There is a young Dublin band called U2, and their singer, Bono, performs as though every lyric has been entrusted to him by a dying messenger.

This becomes tiresome almost immediately.

Their debut album, Boy, is otherwise much better than I had hoped, which only deepens the irritation. The band has a sound. Not a collection of borrowed gestures arranged in roughly contemporary order, but an actual sound: open, nervous, spacious, driven by a rhythm section with uncommon discipline and a guitarist who has somehow discovered that not playing is also an option. For a new group in 1980, this is no small achievement. Most young bands need two albums merely to stop sounding like whichever three records they bought last year.

Then Bono opens his mouth and behaves as if history has convened specifically to hear his remarks.

“I Will Follow” is the obvious example and, unfortunately for my argument, a very good song. The Edge — this is apparently the guitarist’s name, and we shall all have to live with it — plays a bright, chiming figure that seems larger than the number of notes involved. He uses echo and repetition intelligently, leaving holes in the arrangement rather than stuffing them with the usual adolescent guitar-shop debris. Adam Clayton’s bass presses underneath it, Larry Mullen’s drums keep the song moving without turning it into military exercise, and for several glorious seconds U2 sound lean, modern and genuinely exciting.

Then the town crier arrives.

Bono does not sing a line when he can proclaim it. He does not express a feeling when he can nail it to the doors of a cathedral. There is no ordinary human temperature available to him. A minor emotional disturbance becomes revelation. Doubt becomes crisis. Affection becomes oath. One suspects that asking this man whether he wants tea would result in three verses about thirst, betrayal and the sea.

He has the air of a boy who has recently discovered suffering and is furious that the rest of us have been concealing it from him.

The annoyance is compounded by the fact that he has an excellent voice. If he were simply a bad singer, matters would be easier. Rock has a long and honourable tradition of mediocre vocalists surviving through personality, desperation and favourable microphone placement. Bono has genuine power, range and conviction. He can make a fairly ordinary line sound momentous, which may prove useful once the band has written enough momentous lines to justify it.

At present the ratio is troubling.

What makes Boy interesting is the tension between him and everybody else. The three musicians behind Bono understand restraint. The Edge especially seems determined to discover how much can be achieved with very little. His guitar rarely behaves like a conventional lead instrument. It flashes through the arrangements, hangs notes in the air, repeats small figures until they become structural. There is none of the usual peacock nonsense, no sweaty little eruption inserted to reassure the guitarist that Mother still loves him.

Clayton and Mullen are similarly economical. They give these songs muscle without cluttering them. Mullen in particular has an instinct for making the drums feel larger than the actual playing, and Clayton knows when a bass line should push and when it should simply sit there making the rest of the band sound better.

This leaves Bono an enormous amount of space.

He fills all of it.

And then, apparently dissatisfied, begins filling the space in adjoining rooms.

“Out of Control” demonstrates both the promise and the problem. The band sounds tremendous: urgent, sharp, still rough enough around the edges to prevent admiration becoming hygiene. Mullen drives it, the Edge throws metallic shapes over the top, and Bono attacks the vocal like a man trying to warn a village about an approaching wall of water.

Once again, it works. Once again, I wish it worked slightly less well.

Because a peculiar possibility begins to suggest itself while listening to Boy: these people may have stumbled onto a formula. Not a formula in the cynical Tin Pan Alley sense, but something potentially worse — a method for making every song feel important before anyone has established whether it is.

The Edge creates space. The rhythm section builds momentum. Bono fills the resulting emptiness with conviction. The song begins at human scale and, without anybody quite noticing, starts reaching for the back wall of an auditorium.

These boys have made one album and already seem faintly annoyed by the dimensions of ordinary rooms.

“An Cat Dubh” and “Into the Heart” are considerably more persuasive because the singer is forced to inhabit the atmosphere rather than conquer it. The songs stretch and darken. Guitar becomes texture. The rhythm section breathes. For once U2 allow uncertainty to remain uncertain. There are passages here of real beauty, and they suggest a far more interesting band than the one constantly trying to turn every emotional pothole into the Siege of Leningrad.

That may be the album’s fundamental problem. Boy is preoccupied with youth, confusion, identity, desire, childhood and the vague terror of becoming whoever it is one eventually becomes. These are perfectly good subjects. In fact, they suit the music rather well. But Bono seems constitutionally incapable of permitting a small idea to remain small.

The rest of U2 are making post-punk.

Bono is already making monuments to himself.

This places the band in a strange position in 1980. Punk spent the last few years attacking rock’s bloated self-importance, and the more interesting bands that followed have generally retained punk’s suspicion of grand gestures even while abandoning its musical restrictions. U2 appear to have retained the restrictions selectively and misplaced the suspicion altogether.

They are sincere.

Alarmingly sincere.

There is hardly a trace of irony on Boy, hardly any sense that these four understand how ridiculous rock musicians can look while attempting to be profound. Perhaps that is admirable. Perhaps it is simply what happens when nobody in the band has yet developed a functioning embarrassment gland.

Bono, especially, seems to suffer from the dangerous condition of believing that because he feels something strongly, the rest of us have been waiting to hear about it.

Either way, it gives the record a tone unlike much around it.

“Stories for Boys” and “A Day Without Me” show that the group can make this intensity work within concise songs, but even there one feels the arrangements leaning outward. The guitar echoes. The drums widen. The vocal reaches. U2 do not merely play songs; they seem to be sending them somewhere.

Where, exactly, I cannot say.

Possibly Belgium.

One can already imagine the danger if somebody gives them more money.

This is the nightmare concealed inside Boy. At the moment Steve Lillywhite has done an excellent job preserving the band’s air and roughness. The drums are substantial without becoming ridiculous. The guitars have atmosphere without disappearing into studio fog. The bass remains audible, always a reassuring indication that civilization has not completely collapsed.

But imagine what could happen if U2 become successful and some record company halfwit decides the obvious solution is to make all of this bigger.

Bigger drums. Bigger guitar. More echo. More lights. More significance.

Bono will not merely require a stage.

He will require territory.

“I Will Follow” is precisely the sort of song that could encourage such criminal behaviour because it has the rare and dangerous quality of sounding immediate on first hearing and better on the third. The riff sticks. The rhythm pushes. The chorus lands. It is very difficult to dislike honestly.

I dislike it dishonestly whenever possible.

The album contains enough such moments to make dismissal impossible. U2 are not rubbish. Rubbish would be comforting. Rubbish goes away.

These people may not.

That prospect worries me more.

There is something in their combination that feels unusually complete for a first record. The Edge already sounds like nobody obvious. Mullen is better than a drummer this young has any business being. Clayton understands his role. Even Bono’s unbearable intensity is plainly not an affectation pasted on after rehearsals. The man appears genuinely to be like this.

Imagine being seated next to him at dinner.

You would ask him to pass the salt and receive a five-minute account of hunger.

God help his friends.

The obvious prediction is that U2 will learn moderation. Most young bands do. Experience introduces ambiguity. Success creates distance. Somebody laughs at the trousers. Eventually the singer discovers that not every audience requires salvation before closing time.

But I wonder.

What if they do the opposite?

What if the excess is not something they grow out of but something they grow into? What if that guitar sound gets bigger, the drums get broader and Bono discovers that thousands of people actually enjoy being addressed as though they are participants in some enormous emotional emergency?

One shudders.

Because Boy is good enough to make that future conceivable.

That is the deeply irritating truth.

This is an assured debut by a band with a distinctive guitarist, a formidable young rhythm section, a talented singer and an almost pathological appetite for significance. They have found their sound remarkably early.

With luck, they will lose some of it.

Otherwise there is a real danger that U2 may spend years making enormous, echoing, earnest rock music for enormous crowds while Bono strides around behaving like the bastard son of a revival preacher and a traffic warden who has mistaken himself for Moses.

He is twenty years old and already carries himself like a man expecting stained glass.

Surely there cannot be much of a market for that.

October 1980