f you’ve ever wanted to get really inside a band, this book is arguably as close as it gets.

A 350-page extravaganza of interviews, photos, memorabilia and highly personal comments by the band themselves, in conversation with sometimes hotpress writer Neil McCormick, it charts the progress of the most celebrated Irishmen in the world from embryonic conception as The Hype to the rock monsters of the present day.
While U2 are one of the most interviewed bands on the planet over the past three decades years, this is the first time you get an unadulterated and uninterrupted view of how they perceived their own march to world domination, from the inside. While that is one of the book’s great strengths, it is for the wealth of photographs, especially from the early days, that fans will find it irresistible. With close to 30 years behind them, they have been photographed at every turn, sometimes brilliantly – making flicking through the book a sumptuous pleasure in itself.
There is generous reference to hotpress, Dave Fanning and others for their commitment to the band from the off, in the face of general indifference elsewhere. You also get a clear picture of the band members’ family backgrounds from which their determination to conquer the rock world sprang. There is candid stuff here that hasn’t been rehashed a dozen times: at one point, for example, Bono admits that he came into the world crying – and that he cried for three years, until the day he started school.
Quotes from the four individuals put flesh on some of the issues covered more cursorily in the past, with the often fraught relationship with record producers and other technicians examined in intriguing detail. Curiously, the least interesting feature of U2 BY U2 is the reiteration of Bono’s latter-day political role. So completely has it been played out in public that it’d be hard to offer anything that feels like an insight.
U2 have kept themselves, the media and the fans on alert by constantly reinventing themselves and finding new challenges. This book not only tracks those changes and puts them into perspective, but it ends with an appropriately upbeat observation from Bono when he says “I’m waking up every day now trying to imagine what we can do next.” I don’t think we should worry. He’ll think of something.