out of time. Despite the exaggerated applause of the Village, there were no encores. Stella felt like crying. All that practice only for the performance to be such a mess.
Years later, Bono told me that the girls had thought the band could be good without him, and tried to persuade the other members to kick him out. My sister, however, vehemently denies it. âI never thought they could be any good,â she insists.
Probably the only person who walked away from the St. Fintanâs gig in a state of high excitement was me. I hadnât seen or heard enough live rock to be any judge of quality but my ears were buzzing from the volume, my heart was pounding from the release of tension and I was more convinced than ever that I had to get my own band together. I even liked Ratt Salad.
In a postmortem of their performance, Feedback agreed that the experiment with backing singers had been a failure. Paul, however, remained inspirationally upbeat about the groupâs prospects. He had seen a âsparkâ and was convinced that the group could build themselves around it until they would set their world ablaze. Concerns, however, were raised about the bandâs nameâwhich, it was gloomily pointed out, could be construed as a joke at their own expense, suggesting a less-than-professional standard of musicianship. Adam (whose musicianship was perhaps the most suspect) proposed that they become the Hype. It was a word he had come across reading the British music papers, where journalists frequently accused the music business of âhypingâ bands, essentially creating a publicity storm out of all proportion to the bandâs actual abilities. As a group name it seemed modern, knowing and aspirational, an ironic comment on the music scene. It certainly suited a band whose ambitions currently far outweighed their actual abilities.
Something was happening in the music scene, an urgent new movement taking shape in the rock underground of the U.K., the faintest of reverberations being just about distinguishable across the Irish Sea. You had to be almost psychically alert to detect the signs. You had to be hungry for something new. You had, in essence, to be a music-obsessed, Anglophile, neophyte teenager in the grip of an identity crisis with existential overtones. But, amid the sonic soup of corny show-band schmaltz, ersatz country and western, earnest folk ballads, self-aggrandizing heavy rock, slushy pop and chintzy disco that formed the sound track to Irish life, the first subtle hints of a brutally pared-down, compellingly aggressive rock revolution could be detected.
There was no national pop radio channel in Ireland but if you lived in Dublin, on the east coast of the country, you could tune in through the static to the late-night John Peel show on BBCRadio One, broadcast from transmitters across the sea in Wales. Peel played an eclectic concoction of recordings from the outer limits of the musical stratosphere, to which I somewhat masochistically subjected myself as part of my ongoing musical education. I would lie in bed, in a state of baffled incredulity, listening to portentous, meandering, fey-psychedelic instrumentals and dissonant, distorted experimental metal epics by bands with names that sounded like mystic invocations to some mad old God of music, driven by a conviction that there was something going on here that I was just too young and inexperienced to understand. I listened intently, passing through waves of amusement, frustration and irritation, all the while searching for a key to unlock the door to this arcane world.
And then, one wonderful night, spitting out of my tinny transistor came a sound that almost physically jerked me to attention. A high-pitched squall of keening, angry vocals spilled asymmetrically across an urgent, rhythmic bass and drum barrage, swamped in a thrashing blur of overdriven guitars. â I am the anti-KRRIST-a! / I am an anar-KYST-a! â I felt like I was
Years later, Bono told me that the girls had thought the band could be good without him, and tried to persuade the other members to kick him out. My sister, however, vehemently denies it. âI never thought they could be any good,â she insists.
Probably the only person who walked away from the St. Fintanâs gig in a state of high excitement was me. I hadnât seen or heard enough live rock to be any judge of quality but my ears were buzzing from the volume, my heart was pounding from the release of tension and I was more convinced than ever that I had to get my own band together. I even liked Ratt Salad.
In a postmortem of their performance, Feedback agreed that the experiment with backing singers had been a failure. Paul, however, remained inspirationally upbeat about the groupâs prospects. He had seen a âsparkâ and was convinced that the group could build themselves around it until they would set their world ablaze. Concerns, however, were raised about the bandâs nameâwhich, it was gloomily pointed out, could be construed as a joke at their own expense, suggesting a less-than-professional standard of musicianship. Adam (whose musicianship was perhaps the most suspect) proposed that they become the Hype. It was a word he had come across reading the British music papers, where journalists frequently accused the music business of âhypingâ bands, essentially creating a publicity storm out of all proportion to the bandâs actual abilities. As a group name it seemed modern, knowing and aspirational, an ironic comment on the music scene. It certainly suited a band whose ambitions currently far outweighed their actual abilities.
Something was happening in the music scene, an urgent new movement taking shape in the rock underground of the U.K., the faintest of reverberations being just about distinguishable across the Irish Sea. You had to be almost psychically alert to detect the signs. You had to be hungry for something new. You had, in essence, to be a music-obsessed, Anglophile, neophyte teenager in the grip of an identity crisis with existential overtones. But, amid the sonic soup of corny show-band schmaltz, ersatz country and western, earnest folk ballads, self-aggrandizing heavy rock, slushy pop and chintzy disco that formed the sound track to Irish life, the first subtle hints of a brutally pared-down, compellingly aggressive rock revolution could be detected.
There was no national pop radio channel in Ireland but if you lived in Dublin, on the east coast of the country, you could tune in through the static to the late-night John Peel show on BBCRadio One, broadcast from transmitters across the sea in Wales. Peel played an eclectic concoction of recordings from the outer limits of the musical stratosphere, to which I somewhat masochistically subjected myself as part of my ongoing musical education. I would lie in bed, in a state of baffled incredulity, listening to portentous, meandering, fey-psychedelic instrumentals and dissonant, distorted experimental metal epics by bands with names that sounded like mystic invocations to some mad old God of music, driven by a conviction that there was something going on here that I was just too young and inexperienced to understand. I listened intently, passing through waves of amusement, frustration and irritation, all the while searching for a key to unlock the door to this arcane world.
And then, one wonderful night, spitting out of my tinny transistor came a sound that almost physically jerked me to attention. A high-pitched squall of keening, angry vocals spilled asymmetrically across an urgent, rhythmic bass and drum barrage, swamped in a thrashing blur of overdriven guitars. â I am the anti-KRRIST-a! / I am an anar-KYST-a! â I felt like I was
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