27/10/1978 Abbey Inn, Tralee, Ireland. U2 & The Hype Concerts 1978.
This is a complete list of known U2 concerts that took place in Ireland in 1978. I have spent many hours trawling the Irish Newspaper Archive, The Dublin Library and talking to those that were there, too make this the most complete document of U2’s early career. This site would not be possible without them, the Dublin Library & the Irish Newspaper Archive.
27/10/1978 Abbey Inn, Tralee, Ireland
Attendance; unknown
Support to; Billy Roache Band
Admission; unknown Set; includes Concentration Cramp
Stacc Coll (R.I.P) U2 sound engineer 1978 – 80
My recall is A1 & all of it good re. working with U2. There’s a sizeable constituency that does nothing but berate/slag off U2, the price of success I think, the Irish model of success & much loved requiring you to be dead first. Ho hum & all that. They were not the best band about those times, that was Stepaside & no arguments, but they had a vision & an ambition that NO-ONE understood. There are other items, minutiae I suppose, like a two-night residence at The Abbey Inn, Tralee, where the van survived a fire-bombing, U2 slept in the only bed available [all of them][they looked like Laurel & Hardy].
Revelation
Paul [Bono] got severely grumpy when I contradicted his angle on Revelation, his stance being based on Christian scholarship & mine on a suite of music by Vangelis Pappathanisiou [title: 666]. Ho hum again …. Probably what I recall most is how he showed up at my Da’s funeral. When we carried the coffin out of the church in Finglas there was Paul. He wouldn’t come into the church, just waited outside. He looked at me & just nodded. It’s all little histories, forgotten by most as of lesser importance.
Transport
Things I forgot; The Frames [the ORIGINAL Frames], the best band that never got anywhere, & The Strougers, a bag of laughs who were musically adept & blessed with Bitzy’s presence. This was the gig, two gigs, Friday & Saturday, to make the cost of doing it right. This means bring your own P.A. or you end up with Donie McGinty’s orange boxes with speakers made in 1922. The cost also included somewhere to stay overnight, which The Abbey Inn graciously included. The most vital part was transport. Enter Phil Kavanagh, manager of D.C. Nein & everyone’s trucker. He had a Luton trannie with airplane seats! Not in the cost was me, sound. The sound didn’t matter either, just get a sound, the yokels won’t know the difference….. so off we went. Somewhere in Tipperary.
The Abbey Inn, Tralee
There was not another word spoken till we go to Tralee. The Abbey Inn was a dump. Donie McGinty’s brother’s pub, that sort of near – collapse entity. Sound check was to make the band feel OK. If you sound check U2 once that’s enough. The rest is getting the room right, be that a stadium or The Abbey Inn.
Fire Bomb
The first night someone tried to burn the wagon. There was a flash outside & Phil & me ran out to find someone had chucked a molotov cocktail under the wagon, the tanks of which Phil had filled an hour earlier. The van was not diesel. It was petrol engined. As in BOOM! Phil ran out into the wagon, over the flames, started it up & drove like fuck…. which blew out the fire, as much had took hold of the wagon. Welcome to Tralee. I can’t remember the gig much. There wasn’t much to remember, after the fire bombing from the Judean Peoples Front.
The concert
The first half was the band’s songs. Response zero. Second half they went into attack mode; a relentless blast of Rolling Stones & the usual sounds-like-the-Stones shite, plus a few of their own early songs, which were brilliant. Brilliant? Yes brilliant. One song I still recall the title of: Concentration Cramp…… I mentioned it to Bono later & he dismissed my comments as if I had just come down the river in a tub. Or picked holes in his doctrinaire ballocks, though I was still young & innocent enough to see how vindictive he is. For all that, they blew the place away. After the gig some punter told me THEM BOYS BETTER THAN WOLF TONES!!.. which reminded me of something.
And So To Bed
And so to bed. We, the band, Phil & me, were billeted in a room up what I can only describe as an organic stairs. It seemed to be swallowing us as we creaked up the steps. We had one room with one bed, a big double bed, but no way was it taking seven of us. So the band got the bed & we crashed on the floor. Phil & me had an instant another chance to talk about common ground we had, from London squats to Morocco. Every so often Phil got around to asking me why I was doing sound & not gigs, which I always avoided with another tale of squatney & such.
Laurel & Hardy
It was half an hour before I noticed the band. U2 were all together in the big bed, Dave (Edge) even had his beany cap on. The four of them looked like double Laurel & Hardy. They were looking at us, Phil & me, like we were extra-terrestrials. Not all of them; Adam Clayton looked both fascinated & hungry to know more.
Photo Shoot
Next day we drove up into the Glen Of Somewhere, plastic leprechauns for sale or rent, all that shite. There were several group pics, all-in pics taken, dunno who by. Bono probably to the films anyway, him being very much what is now called a controlled freak, though fascist is more appropriate word. Or little shite.. though that’s two words.
