U2 Live & Dangerous - The Unforgettable Fire Tour

“It was dangerous and felt like it could kick off at any moment...”

Like everybody else, I became a U2 fan the moment I heard the Boy album. I was still at school when I saw them for the first time live, which was in the RDS Main Hall early in 1982, as part of the October tour – and they were phenomenal.

But they had really grown and developed by the time of The Unforgattable Fire, which is a hugely under-rated record. Before the big Croke Park show in June, we brought some journalists to New York to see the Unforgettable Fire tour in Madison Square Garden, which happened to be on April Fool’s Day. The crowd that was there that night was just wild. It was dangerous and felt like it could kick off at any moment, which is something you don’t get nowadays with U2. It meant a lot to these Irish fellas in New York, most of whom were there illegally. It was like the Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Oasis all rolled into one for Ireland! You really thought they were going to wreck the joint – it was great! These redcoat guys in Madison Square Garden thought they could tell them what to do, but the Irish at the time didn’t take nonsense from anybody. You should have seen the band walk on stage: all that darkness and the way they just exploded into it. It was an extraordinary night.

Even when they did Croke Park that time, there was a real edge to it. We’d done Neil Diamond there, but this was the first proper rock show in Croke Park and there was a lot of opposition to it happening. It’s well documented, the trouble that was outside of it afterwards – I always remember Kid Jensen, who was a good DJ at the time, getting a belt. In career terms, it was a big-ask, going from wherever it was in Dublin they’d headlined before to selling 65,000 tickets. Nowadays it’s no big deal, but back then people were like: “Are you serious?”

I remember Paul McGuinness being on the phone all the time to my old fella (the late, great Jim Aiken – S.C.) about this and that to do with the gig, because it was uncharted territory. U2 have always had good people around them, so once the tickets were sold, we were pretty confident it would go well. The production was big in Madison Square Garden, but they really scaled it up for Dublin. People travelled up from Cork and down from Belfast: it felt like the whole of Ireland was coming together there.

Squeeze didn’t get much of a reception, but The Alarm, who were a bit punkish and looked cool, worked because they had a great frontman, Mike Peters, and three-minute songs like ’68 Guns’ that all the 16-20-year olds in the crowd could bounce around to. R.E.M. were a late addition to the bill and suffered a bit from people being impatient to see U2. My dad brought the whole family in to meet the band, which was great. They all took time to shake hands and talk to Mum. They were decent young fellas and mature for their years.

The great thing about them that day was Bono. There were no video screens, so the band had to physically work really hard. That’s when Bono showed that he could handle a massive crowd, who held onto his every word.

I remember him coming on and, full of confidence, saying, “Well, the Jacks are back and what an All-Ireland we have for you tonight!” ‘I Will Follow’ was played second song in, and the place went mental. You can have all the special effects you want, but it’s a song like that, which really gets the crowd going.

Later on, Bono said, “Here’s a song by a friend of ours…” and they launched into Bruce Springsteen’s ‘My Homtown’. We’d done The Boss a few weeks earlier on the Born In The USA tour, so that tied it all in perfectly.

I don’t know if it’s still available, but they made a brilliant documentary about it. McGuinness looks like something out of the movie, Good Fellas! Back then the local crew would always turn up wearing different t-shirts, but Paul insisted on everybody being in matching U2 ones. You were much more aware of him than you were other managers of the time.

The Unforgettable Fire itself is an incredible album, one of the greats, which has to be turned up to ‘11’. And that was a really incredible tour.