’re a gang in the truest sense of the word, and in the cutthroat world of rock stardom, there’s something pure about that.
