Drummer Seeks Musicians, part one: The Note

Drummer Seeks Musicians: The Making of U2

This episode traces the 50-year origin story of U2, beginning with Larry Mullen's 1976 notice at Mount Temple Comprehensive in Dublin. It ex

Key takeaways

• Larry Mullen posted a 'Drummer seeks musicians' note on a school notice board in September 1976.
• Mount Temple Comprehensive was a radical, co-educational, and multi-denominational school in Dublin.
• The band's early iteration, known as Feedback, included five members before eventually becoming the four-piece U2.
• Adam Clayton joined the group after seeing the notice and attending an audition at Larry Mullen's house.
• Bono (Paul Hewson) brought a punk influence to the school, famously appearing with a safety pin in his mouth.

Main topics

• Formation of U2
• Mount Temple Comprehensive history
• Larry Mullen's 1976 notice

Notable quotes

Drummer seeks musicians to form band.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deeply personal and historical look at how a sp

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) You're listening to the Irish Times. Speaker 1 (0:02) Good Speaker 2 (0:10) wine. Every night a top group. Speaker 2 (0:19) Love stories begin at Chivago. Of course, during this hot spell, the government is asking people to conserve water, to preserve our reservoirs, so don't use the hose on the lawns or the flowers if you can avoid it. Speaker 5 (0:31) September 1976. It's the end of a three-month-long heatwave in Dublin and schools have reopened. In one school on the city's north side, a long corridor cuts the building in two. They call it the Mall. One day, a 14-year-old boy with shoulder-length blonde hair pins a piece of paper to the cluttered notice board in the mall. It says, Drummer seeks musicians to form band. And 50 years later, the band that grew out of that note is still together. They have the same four members. They've sold more than 170 million records. They have 22 Grammy Awards, more than any other band in history. They've sold out stadiums across the world for decades and are still making new music together with an album due soon. They are one of Ireland's greatest exports since Guinness and Kerrygold. They are U2. Speaker 2 (1:28) How to Speaker 4 (1:31) dismantle an atomic bomb? U2. Speaker 2 (1:36) The Joshua Tree, U2. Speaker 5 (1:43) The band first met in Mount Temple Comprehensive, a secondary school on Dublin's north side. Four teenagers known then as Paul Hewson, Dave Evans, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. Mount Temple doesn't boast about what happened there. There's no plaque marking the spot where Larry put up that note. Every so often, some U2 fans will arrive at the school wanting to walk this hallowed ground. They won't be able to do that for much longer. In a few months, there won't even be a corridor. The mall will not exist. The building is due to be demolished. A brand new school is already rising behind it. But before that happens, to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of U2, I want to tell you a story. Over the years, Larry Mullen's note has become part of rock and roll mythology, the origin story of one of the world's biggest bands. As I started talking to the people who were actually there, teachers, classmates and friends, I became more curious, not just about the note, but about what it represents. The beginning of something incredible. And I had questions. Why did four teenagers who met in school in North Dublin stay together for half a century when so many other world-famous bands fell apart? And perhaps the most interesting question of all. Why did it happen in Mount Temple? The deeper I dug into the story of U2, the more I was intrigued by the place. A school unlike most others in Ireland, an extraordinary group of teachers and a generation of young people. being educated in a new way. I wanted to find out what it was about this particular place in Dublin in the mid-1970s that allowed U2, a band made up of four self-described chancers, to thrive. To figure out how they got there in the first place and explore the circumstances that conspired to bring a disparate group of individuals together and give them the tools to conquer the world. This is the story of a note. But it's also the story of a school, a story of friendship, of grief, of faith, and of four Dublin teenagers who had absolutely no clue what lay ahead. Speaker 2 (4:00) We're going back 50 years. We didn't know we had the biggest rock band in the world sitting in front of us. How could we know? Speaker 5 (4:09) That was the voice of Colin McKenzie, one of two music teachers who taught at Mount Temple back then. The band's history and form teacher, Donald Moxham, a man with a rare vocation for teaching, is one of the few people who remembers seeing Larry's note. I knew I Speaker 2 (4:24) saw a note going Speaker 5 (4:25) up, but I mean, I didn't think it was Speaker 2 (4:27) going to lead to anything. And I'll be honest. Speaker 5 (4:29) How could anybody predict what a scrap of paper on a school notice board would lead to? I Speaker 2 (4:35) was wrong. I was so wrong. I'm delighted I was wrong. Speaker 5 (4:40) I'm Roisin Ingle from the Irish Times. This is Drummer Seeks Musicians. The making of U2. Speaker 5 (5:06) It all begins with Larry Mullen. Without his note, we'd be telling another story. Before he pinned that note to the notice board, Larry was just a kid living with his sister Cecilia and parents in Artain, a suburb not far from Mount Temple. From the age of eight, his mother Maureen took him to piano lessons in the School of Music in Chatham Row, but gave them up after the piano teacher asked him to stop hitting the keys. At nine, he moved on to drum lessons in the same school with one of the country's most respected drummers, Joe Bonney. He played with the Artane Boys Band until they told him to cut his hair and then with the Post Office Workers Band. He was good. He was shy. And he stood out from the Mount Temple crowd for another reason. Speaker 4 (5:50) Larry was noticeable. One thing is that he was very handsome, you know, beautiful, or he had that coolness. He looked like some kind of American kid who wandered out of... Grease or something, you know, long hair. He looked like a he looked like a star he had he had charisma He had he had beauty which just goes a long way when you're a teenager And so the girls ooh-dee-naht about him a little bit so you knew who he was even if he was in the class Below you you know in school. That's that's huge. There's usually not that much intermingling across classes Speaker 5 (6:25) That's the voice of Daily Telegraph music journalist and former Mount Temple classmate of U2, Neil McCormick. We'll hear a lot from Neil over these three episodes. He's been close to the band for decades and was trusted as the band's ghostwriter. He also wrote the brilliant memoir Bono Was My Doppelganger about growing up alongside the future frontman and watching his own rock and roll ambitions fall away. His brother Ivan and his sister Stella were at the school at the same time and we'll be hearing from them too. Here's Neil on Larry again. Speaker 4 (6:54) He's a character who locks inward, who keeps things in and keeps things tight. He's still that character to a large extent. So he wasn't a gregarious one that you would know through thrusting and being around the place. Speaker 5 (7:11) Stella McCormack, Neil's sister, was a couple of years older than Larry, but remembers him well. I used to go to an art class, extra art classes. But one of the art classes that I was going to, Larry was there and he was an awful flirt. You know, like he was very good looking and even I could see that, although he was two years younger than me and he was flirting a lot with me because I was the, you know, newbie and older and everything. By rights, Larry Mullins should never have ended up in Mount Temple. His father, also Larry, had imagined a far more traditional path for him. Larry had sat the entrance exams for Chanel College and for St Paul's. These were local Catholic academic sporting schools. These things were important to his civil servant father, but not to Larry. And then in July 1973, when Larry was 11, his younger sister Mary died. Larry spoke about this in the book U2 by U2 as a defining moment. After Mary died, his father stopped trying to force him into the more academic institutions and let him go to the newly opened comprehensive. Larry said of Mary's death, It was very traumatic for everybody. I think my father gave up pushing me after that. I was sent to Mount Temple. My father had just backed off. The teachers of Mount Temple feature a lot in this series. The band has generously acknowledged them down through the years, but until now, their voices and their memories have mostly remained unheard. Speaker 7 (8:40) Larry sat always with his pal at the very back row as I faced the window looking out and as I faced my classroom. They always sat together. They had blonde hair down to their shoulders, both the same. They were nearly like twins and were very quiet, except they chittered away to each other. Speaker 5 (8:58) That's the voice of Sophie Shirley, who taught religious education at the school. She's 80 now, a warm, empathic woman who has fond memories of the school and her students, not just the ones who went on to become famous. She has astonishing levels of recall and still remembers where each member of U2 sat in her class. She now lives an hour and a half drive from Dublin, but was eager to return to Mount Temple for the first time in almost five decades. In one particular class, as she talked about God's plans for everybody, she vividly remembers hearing from Larry, who was not usually known to speak up in lessons. Speaker 7 (9:34) I was coming, talking faith, but knowing that God is a loving God and makes everybody unique for a purpose. I emphasised often, but one day I said, you know, God has a very unique and individual job for each one of you, or position in life, something for you to do that's unique to you. I never saw Larry's hand go up so fast. He says, Miss, I only want to be a drummer in a band. That's all I want to be. Speaker 5 (10:04) I got goosebumps when I heard Sophie say that, sitting in Mount Temple, just yards away from the classroom where this exchange took place. It felt as though she'd unknowingly given young Larry permission to pursue his dream. All we know for sure is that sometime after that, Larry went to see one of the music teachers, Colin McKenzie. I Speaker 2 (10:23) just remember telling Speaker 5 (10:24) him to Speaker 2 (10:25) put up the notice. Speaker 5 (10:26) Larry has always said it was his dad who had the idea to put up the notice. Father and son didn't always see eye to eye, but... Larry said that his dad probably thought, OK, the kid wants to play drums, how do I help him survive and navigate this? Larry Mullen Sr. wasn't the only one trying to help Larry Jr. Colin McKenzie is long retired now and in his 80s. He does art in his spare time and he helps out with his son's choir, the Dawson Chorus. He has a clear memory of suggesting the same thing to Larry. Larry Speaker 2 (10:57) approached me, I told him to put up a notice. which obviously he did. Larry says his dad told him, which also may be the truth as well, that that also happened. Speaker 5 (11:08) And then there is this story from the school's other music teacher, Albert Bradshaw. The charming, elegant man who likes to visit cathedrals around Europe. He Speaker 2 (11:17) recalls Larry approaching him. He came to me on one occasion when he was interested in doing anything rhythmic and he wanted to play the drums. And I said to him, now are you serious about this? I'll find somebody, but they will be good and they will expect hard work. So I presumed he'd said fine. So I went to a friend in the orchestra and I got the name of one of the best drum teachers in Ireland. Speaker 5 (11:43) Albert never heard from Larry again on this subject. He'd clearly had enough of formal lessons. He just wanted other musicians to play with. In an interview Larry gave to RTE in 1986, he gave a good account of what was on his mind when he put up the note. Speaker 2 (11:58) Suddenly you get to the stage after playing in your bedroom for six months, you wonder where to go, you know. Just thought it'd be a good idea, maybe if I just stuck a notice up just on the off chance that Tony might be interested in, so I didn't think I would be interested in forming a rock band. I mean, if somebody with an accordion had come along, I would have played with them, you know. He Speaker 5 (12:16) was desperate to find people to play with. That desperation led him to write the note and put it up in the mall. Speaker 4 (12:22) The main body of the school, the main part of the school where you went to your lessons was this block. that's just, you know, on one level and with long corridors. And the mall was the central corridor. And there was a big board in the middle where people would stick up notices about they're selling this, they're buying this, they want to meet that. There's a starting a chess club. And people would just be always gathering around that to look and see. Classmate Sarah Condell remembers. Speaker 1 (12:52) You would go to check on a Wednesday or Thursday to see whether it was usually a Thursday to see whether you made the first hockey team or whether you were still in the seconds like me. So it was those kind of notices went up and then there'd be notices around, you know, what the what the opera was going to be for the year and people looking for volunteers for this, that and the other. Speaker 4 (13:10) The note has become legendary because it's where the story starts. It was a bulletin board for the life of the young people in Mount Temple and absorbed a lot of energy and discussion. Everybody was kind of aware of what was going on on that. It's an interesting place for something to start. Speaker 5 (13:30) And so the note went up. Drummer seeks musicians to form band. Contact Larry Mullen third year. Sophie Shirley was there. one of the few people I spoke to who has a detailed memory of seeing the note. Speaker 7 (13:43) I do, I do. I just went over and saw the little notice and I'm a drummer in a band and anybody want to join me to form a band? Well,