A week or so ago, I was listening to a live version of "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" obsessively (as occasionally happens). From the "London 1980 (12A)" album, which I didn't have any further track tag info on. AMAZING, amazing version of the song.. and toward the end, Bono goes into a speech, and he's screaming, and you can hear so much pent up emotion in his voice... "How far do you trust me?"

But here, rather than me trying to explain, download!

So I'd been listening to that over and over and over again, and then I put the rest of that show on my iPod to listen to. And after "Stories for Boys", Bono starts talking, admiting outright his concern about the audience's ambivalence: "I don't know how you feel about people like ourselves. We're sort of giving out a lot of our flesh and passion. I was told you didn't like that sort of thing, so I tried hard to think, well, I better keep it steady, or..." and he trails off, and begins fumbling to say something about a local band he'd seen the night before, and realises he's making no connection at all and just stops, and Edge starts into the next song. And this image of how frustrated he had to be was so strong in my mind, just his comments during the show, and the huge flood of passion in the closing 11 O'Clock...

So I channeled it all into the first U2fic I've done in ages, and it's in need of some awfully heavy editing but I churned it out in one sitting. And then I wrote it a second time, showing it as Mackie would've seen it, watching from a dark corner in the back.

But later, I started getting antsy about it, because I'd worked the actual quotes into the story, but hadn't checked to see if there was any further information on the show - i.e., an entry in Pimm Jal de la Parra's "U2 Live", the penultimate resource on U2 concerts. I needed to look up something else in it today, and remembered to check the entry on this show:

This was during their initial inundation of London, following the release of "Boy". This particular show was a joint show, a handful of bands including Echo and the Bunnymen (who I'm assuming were the headliners, as I've only vaguely heard of some of the other bands). Sept. 7, 1980, at the Lyceum. "The crowd offer practically no response throughout the show, leaving a frustrated Bono to make sarcastic remarks. When he points out THe Edge during his solo in Electric Co., Bono confronts the crowd's lack of reaction by twitching his fingers and demanding, "Check! Attention!" A powerful version of 11 O'Clock Tick Tock ends the show as it had started, but gets hardly any applause. Bono drops the microphone on the floor as the band leave the stage."

...I want to cry, reading that, the poor things! I knew, just from listening to an old bootleg recording, that it was a rough night, but.. That explains the odd muffled mic noise at the close of the set. (That, I'll be adding in to the story.) I'm really happy about the fact that I'd read the show so well though.. I think I'll need to tweak my ending to the story, the backstage scene, as they're a little more cheerful than they should be. But there again, I think they would have known, that even if the crowd there didn't get it, that they had delivered something worth hearing, worth feeling...

Just flipping through the beginning section of this book makes me twitchy to write babyU2s again, there's so much there, so much passion and emotion and hope and terror and everything all rolled into one. (And, of course, there's 11 O'Clock.)

O_O! Okso I flipped a few pages, just skimming to see how the other shows went on that tour, and I made it to them starting to tour the US. I read the big summary column, and then my eyes fell on the entry beneath:

December 6, 1980. New York, NY, The Ritz
"Because a show planned for the previous night at the Penny Arcade in Rochester, NY, is cancelled, U2 find themselves in one of the country's most prestigious venues for their American debut."

U2 ALMOST DEBUTED IN THE US AT THE PENNY ARCADE!??!?!! holy hell, there's my mindfuck for the day. Good lord. I was--- alright so I wasn't yet, but that's like a block away from where I spent my first year or so of existence.

...really, all things considered, it's no wonder at all that this band is my heart and soul. There's far too many coincidences freaking everywhere.


later edit: I checked with Mom - she and Dad were living in Charlotte by 1980. My very *parents* were maybe a block away from where U2 would have first played the US.