In a Dublin studio in the summer of 1981, the Irish band U2 were trying to make their second album while the ground shifted under their feet. The singer Bono, the guitarist the Edge and the drummer Larry Mullen Jr. had been spending time with a Christian group called Shalom Fellowship, and the questions raised there followed them into the recording room. Could a believer stand on a rock stage without betraying the faith? For a while it looked as though the answer might be no, and that U2 would simply stop existing. U2 released the album October on October 12, 1981.
A rushed second album
The album that came out of that crisis was October, released on 12 October 1981 on Island Records. It was the follow-up to their debut Boy from 1980, and once again the producer was Steve Lillywhite. But the sessions at Windmill Lane Studios had none of the confidence a second record is supposed to bring. Bono lost a briefcase containing unfinished lyrics, which forced the band to finish the album in a rush, improvising words and ideas on the spot. The result was a record that sounded urgent and exposed, as if the songs had been pulled out of someone before they were ready.
The spiritual tension was not hidden away. The lyrics were inspired directly by the band members' involvement with Shalom Fellowship, and religious themes run through the whole record. Nowhere is that clearer than on the single Gloria, which arrived the same day as the album. Its chorus is sung partly in Latin: Gloria, in te domine. The songs With a Shout (Jerusalem) and Tomorrow carry the same weight, and Tomorrow is a lament for Bono's mother, who died when he was a child. Faith and grief sit side by side, neither one resolving the other.
The title, the cover, the fight
The title itself came before the song. Bono chose the word October and later called it ominous, a reflection of the disappointment he felt at the time. The cover photograph, taken by Ian Finlay at Grand Canal Dock in Dublin, was shot spontaneously on an overcast day during the recording. Bono wanted an industrial look for the image, and the finished sleeve had a starkness that matched the music. Island Records was not happy with the final design and tried to talk the group out of using it, but U2 and their manager Paul McGuinness refused, pointing to a contract that gave the band control over artwork.
The album was not an easy sell. It received mixed reviews and limited radio play, and the singles Fire and Gloria did not change that. Yet the record captured something real: a young band arguing with itself about God, doubt and the life they had chosen. The Edge played piano on several tracks, including the title song, and the bassist Adam Clayton moved through three different playing styles on Gloria, from pick to fingers to a slap solo. The music kept shifting because the people making it were still deciding who they were.
The music kept shifting because the people making it were still deciding who they were.
Forty-five years on, October remains the sound of a group that almost did not make it. The crisis with Shalom Fellowship could have ended U2 before they became one of the biggest bands in the world. Instead, the rushed and improvised sessions produced an album that wears its confusion openly. The cover, the Latin chorus, the grief in Tomorrow, the industrial Dublin backdrop: everything about the record says that this was a band standing at the edge of something and choosing, barely, to keep going.