In the summer of 1980, four young men from Dublin were set to make their first album with Martin Hannett, the producer behind Joy Division's eerie, spacious records. But U2 had already worked with Hannett on their single '11 O'Clock Tick Tock', and they didn't like the experience. Island Records, the label that had signed them, cancelled Hannett's involvement after the musicians objected. Hannett was reeling from the suicide of Joy Division's singer Ian Curtis that May, and a label representative said he simply wasn't well enough to work. U2 released Boy on October 20, 1980.
Steve Lillywhite takes over
A replacement had to be found fast. Island sent a copy of U2's debut EP Three from 1979 to Steve Lillywhite, a young producer who had made his name with punk and new wave acts. Lillywhite liked the vocals on the record but thought the sound was weak. Before committing, he wanted to see the band live. So he went to a small school hall somewhere in Ireland, watched U2 play, and agreed to work with them. First came the single 'A Day Without Me', which missed the charts entirely, but the band trusted him enough to let him produce the album.
The recording took place from July to September 1980 at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. Lillywhite found the room 'very, very dead' acoustically, and engineer Kevin Moloney described a late-1970s design with a wooden, muffled sound. Lillywhite wanted something he called 'three-dimensional sound' that gave the recording perspective. So he moved drummer Larry Mullen Jr.'s kit into the stairwell. Microphones hung from the ceiling above the stairs, capturing what Lillywhite called a 'wonderful clattery' drum sound. The drums could only be recorded in the evening, after the studio secretary went home, because during the day the phone kept ringing. Even then, a stray call could ruin a take.
Microphones hung from the ceiling above the stairs, capturing what Lillywhite called a 'wonderful clattery' drum sound.
At first Mullen found it strange to be separated from the rest of the band. But Lillywhite was just getting started. He recorded the sound of smashing bottles and cutlery sliding across a spinning bicycle wheel. The rhythm section struggled to keep time, so Lillywhite and Moloney spent nights editing tape from the multitrack recordings to create steady drum loops. Lillywhite even recorded several bass parts for Adam Clayton to show him the line he wanted, which meant Clayton had to layer many overdubs. Bono called Lillywhite 'a breath of fresh air', and guitarist the Edge said the producer knew how to bring the best out of everyone.
Writing lyrics in the studio
Some songs, including 'An Cat Dubh' and 'The Ocean', were written and recorded right there in the studio. The band had about 40 songs in their live repertoire, and with limited studio time they recorded each one quickly, spent a few hours on overdubs, and moved on. Bono had not finished the lyrics when recording started. On stage he often changed words from show to show, and in the studio he wrote missing lines while his bandmates recorded guitars and percussion. Unhappy with his voice in headphones, he moved to the control room and sang into a handheld microphone while the music played loudly. Lillywhite would compile the best parts from roughly six takes into a single vocal track, and Bono would then listen and record six more takes.
The Edge played every song on a Gibson Explorer, inspired by Television and early Siouxsie and the Banshees. He also cited the European approach of Neu! and Kraftwerk, with different chord changes and a nihilistic attitude to the backbeat. The album's theme was the psychological passage from childhood to adulthood: awakening sexuality in 'An Cat Dubh', teenage years in 'Twilight', mortality in 'Out of Control', and youthful ambition in 'The Ocean'. 'I Will Follow' dealt with the trauma of Bono losing his mother when he was 14. The title 'Shadows and Tall Trees' came from a chapter heading in William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, and 'The Ocean' referenced Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
What critics heard
Critics heard something new. Mark Cooper wrote that U2's sound 'seemed to come out of nowhere', with the drive and exuberance of punk in Mullen's clattering drums, the Edge's glam riffs and the chorus of 'Stories for Boys'. But the emotional palette was different, thriving on teenage spiritual revelations. Mark Prendergast described the album as having a 'watery quality', contrasting anthemic rock songs with instrumental passages of splashes, drizzle and rolling waves. He noted the musique concrète touches Lillywhite added to 'I Will Follow': milk bottles and scraping bicycle spokes. The Edge's unusual approach to his Gibson Explorer, rejecting blues influences for echo chords and sustain harmonics, ran through a system of two Vox amplifiers, two Memory Man echo units and a switcher. Paul Morley of NME called the album "honest, direct and distinctive," and "touching, precocious, full of archaic and modernist conviction." Betty Page of Sounds wrote that the group "achieved a rare blend of innocence and aggression."
The cover almost caused a different kind of trouble. The boy on the original sleeve was Peter Rowen, the younger brother of Bono's friend Guggi. But Island Records feared the image might be perceived as pedophilic, so the American release and other international editions got a new cover. Sandy Porter, given a tiny budget, could not travel to photograph the band, so he used existing photos of the four members. He distorted them by stretching during scanning, using a photo enlarger with a moving platform, and photographing prints with long exposures. Inspired by the Lord of the Flies reference, Porter chose four 'rough and distorted images' resembling sea traces on sand, then cut them with a scalpel and copied, printed, retouched and recopied them onto high-contrast paper.
Boy came out in the UK on 20 October 1980 and in the US on 3 March 1981. It reached 52 in the UK chart, 63 in America, 13 in Ireland and 12 in Canada, selling nearly 200,000 copies in its first pressings. The single 'I Will Follow' hit 20 on the Billboard Top Tracks rock chart and became a college radio hit. The album's sexual subtext gave it an enthusiastic audience in American gay clubs, where imported copies circulated and Bono later said the group gained a gay following convinced the music was made for them. In 2003 Rolling Stone placed Boy at 417 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. A remastered edition arrived in 2008, and for Record Store Day 2020, marking the album's 40th anniversary, a limited edition of 10,000 copies was pressed on white vinyl.