Musical Musings: U2 Essentials Pt 2

Part two of U2 Essentials does the whole thing again. Ken Cheshire’s ten songs split neatly into two halves that run in parallel rather than end to end — the same three albums, Boy, October and War, in the same order — and where the first hour took the front door, this one goes round the back. It opens with Stories for Boys, a song that lost a radio poll: when CBS Ireland couldn’t decide which of three tracks should be the A-side of U2’s debut EP in 1979, they handed the question to Dave Fanning’s listeners, and this came second. Then The Electric Co., the fiercest thing on the debut album and the darkest — “Electric Co.” is short for electroconvulsive therapy, and the song was written in anger about a friend receiving it in a Dublin psychiatric hospital. Not many nineteen-year-olds were writing about that in 1980. The middle of the hour belongs to the strangest thing that ever happened to this band. In March 1981, after a gig at a tavern in Portland, Oregon, Bono’s briefcase disappeared from backstage — and in it were the lyrics and notebooks for the whole of the second album. The studio was already booked, so he rewrote what he could remember and invented the rest at the microphone with the tape running. I Fall Down and Rejoice both came out of that emergency, and the band have called it the worst recording experience of their lives. Twenty-three years later the briefcase turned up in an attic in Tacoma, was returned to Bono, and among the scribbled ideas in the notebook was a song title he hadn’t yet written: Sunday Bloody Sunday. It had been sitting in that case in Portland nearly two years before anyone heard the song — and it’s how we close the hour, and the series. Ten songs, three albums, three years, and a band who turned fifty last Friday and still have a new album to come this year. Broadcast 28 September 2026 Songs in this episode: 0:01 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials 1:05 U2 – Stories For Boys 2:29 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials 3:33 U2 – The Electric Co. 4:57 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials 6:01 U2 – I Fall Down 7:22 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials 8:26 U2 – Rejoice 9:46 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials 10:50 U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday 12:12 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings U2 Essentials